Digital media
In mass communication, digital media is any communication media that operates in conjunction with various encoded machine-readable data formats. Digital content can be created, viewed, distributed, modified, listened to, and preserved on a digital electronic device, including digital data storage media and digital broadcasting. Digital is defined as any data represented by a series of digits, and media refers to methods of broadcasting or communicating this information. Together, digital media refers to mediums of digitized information broadcast through a screen and/or a speaker. This also includes text, audio, video, and graphics are transmitted over the internet for consumption on digital devices.
Digital media platforms, such as YouTube, Kick, and Twitch, accounted for viewership rates of 27.9 billion hours in 2020. A contributing factor to its part in what is commonly referred to as the digital revolution can be attributed to the use of interconnectivity.
Examples
Examples of digital media include software, digital images,web pages and websites, social media, digital data and databases, digital audio such as MP3, electronic documents and electronic books. Digital media often contrasts with print media, such as printed books, newspapers and magazines, and other traditional or analog media, such as photographic film, audio tapes or video tapes.Digital media has had a significantly broad and complex impact on society and culture. Combined with the Internet and personal computing, digital media has caused disruptive innovation in publishing, journalism, public relations, entertainment, education, commerce and politics. Digital media has also posed new challenges to copyright and intellectual property laws, fostering an open content movement in which content creators voluntarily give up some or all of their legal rights to their work. The ubiquity of digital media and its effects on society suggest that we are at the start of a new era in industrial history, called the Information Age, perhaps leading to a paperless society in which all media are produced and consumed on computers. However, challenges to a digital transition remain, including outdated copyright laws, censorship, the digital divide, and the spectre of a digital dark age, in which older media becomes inaccessible to new or upgraded information systems. Digital media has a significant, wide-ranging and complex impact on society and culture.
Business model
Digital media platforms like YouTube operate through a triple-product business model in which they provide information and entertainment to the public, often at no cost, while also capturing their attention and collecting user data to sell to advertisers. This business model aims to maximize consumer engagement on the platform.Paid Media
Paid media refers to promotional channels that marketers pay to use, including traditional media and online and digital media. This model compels businesses to develop sponsored media and then pay social media platforms like Instagram to show it to customers in their newsfeeds. These customers become exposed to paid media, sometimes referred to as promoted or sponsored posts.Owned Media
Owned media refers to digital assets and channels that a company or individual controls and manages. This includes websites, social media profiles, blogs, and any other content platforms owned and operated by the entity. An entity is the owner or controller of the channel, such as a business or an individual managing their online presence.Earned Media
Earned media refers to public relations channels such as television, newspapers, blogs, or video sites that do not require direct payment or control by marketers but are included because viewers, readers, or users are interested in them. Free media is essentially online word-of-mouth, typically in the form of "viral" trends, mentions, shares, retweets, reviews, recommendations, or content from third-party websites. When one's product or service is so good that users cannot help but post it on their social media, they get a lot of "earned media." They gain media credibility compared to other forms of credibility, becoming more transparent.History
Codes and information by machines were first conceptualized by Charles Babbage in the early 1800s. Babbage imagined that these codes would give him instructions for his Motor of Difference and Analytical Engine, machines that Babbage had designed to solve the problem of error in calculations. Between 1822 and 1823, the mathematician Ada Lovelace wrote the first instructions for calculating numbers on Babbage engines. Lovelace's instructions are now believed to be the first computer program. Although the machines were designed to perform analysis tasks, Lovelace anticipated the possible social impact of computers and program writing. "For in the distribution and combination of truths and formulas of analysis, which may become easier and more quickly subjected to the mechanical combinations of the engine, the relationships and the nature of many subjects in which science necessarily relates in new subjects, and more deeply researched there are in all extensions of human power or additions to human knowledge, various collateral influences, in addition to the primary and primary object reached." Other old machine readable media include instructions for pianolas and weaving machines.It is estimated that in the year 1986 less than 1% of the world's media storage capacity was digital and in 2007 it was already 94%. The year 2002 is assumed to be the year when human kind was able to store more information in digital than in analog media.
