Readings for 10/19/15

I really enjoyed reading this week's articles. Whereas Dr. Chyi’s study indicates that digital news is not replacing newspapers yet, Lee and Leung’s study indicates that the Internet is displacing all traditional media (i.e. newspapers, television, radio, and magazines) rather than supplementing them. According to Lee and Leung’s study, Internet users for news/information and entertainment do not spend more time with functionally similar traditional media for the same purpose. Their findings reject the “more-more” hypothesis as suggested by the user-centric approach. The Internet is shown to have an overall displacement effect, and not a single instance of a “more-more” situation occurred in the use of traditional media among Internet users. The ‘‘more-less’’ scenario is seen across all traditional media.
In contrary to Lee and Leung’s study, Yuan’s study supported the user-centric model. She looked at the old and new media for the news audience from the repertoire-oriented approach, hoping to provide more fluid and dynamic analysis than the dichotomous distinction between the substitutive and supplementary relationships. Her focus on media repertoire was particularly interesting as I see it personally applying to me: for example, setting favorites on my Internet. I think the repertoire-oriented approach will greatly depend on how much effort I have to put into when using new channels. Her study only focused on news. I wonder if it would be the same for other media content, such as entertainment.

Some might argue that whether or not new media replace or supplement old media would depend on multiple factors, given they provide similar functions. However, how can different media serve the same needs and functions? As Marshall McLuhan once said, “Medium is the message,” different media platforms provide distinct senses and require audiences' physiology to function differently. Although the media content might be the same, audiences change their attitude when interacting with different media platforms.
The amount of using the Internet will vary in each society depending on how developed and fast the Internet is. For example, Korea is the most wired country in the world according to the world statistics. Basically, there’s free high speed wi-fi wherever you go including subways. Because of this, there are many online-related burgeoning industries (and big conglomerates of course) coming up with innovative ways of delivering content via unprecedented media platforms. For example, there’s a new form of media called “web drama,” which is relatively very short (about 10 minutes per each episode) compared to the traditional drama shown on an old medium, television. This is increasingly getting popular in the K-drama industry mainly because about 99% of all young Korean people have a smartphone with web streaming capabilities.