We live in the 21st century, which we can boldly call the time of the great digital revolution. For decades, successive generations, people have invented and improved new technologies to make everyday life easier for everyone.
They also competed in ideas on how best to capture and replicate their discoveries. Information is no longer something exclusive, available to the elite. Just the opposite happened. Now almost everyone can choose the source of this information by himself, not limiting to one medium. You can learn from virtual encyclopedias, exchange photos on specially created exchanges, or by saying a simple command to your smartphone – check what time the bus will be going and buy a ticket for it.
The smartfone is our third hand
Many people cannot imagine their life without a mobile phone or the Internet. They feel emptiness, anxiety if they forget to take the device from home, or if, due to a failure, access to our second life behind the screen will be temporarily interrupted. We have become addicted to our computer helpers, “companions” in life, who can make it much easier for us, but also make it very difficult, even disgusting. Many companies have also realized that not having their brand online is a business suicide and spending huge amounts of money to promote themselves in web 2.0. The editorial offices are also fighting a constant battle to attract as many Internet users as possible and exchange them for money from advertising.
Changes that are hard to keep up with
It is said that nowadays technology is being improved so quickly that some people find it difficult to keep up with the changes and therefore cannot adapt. That is why many books, guides devoted to the contemporary Internet, communities, web 2.0 are becoming less and less relevant every day, and subsequent authors repeat the cliché heard on the Internet: You have to be born in the age of technology to be familiar with it. It is difficult not to agree with this, because many things can be understood if you get to know the motives of a given action. If, instead of looking at a given event, we pay attention to why it happened – it will be easier for us to understand the given phenomenon and new answers will appear. The advancement of technology is slowly killing newspapers, so the big race of press publishers for high rankings on the web has started. The Internet has become a kind of promised land, a shelter for collapsing newspapers.
In the following posts, I will present the backstage of the work of the modern editorial office, blogs and internet portals fighting for their position in web 2.0. Although the means of achieving success are sometimes even unethical, one basic thing counts here – attracting the Internet user and making money on it. Many specialists believe that newspapers are no longer possible.
This is an excerpt from my master’s thesis on the impact of the internet on the development of civic communities and editorial work, published in 2012.