Digital computers
Though they used machine-readable media, Babbage's engines, player pianos, jacquard looms and many other early calculating machines were themselves analog computers, with physical, mechanical parts. The first truly digital media came into existence with the rise of digital computers. Digital computers use binary code and Boolean logic to store and process information, allowing one machine in one configuration to perform many different tasks. The first modern, programmable, digital computers, the Manchester Mark 1 and the EDSAC, were independently invented between 1948 and 1949. Though different in many ways from modern computers, these machines had digital software controlling their logical operations. They were encoded in binary, a system of ones and zeroes that are combined to make hundreds of characters. The 1s and 0s of binary are the "digits" of digital media."As We May Think"
While digital media did not come into common use until the late 20th century, the conceptual foundation of digital media is traced to the work of scientist and engineer Vannevar Bush and his celebrated essay "As We May Think", published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1945. Bush envisioned a system of devices that could be used to help scientists, doctors, and historians, among others, to store, analyze and communicate information. Calling this then-imaginary device a "memex", Bush wrote:The owner of the memex, let us say, is interested in the origin and properties of the bow and arrow. Specifically, he is studying why the short Turkish bow was apparently superior to the English long bow in the skirmishes of the Crusades. He has dozens of possibly pertinent books and articles in his memex. First, he runs through an encyclopedia, finds an interesting but sketchy article, and leaves it projected. Next, in history, he finds another pertinent item and ties the two together. Thus he goes, building a trail of many items. Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own, either linking it into the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item. When it becomes evident that the elastic properties of available materials had a great deal to do with the bow, he branches off on a side trail which takes him through textbooks on elasticity and tables of physical constants. He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his own. Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him.
Bush hoped that the creation of this memex would be the work of scientists after World War II. Though the essay predated digital computers by several years, "As We May Think" anticipated the potential social and intellectual benefits of digital media and provided the conceptual framework for digital scholarship, the World Wide Web, wikis and even social media. It was recognized as a significant work even at the time of its publication.
Impact
The digital revolution
Since the 1960s, computing power and storage capacity have increased exponentially, largely as a result of MOSFET scaling which enables MOS transistor counts to increase at a rapid pace predicted by Moore's law. Personal computers and smartphones put the ability to access, modify, store and share digital media in the hands of billions of people. Many electronic devices, from digital cameras to drones have the ability to create, transmit and view digital media. Combined with the World Wide Web and the Internet, digital media has transformed 21st century society in a way that is frequently compared to the cultural, economic and social impact of the printing press. The change has been so rapid and so widespread that it has launched an economic transition from an industrial economy to an information-based economy, creating a new period in human history known as the Information Age or the digital revolution.The transition has created some uncertainty about definitions. Digital media, new media, multimedia, and similar terms all have a relationship to both the engineering innovations and cultural impact of digital media. The blending of digital media with other media, and with cultural and social factors, is sometimes known as new media or "the new media." Similarly, digital media seems to demand a new set of communications skills, called transliteracy, media literacy, or digital literacy. These skills include not only the ability to read and write—traditional literacy—but the ability to navigate the Internet, evaluate sources, and create digital content. The idea that we are moving toward a fully digital, paperless society is accompanied by the fear that we may soon—or currently—be facing a digital dark age, in which older media are no longer accessible on modern devices or using modern methods of scholarship. Digital media has a significant, wide-ranging and complex effect on society and culture.
A senior engineer at Motorola named Martin Cooper was the first person to make a phone call on April 3, 1973. He decided the first phone call should be to a rival telecommunications company saying "I'm speaking via a mobile phone". Ten years later, Motorola released the Motorola DynaTAC, the first commercially available mobile phone. In the early 1990s Nokia released the Nokia 1011, the first mass-produced mobile phone. The number of smartphone users has increased dramatically, as has the commercial landscape. Android and iOS dominate the smartphone market. A study by Gartner found that in 2016 about 88% of the worldwide smartphones were Android while iOS had a market share of about 12%. About 85% of the mobile market revenue came from mobile games.
The impact of the digital revolution can also be assessed by exploring the amount of worldwide mobile smart device users there are. This can be split into 2 categories; smart phone users and smart tablet users. Worldwide there are currently 2.32 billion smartphone users across the world. This figure is to exceed 2.87 billion by 2020. Smart tablet users reached a total of 1 billion in 2015, 15% of the world's population.
The statistics evidence the impact of digital media communications today. What is also of relevance is the fact that the number of smart device users is rising rapidly yet the amount of functional uses increase daily. A smartphone or tablet can be used for hundreds of daily needs. There are currently over 1 million apps on the Apple App store. These represent significant opportunities for digital marketing strategies. A smartphone user is impacted with digital advertising every second they open their Apple or Android device. This further evidences the digital revolution and the impact of revolution. This has resulted in a total of 13 billion dollars being paid out to the various app developers over the years. This growth has fueled the development of millions of software applications. Most of these apps are able to generate income via in app advertising. Gross revenue for 2020 is projected to be about $189 million.