MIS Assignment 9

Information Environment

Our task is to identify an information environment of our choice and write an essay to address the following questions:

• What should be your role within this environment?
• How can the principles of information organization and representation help you in performing this role?
• What are the challenges facing you in performing the role? How will you address these challenges?

Defining Information Environment
There is now a critical mass of digital information resources that can be used to support researchers, learners, teachers and administrators in their work and study. The production of information is on the increase and ways to deal with this effectively are required. There is the need to ensure that quality information isn’t lost amongst the masses of digital data created everyday. If we can continue to improve the management, interrogation and serving of ‘quality’ information there is huge potential to enhance knowledge creation across learning and research communities. The aim of the Information Environment is to help provide convenient access to resources for research and learning through the use of resource discovery and resource management tools and the development of better services and practice. The Information Environment aims to allow discovery, access and use of resources for research and learning irrespective of their location.
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/themes/informationenvironment.aspx

By definition, mass communication is a message created by a person or a group of people sent through a transmitting device (a medium) to a large audience or market.

So What Exactly is Mass Media?
Mass media is any medium used to transmit mass communication. Until recently mass media was clearly defined and was comprised of the eight mass media industries; Books, Newspapers, Magazines, and Recordings, Radio, Movies, Television and The Internet.
Defining mass media is no longer clear cut or simple. The continuing explosion of digital communication technology is producing more than a little confusion on the subject.
Developing new technology breeds new questions. Should cell phones be included in a definition of mass media? What about video and computer games? Is “World of Warcraft” a mass medium strictly speaking?
Considerable debate surrounds this topic at the moment and the answer is still not entirely clear.

http://medialiteracy.suite101.com/article.cfm/what_is_mass_media_


Well I got my ideas of what is an information environment from my classmates. As what I’ve understood, information environment refers to an environment which provides with effective knowledge from such information resources.

I chose mass media as my information environment. We all know for a fact that mass media plays a big part of transmitting to us so many information.

Mass media denotes a section of the media specifically designed to reach a very large audience such as the population of a nation state. The term was coined in the 1920s with the advent of nationwide radio networks, mass-circulation newspapers and magazines. However, some forms of mass media such as books and manuscripts had already been in use centuries. The term public media has a similar meaning: it is the sum of the public mass distributors of news and entertainment across media such as newspapers, television, radio, broadcasting, which may require union membership in some large markets such as Newspaper Guild, AFTRA, & text publishers.
Mass media includes Internet media (like blogs, message boards, podcasts, and video sharingu) because individuals now have a means to exposure that is comparable in scale to that previously restricted to a select group of mass media producers. The communications audience has been viewed by some commentators as forming a mass society with special characteristics, notably atomization or lack of social connections, which render it especially susceptible to the influence of modern mass-media techniques such as advertising and propaganda. The term "MSM" or "mainstream media" has been widely used in the blogosphere in discussion of the mass media and media bias.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_media

What are the Purpose of Mass media?
Mass media can be used for various purposes:
• Advocacy, both for business and social concerns. This can include advertising, marketing, propaganda, public relations, and political communication.
• Entertainment, traditionally through performances of acting, music, and sports, along with light reading; since the late 20th century also through video and computer games.
• Public service announcements.

Negative characteristics of mass media
Another description of Mass Media is central media which implies:
• An inability to transmit tacit knowledge (or perhaps it can only transfer bad tacit).
• The manipulation of large groups of people through media outlets, for the benefit of a particular political party and/or group of people.
• Marshall McLuhan, one of the biggest critics in media's history, brought up the idea that "the medium is the message."
• Bias, political or otherwise, towards favoring a certain individual, outcome or resolution of an event.
• "The corporate media is not a watchdog protecting us from the powerful, it is a lapdog begging for scraps."
This view of central media can be contrasted with lateral media, such as email networks, where messages are all slightly different and spread by a process of lateral diffusion.

Journalism
Journalism is the discipline of collecting, analyzing, verifying and presenting information regarding current events, trends, issues and people. Those who practice journalism are known as journalists.
News-oriented journalism is sometimes described as the "first rough draft of history" (attributed to Phil Graham), because journalists often record important events, producing news articles on short deadlines. While under pressure to be first with their stories, news media organizations usually edit and proofread their reports prior to publication, adhering to each organization's standards of accuracy, quality and style. Many news organizations claim proud traditions of holding government officials and institutions accountable to the public, while media critics have raised questions about holding the press itself accountable.
Public relations
Public relations is the art and science of managing communication between an organization and its key publics to build, manage and sustain its positive image. Examples include:
• Corporations use marketing public relations (MPR) to convey information about the products they manufacture or services they provide to potential customers to support their direct sales efforts. Typically, they support sales in the short and long term, establishing and burnishing the corporation's branding for a strong, ongoing market.
• Corporations also use public-relations as a vehicle to reach legislators and other politicians, seeking favorable tax, regulatory, and other treatment, and they may use public relations to portray themselves as enlightened employers, in support of human-resources recruiting programs.
• Non-profit organizations, including schools and universities, hospitals, and human and social service agencies, use public relations in support of awareness programs, fund-raising programs, staff recruiting, and to increase patronage of their services.
• Politicians use public relations to attract votes and raise money, and, when successful at the ballot box, to promote and defend their service in office, with an eye to the next election or, at career’s end, to their legacy.

