Section B practise question

"Does your case study suggest that new and digital media have had a positive impact by offering audiences a more diverse range of values and ideology?" [48 marks]

The internet or new and digital media itself can be a big platform for users to share and contribute to the values and ideologies they believe or challenge, this allows the internet platform to offer a diverse range as this can come from any person from anywhere, whether this has a positive or negative impact, this will be something that I will be discussing. 

A Marxists would argue that as they believe that even though audiences are in power in terms of users sharing different and diverse range of values and ideology; the impact is nothing and yet to be seen as a negative thing. Marist tend to to reinforce the role of media in the reproduction of the status quo. Gramsci’s theory of hegemony would reinforce this as it states that dominant ‘media conglomerates’ feed audiences the necessary information.  It suggests that audiences are not empowered through the development of new and digital media as the dominate and higher class "rule and control" the media. An example of this, is the Arab Spring revolution in 2011, this was a protest for democratisation that that agreed with the pluralists views, as audiences took to Twitter to voice their opinions about this. However, an Marxists would argue that even though audiences had done a protest and took to social media to voice their opinion, no changed happen, the result of all the audiences taking part, nothing changed in the media. So even though new and digital media have given audiences a platform to share their values and ideologies that they really feel something strong about, the new and digital media would allow a change to happen because of the elite being in control. 

A pluralists would argue that institutions would allow us as audiences be more involved in the media and news especially, the option of online comments under some news issues allow the audiences to have their point and opinion across to the professionals but other viewers to engaged themselves with and have a discussion with, if they agree or disagree, this allows more diverse debates and issues to comment and discuss about. This supports the pluralists view about how the new and digital media is a positive platform that encourages audience to share their own values and ideologies. Audiences are seen as capable of manipulating the media in variety of ways according to their proper need and dispositions, it will be enabling them to 'conform, accommodate, challenge or reject' (Gurevich et al) this theory suggest that the classless society can do this. An example of this is through UGC. Through the use of new and digital media, audiences are becoming more active, they are willing to challenge the powerful, in terms of UGC, audiences are using social media sites such as Twitter, and using trends and hashtags to raise awareness about issues to a wider audiences; audiences are taking control and being powerful to how they are questioning the powerful. The audiences are using new and digital media to their advantage, speaking about ideologies and values that wouldn't be challenged or spoken about till new and digital media was developed, examples such as police brutality. 

Citizen journalism has become an importance from the developments in new and digital media; posts and hashtags trends have allowed issues to become popular and raised to wider audiences. For example, one of many powerful movements online was the “Blacklivesmatter” this was one of the social media campaigns that engaged a lot of diverse communities especially the black community to come together to raise awareness about police brutality, people had all shared their opinions about this issue through a lot of different ways, the hashtag allowed this matter to come heard off, protests had started, but people also posted up their own videos sharing police brutality happening in their areas, despite however many diverse and different values and ideologies are shared on the intent, on an issue that is important, users of the internet do try to make it so it has a impact at least of the internet but also hoping it makes a change in the world too.

However, there is also a side when new and digital media has offered audiences to share their values and ideologies and that is through Youtube. Within Youtube, “vlogers” and “youtubers” have been growing since the developments of the digital media, of course, youtubers create and share their own content, which is UGC, to their millions of viewers, they are expressing their own values and ideologies. This can have a negative impact at times because those values and ideologies can be harmful and can send out a wrong message. A Youtuber called “Sam Pieper” was blocked and alerted that he couldn’t use his youtube account because of all the negative reports that had been filled out against him, he had very sexual content that didn’t treat females’ right, very disturbing to watch. Thankfully new and digital media has enough control to take over when something has a negative impact on the audiences. However, within the Internet, users of the Internet are exposed too a lot of things, a lot of audiences are using the internet for their own advantage, in particular within news, or even new related stories as well as videos of such vital but extreme behaviour can be shown on the internet without it being censored, graphic images and posts are visual for a lot of the audiences, this can have such a negative impact because it desensitises audiences, especially the younger audiences as they are the main  audiences of the internet, there is less censorship and fewer gate keeping than traditional media, digital media does offer audiences a platform for diverse range of values and ideologies but some people do take advantage of it as use it negatively which then impacts the internet overall.

However, new and digital media can have a positive impact by offering audiences a more diverse range of values and ideology is because of globalisation. The internet is like a “global village” shows like The Simpsons or even Keeping Up With The Kardashian are being watched and spoken about globally, developments of the interment such as “memes” have also caught the attention of a lot of users on the internet globally, where users are getting on the same trends or talk about the same things because users can get influenced very easily online as well as believe things every easily, this can make audiences seem like they are more passive than active. The new and digital media may offer a lot of diverse and alternative values and ideologies, but uses catch on very quickly and therefore can share a lot of similarities with each other but can be diverse due to the cultures some audiences share or where they are in the part of the world. Passive audiences believe things very quickly without double-checking the facts and the resources, which can have a negative impact, fake news is rising and becoming an issue on the internet especially on social media sites; Facebook is in pressure of controlling their users to not post any fake news because that’s where it has started from. This has given the internet such a negative impact because it shows that yes audience’s may be in control in certain things and other things is the elite but are they really protecting the audiences and offering a positive platform for audiences to share their values and ideologies no matter how diverse they are? I don’t really think so. The control is to wide and can be with anyone to be fair.

Overall I think that there are some case where the new and digital media can I have positive impact by offering audiences a more diverse range of values ideologies as a lot of users of the internet can understand and learn new things online about things but I think there is more negatives and then the positives of new and digital media offering audiences a more diverse range of values and ideologies, and the main reason is because of the control that has been spread out and can’t be limited as the internet is so advanced, users are knowledge enough to know how they can use the power to their advantage.