 learners today what we are going to talk about is new media technology and how is new media technology is going to be useful for you and me that is media personnel basically people who are going to go into the media to create content for the audiences i'm not going to deal too much about what technology how to use the technology but we are just going to go through a basics uh initially if we talk of electronic media today radio covers 99 percent of india's population television covers almost 90 percent of the population so what we are going to look at is how this new media has evolved what is going to be uh how is going to be useful to us and what could be the reasons behind this evolution of the new media we are going to look at some theories we are going to look at uh some basic facts for example last two decades have been very very interesting in terms of new media technology the birth and rapid growth of internet and the birth or rather uh introduction of mobile phones in our country these are probably some of the most important events that occurred in yours and my field especially when we are talking of internet connection uh content creation for media so if you talk of internet internet came to india in early 90s and it was first introduced by vsn that is videsanchar nigam limited uh it was not barat sanchar at that time and that was the only isp if you uh are of my age you'll probably know that vsn when it introduced internet it used to cost 15 000 rupees for 100 hours of internet and at the same time uh there was no limit to what kind of phone bills you got the phone bills used to be tremendous but within two years or three years the rates came down to 100 1500 rupees per 100 hours but at the same time the monopoly of vsnl was broken and several private players were uh came into the market several private isps came into the market uh today if you look at uh the kind of population india india's population using internet is about 16 to 18 percent of india's population uses internet and considering india's population 16 to 18 percent is a very very huge figure we are talking of about 40 to 50 crore people using internet every day and we simply cannot as media personal ignore this medium mobile telephony came into our country somewhere around mid 90s uh if you look at mobile telephony there's an interesting story to tell that uh just before mobile phones came into market if you talk of communication devices we first got pagers something called pagers uh a pager was a small device where you could send messages using another telephones but uh just before by the time the pagers got popular mobiles came in and the pagers actually uh died its own natural death because with mobile you could talk as well as send messages but uh at at that time when the mobile telephones were introduced they're extremely expensive it used to cost something like 32 rupees uh per minute for an outgoing call and 16 rupees per minute for an incoming call that was the kind of money people were spending at that time i remember because i brought my first mobile when it was 16 rupees in outgoing and eight rupees incoming but it was huge and you had a very funny situation that uh if somebody called you you usually used to cut the phone call and you know return the call from a landline because it's very expensive but uh the real revolution happened in mobile phones with uh dirubai ambani uh ambali's photograph reliance karlo dunya mukhime campaign they came out with cda may wireless in local look telephones and they came out with 40 paisae outgoing call and free incoming that simply turned the market around revolutionized the whole market and uh frankly speaking it's because of reliance that today you and me are actually getting an incoming call i mean of course it would have happened some other time but at that time that was the key uh point which turned the mobile phone industry around on its head and suddenly mobiles became very popular and widely used otherwise it was quite an elitist kind of product at the beginning uh when you talk of mobiles and reliance and and karlo dunya mukhime you are also to remember since we are media students we also have to remember two more things which actually revolutionized markets one uh very important thing that revolutionized market was uh gulchan kumar of t series if you if you remember uh before gulchan kumar an audio cassette of a film used to cost somewhere around 100 to 150 rupees with gulchan kumar t series he brought cassettes uh uh the price of cassettes down to 25 rupees with his i think first of this one of the first cassettes he brought out was ashik and then a series of mata songs and uh devotional songs and he brought down that market so much that everybody had to ultimately bow down to the market pressures and lose the prices of audio cassettes the second revolution came a few years back about five to six years back when mozabe introduced movie films DVDs in 34 rupees otherwise any movie film you wanted to buy it to cost something above 150 rupees never below that in fact v series to cost 150 dvd is to cost something like 400 rupees for a film and mozabe revolutionized that market also when you gave 24 rupees they gave vcd all three series and 34 rupees a dvd if you look at it the other way around i think it was logically very very right time to happen because if you look at dvd or vcd without the content it's just a piece of plastic that is what we have to understand and why new media is important is because now we are going from a physical medium to a virtual medium in the last five years the internet as well as the mobile services have uh advanced technically very very rapidly more and more futures are being added every month to your mobile phone and internet uh uh you know services uh but probably the most important things to happen in these few years is uh gprs in your mobile phone which means internet access in your mobile phones because once you got gprs you have an integrated service of mobile telephony plus internet connectivity which is probably where the most important important event our middle phase