The key issues for audiences and institutions...

• Digitality-The way of encoding information,using a series of electrical pulses and binary on or off (electrical pulses style code,with a make up of '0's and '1's.
• Interactivity-Interacting, a two way feed, can respond to it. The way information is now compressed into smaller amounts of information so it can "go through the air". Used in electrical functions like television, and satellite TV as well as ISDN modems for internet, with smaller compressed chunks it allows for information in a smaller bandwidth, creating more information in one feed.
• Hypertextuality-This is the idea of having information and programs organised in the liquid form. the information isn't on one continuous long loop,its small pieces of information that can be seen in any order, for example, on a DVD, you can choose a certain scene to watch whereas on a normal cassette you would have to watch the whole thing through. this also applies for web linking,skipping chunks of information to access new ideas. The order of the text is no longer controlled by the producer.
• Dispersal-How the information is shared, to do with the market share and size. How much access the users have and how they are used by the producers.
• Virtuality-This is the idea of how new technologies allow new virtual worlds that mimik and represent the work, how and why?
• Convergents-This is the fact that new media technologies are merging into one. For example how phones are now able to access the internet, e.g. the iPhone. A key new concept of media technology, where will it go from now? Now because of interactivity, more media technologies can be converged in to one small thing.
• Audience-This is who and how the new media technologies are being bought and advertised. How does the audience use the technology? Does it change the way they use the information? Is it consumer demand that has driven the increase of mdia technologies? Who has access to the technologies?
• Regulation and Control-Is there control over the new technologies? For example, copyright such as file sharing, these problems create a problem for the producers, if someone downloads a song off of limewire then the producer loses money from what the sale would have been.
• Ownership-This makes a difference because large companies are able to manufacture massive products that will affect what you buy, for example apple is dominating the mp3 market.

Moral panics and concerns with online technology

There are a number of social concerns of the development of social networking, these are mainly because of the ability to access people’s details. Online blogs like “MySpace” and “Bebo” can contain private information that can be used for a number of criminal offences, from fraud to paedophilia, shown in some cases in Second Life. There are also other concerns about the increase of people’s lives revolving around technology. For example, obesity is an increasing problem in the youth of today and this could be seen as being because of teenagers spending time talking to their friends online, using modern technology, instead of physically going and meeting them.
The growing popularity of social networking is changing the way that we interact in that we all use it more and more. As well as targeting the youth culture, social networking is beginning to cater for the older generation with websites such as “Friends Reunited”. Also interaction using this kind of technology is changing by social networking and mobile phones starting to merge together. The iPhone, recently introduced by Apple, has built in internet which enables the user to access portable social networking and the ability to make phone calls and send text messages.
There are issues with censorship and control, mainly with the ability to access another’s personal information (name, address, e-mail address). The censorship and control in social networking was shown as having loopholes, in Second Life, users were able to form secret groups and have meeting without the owners knowing and perform illegal acts such as drug trafficking.

What is the future for online technology??

Tell Me The Future:

• Chris De Wolfe is strongly associated with social networking because he is a CEO and is a co-founder of MySpace. He believes that social networking is going to continue on allowing people to "put their lives online" and that this is going to continue to the extent that online and offline worlds will become blurred. He also thinks that the future of social networking will become a lot more personal, portable and collaborative, this increases the demand to make everyone's web experience personal. Wolfe also believes that there is so much that can happen to the future of social networking that at the moment we are merely looking at "the tip of the iceberg for what the social web will look like in the future. The impact of portable hardware will be that there will be social networking relationships with every mobile phone company in the world. Wolfe also expects that half of MySpace's future traffic will come from non-PC users.
• Chad Hurley is involved in video and is a co-founder of Youtube. The goal of his company, Youtube, is to allow every person on the planet to participate in Youtube by making the process of uploading videos onto Youtube a mere phone call. Hurley is a positive determinist because he believes that what is coming to the future of companies like Youtube is positive and will link the world together, "record and share video with a small group or everyone around the world".
• Maurice Levy says that the challenge for advertisers is that, with all media soon being digital and almost any advertising possible, advertising will depend even more on a huge amount of creativity. Also with people not wanting to be interrupted for a commercial break, advertising companies will have to find genuine and honest ways to appeal to the public with the needed creativity. Linear media is swiftly being taken over by Liquid media, prescribed time, for example, the time of a television programme, is now becoming multitasking time. You are now able to move more seamlessly in and out of different settings using Liquid media.
• Norvig draws the parallel between Edison inventing electricity and the development of online technology by noting that when Edison invented electricity, he knew that it would be in demand but didn't foresee that it would evolve into such a wide range of electrical appliances such as iPods and mobile phones. Similarly, information now flows so freely that it will also be changed and improved by unforeseen appliances.
• Despite more and more developing countries gaining full Internet connectivity, penetration to more rural areas are continuously restricted due to the lack of infrastructure. Also, there is a problem that a computer is unaffordable for the average villager in a developing country. Overall progress can be achieved though by installing wireless connections in the developing world. However, this will make it extremely difficult to achieve Economies of Scale, which will limit the development in the coming years. This is evidence of a "digital divide" because it shows how late countries in Africa were in achieving internet connections, only in 1991. Also, this divide is shown by the fact that PC's are normally unaffordable in African households, but in the typical English home, there is at least one available connection to the internet.