The distortion of media roles by new media technologies

Book excerpt: Essay from the year 2014 in the subject Communications - Multimedia, Internet, New Technologies, University of Venda, course: Journalism, language: English, abstract: This paper defines new media communications from a wide array perspective, it further outline various roles of the media in today's world, the paper went on to explain how new media technologies are impacting on the roles of the media both positively and negatively. Without the media the world is incomplete, media complete us by serving different roles. The media play different roles within the society. Without the media people would be isolated, not only from the rest of the world but also from their governments, law-makers, and neighbouring countries and cities (Flew, 2002). Media roles within the society are; watchdog, surveillance, edutainment, infotainment, educational, informational, developmental, and entertainment as well as interpreting role. New media technologies are interactive form of communication that uses the internet, including podcast, RRSCeeds, social network, text messaging, blogs, wiki, virtual world and more. New media technologies are democratised to the information and they are helpful in the free flow of information that also make new path for development. New media technologies are mostly digital and they often have characteristics of being manipulated, networkable, dense, compressible and interactive e.g. Internet, websites, computer multimedia, video games, augmented reality, CD-ROOMS and DVDs. Distorting is to change or to twist something so that it become strange. The assertion or the claim that new media technologies are distorting/changing/twisting the roles of the media is to some extent true but not true to a greater extent therefore this essay of mine will do an in-depth analysis on both side of the topic because they are both socially and morally acceptable.