has happened and lately even though there are a lot of hiccups and dealing problems 3g has come in and the more people start using it the more problems will be solved and i am sure in a in a couple of years the 3g services will be up and running very well and that is going to change the outlook of media content delivery which is where you and me friends we come in because we have to ultimately uh create content for that media uh why it is so important to talk of this new media why are we not talking of newspapers because newspapers are still growing in India abroad newspapers are closing down but in India we are still having a growth rate of 20 percent for vernacular medium original press and say 70 to 18 percent for English language press then why are we talking of this new media instead of television and newspapers the main reason is because our telephone is cheap affordable and the kind of services the mobile phone gives you no other medium can because it integrates all possible services into a small single device and that is where it's going to go which is why we have to keep on talking about mobile phones uh it's portable you can shoot audio video you can shoot audio video and transfer it by mms to somebody you can you can uh create and edit a film on a mobile phone okay some mobile phones may not have the capacity but still the all phones are becoming cheaper and cheaper i am sure even a even a standard phone will be uh having facilities of 3g and gprs and and editing software is pre-installed in that phone and we are going to have that that kind of uh reporting very soon in the field but you can send in your story by mms you can even send voice you can type text and you can send it to your newspaper office you can i'm sure in the few more years we'll be able to even edit movies uh and edit uh web pages and send it to your internet uh internet medium but uh while we are talking of this new medium i think we should also talk as media students why has this happened what would be the reasons behind the popularity development advancement of this new technology i am uh not going to talk of why it it has happened but i'm going to ask you some questions which you have to answer yourself uh because it is important that you study those those theories and try to find the answers as to why these new media have developed we all know these theories uh somehow one is the uses and gratification theory by cards if you look at uses and gratification theory we see that the audience normally is is not a or not a passive participant in the in the process of giving and taking information it is an active uh active entity and it uses whatever it likes or feels gratified by and discards the rest so even while watching a particular news bulletin if i don't like a particular news item i may not i may simply you know it i may not use it at all uh i may remember only what i like i will use what i like and i discard the rest so uh this is the indirect effort indirect uh uh effects paradigm of course persuasion theory carl holland you must have read persuasion theory simply put the more you bombard the audiences with a particular message over a period of time the audience may start believing that message whether it's true or not whether it's good or bad it's not a question the point is that the audience may start believing and what you see today is if if i keep on getting an sms from an advertiser that uh uh a particular uh a particular thing is available at free of cost or a very low cost and maybe use this services over the other services and if i keep on getting i may someday decide to try out that service and maybe i like it and that persuasion theory works maybe you you you have to think whether you like it or not marshal mac luhan we all study as a part of our syllabus marshal mac luhan as the media means the message is one theory that we have we study hot and cold media what is internet hot or cold media you have to answer this question we also have uh direct effects paradigm where we are talking of something called magic bullet theory or the hypodermic syringe theory do they work in this medium do they work in the new media field does a new medium actually inject messages directly into your brain and you start believing it or not is something that you have to learn we have got something called manufacturing consent by norm chomsky where what what norm chomsky has said is that all media houses are essentially business houses and they are working towards creating profits and they are not concerned with what happens to you and me is that what internet does to you is that what medium does to you is we are talking of a mobile medium and mobile medium is owned or or the services are provided by by mobile service providers are they concerned with the society or not is the question that you have to ask yourself when you are talking of new media we are just talking of internet as a whole and mobile technology as a whole we are also talking of a phenomenon of facebook and twitter and or could and blogs these are the kind of things that are happening today in the new media where is that content delivered these are the places where the content is delivered facebook or good blogs youtube twitter these are the places now how how does this phenomenon occur what is do you know if something called six degrees of separation if i say that you and me are separated by six degrees maximum so there is always a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend who is your friend that is called six degrees of separation i think you should read up this particular phenomenon what we have talked about is is the spiral of silence and social capital by robert putnam we need to understand that the society does not work in isolation and members of the society don't work in isolation but there is something called social capital which is slowly deteriorating in ours our civil society which is where we need to have a look at these theories and and phenomenon of internet whether internet helps somewhere in raising the social capital if you really want to think of this if you uh does internet help you voice is is internet more democratic medium for example the if you look at the the promote mutalic what he did in banglo he beat up women from from pubs and bars and some women raised started something called pinch addict campaign where they sent this pink colored uh judges to robert this mutalic is it an internet based phenomenon is the civil society working towards a common goal somewhere what did hannah azare's campaign mean to you and me did it really help did internet help in generating uh generating that kind of support for hannah azare did internet help in what happened in Egypt is it helping what is happening in Libya these are the questions you should ask because internet is the medium that is being used everywhere for uh generating views generating concepts and proliferating them across the population you need to think about these things also uh we are talking about spiral of silence where uh a particular person if if you're talking in a group if you're discussing something in a group and a person feels that this this particular group is not favorable to my opinion i will generally try and avoid to speak out my opinion but then if you look at new media i've got the whole internet to talk about my opinion so i can maybe write my opinion on a blog or facebook or tweet the opinion and uh do you think internet is more democratic this is what we are to talk about uh these are the theories that we talked about as a media profession what are the kind of skill sets that you'll require to not only not only uh excel but plain basic survival in today's uh media industry remember in the industry today you don't have jobs you have got contracts and in that scenario how are you going to survive you're going to survive only by learning multiple skill sets i'll quickly uh go through some of the skill sets that you actually have to have essentially one very important skill set if you're talking of twitter you have to write your story in 140 characters you're talking of sms i think it is 160 characters maximum or 150 characters maximum you're not talking of facebook again you've got a very short space to write your story blog of course you can write a lot but then who has got that much attention span to keep on reading a long blog you should be able to crunch your matter so a very important skill set is actually compressing your matter into less words and ideally what you should do is actually go back to school and learn pressy writing and comprehension which will give you the necessary skill sets graphic design photography is a must you should know the basics of photography how does the light come i mean how do you how do you keep an object which you're going to photograph how are you going to ask your uh ask a person who are you interviewing uh what position it should be what's the background and of course ultimately you should be able to retouch the photographs in photoshop which is a very important skill set you need to have video shooting and editing of course you need video shooting and editing even if you are able to use your mobile phone to shoot something you should be able to grab that into a computer and edit it and create a newslet that is what is important encoding you should understand various media you should understand that a mobile phone has a different codec right it has got a different codec or or a method or a software which which will show video to you so every mobile phone will have a different frame size every mobile phone will have a different codec if you are going to transfer a file to youtube you might benefit if you know the size of the frame of the youtube if you are uh delivering over the net if you're delivering over the dvd vcd how to encode video for different media is something that you must learn and of course internet like i said it's okay to facebook and tweet it's okay to blog it's okay to chat over the over the internet there's no harm in that but the point is that uh you need to be able to write something important something knowledgeable something logical also along with your uh regular chats because remember tomorrow's employer is going to ask you for your a b account and they're going to look at your facebook's and they're going to look at your blogs and they're going to decide whether to give you a job on basis of that too so you have to be very uh careful about what you write on facebook and what you write on your blogs because it's an open medium once you are on the network nothing is secret if you're very careful with that learn youtube also you know how to use it how to understand how to how understand the technology of how youtube is done and how to create content for youtube is something that you should learn and lastly you should learn something called seo search engine optimization uh uh when promoting see it's not enough to create a blog or upload a video to youtube or a facebook account it is equally important to be able to promote that video and promote the blog the number of people who are going to comment on your blog is what is going to decide whether you're a good blogger or not it's not enough to ask some of your friends and relatives to come to your blog and and you know invite comments from them it is important that your blog is read by several people outside your domain outside your immediate circle of friends because only then you will realize that the blog is read by so many people and it's an important blog and uh how to promote it you need to learn how to design something called keywords and description you need to be able to design it it's not a simple process you should be able to perfectly generate those keywords and put it in your youtube and blog accounts which is how the search engines will be able to find your blog and your facebook account and your youtube and other people will be able to use it so that is what it is about the new media technology uh as media students you need to learn all this uh falling short of time we cannot actually teach you all this but these are the kind of things that you have to learn to survive in tomorrow's media field thank you