Forms of mass media
Electronic media and print media include:
• Broadcasting, in the narrow sense, for radio and television.
• Various types of discs or tapes. In the 20th century, these were mainly used for music. Video and computer uses followed.
• Film, most often used for entertainment, but also for documentaries.
Film is a term that encompasses motion pictures as individual projects, as well as the field in general. The origin of the name comes from the fact that photographic film (also called filmstock) has historically been the primary medium for recording and displaying motion pictures. Many other terms exist — motion pictures (or just pictures and "picture"), the silver screen, photoplays, the cinema, picture shows, flicks — and commonly movies.

• Internet, which has many uses and presents both opportunities and challenges. Blogs and podcasts (such as news, music, pre-recorded speech, and video)
The Internet (also known simply as "the Net" or "the Web") is a more interactive medium of mass media, and can be briefly described as "a network of networks". Specifically, it is the worldwide, publicly accessible network of interconnected computer networks that transmit data by packet switching using the standard Internet Protocol (IP). It consists of millions of smaller domestic, academic, business, and governmental networks, which together carry various information and services, such as electronic mail, online chat, file transfer, and the interlinked Web pages and other documents of the World Wide Web.
Contrary to some common usage, the Internet and the World Wide Web are not synonymous: the Internet is the system of interconnected computer networks, linked by copper wires, fiber-optic cables, wireless connections etc.; the Web is the contents, or the interconnected documents, linked by hyperlinks and URLs. The World Wide Web is accessible through the Internet, along with many other services including e-mail, file sharing and others described below.
The internet thus far has become an extremely dominant form of media.
Blogs (Web Logs)
Blogging has become a huge form of media, popular through the internet. A blog is a website, usually maintained by an individual, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (artlog), photographs (photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), music (MP3 blog), audio (podcasting) are part of a wider network of social media. Micro-blogging is another type of blogging which consists of blogs with very short posts.
RSS feeds
RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites, including major news sites like Wired, news-oriented community sites like Slashdot, and personal blogs. It is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts. An RSS document (which is called a "feed" or "web feed" or "channel") contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with web sites in an automated manner that can be piped into special programs or filtered displays.
Podcast
Main article: Podcast
A podcast is a series of digital-media files which are distributed over the Internet using syndication feeds for playback on portable media players and computers. The term podcast, like broadcast, can refer either to the series of content itself or to the method by which it is syndicated; the latter is also called podcasting. The host or author of a podcast is often called a podcaster.

• Mobile phones, often called the 7th Mass Media, used for rapid breaking news, short clips of entertainment like jokes, horoscopes, alerts, games, music, and advertising
Mobile phones were introduced in Japan in 1979 but became a mass media only in 1998 when the first downloadable ringing tones were introduced in Finland. Soon most forms of media content were introduced on mobile phones, and today the total value of media consumed on mobile towers over that of internet content, and was worth over 31 billion dollars in 2007 (source Informa). The mobile media content includes over 8 billion dollars worth of mobile music (ringing tones, ringback tones, truetones, MP3 files, karaoke, music videos, music streaming services etc); over 5 billion dollars worth of mobile gaming; and various news, entertainment and advertising services. In Japan mobile phone books are so popular that five of the ten best-selling printed books were originally released as mobile phone books.

• Publishing is the industry concerned with the production of literature or information – the activity of making information available for public view. In some cases, authors may be their own publishers.
Traditionally, the term refers to the distribution of printed works such as books and newspapers. With the advent of digital information systems and the Internet, the scope of publishing has expanded to include websites, blogs, and the like.
As a business, publishing includes the development, marketing, production, and distribution of newspapers, magazines, books, literary works, musical works, software, other works dealing with information.
Forms of Publishing
Magazine
A magazine is a periodical publication containing a variety of articles, generally financed by advertising and/or purchase by readers.
Magazines are typically published weekly, biweekly, monthly, bimonthly or quarterly, with a date on the cover that is in advance of the date it is actually published. They are often printed in color on coated paper, and are bound with a soft cover.
Magazines fall into two broad categories: consumer magazines and business magazines. In practice, magazines are a subset of periodicals, distinct from those periodicals produced by scientific, artistic, academic or special interest publishers which are subscription-only, more expensive, narrowly limited in circulation, and often have little or no advertising.
Newspaper
A newspaper is a publication containing news and information and advertising, usually printed on low-cost paper called newsprint. It may be general or special interest, most often published daily or weekly. The first printed newspaper was published in 1605, and the form has thrived even in the face of competition from technologies such as radio and television. Recent developments on the Internet are posing major threats to its business model, however. Paid circulation is declining in most countries, and advertising revenue, which makes up the bulk of a newspaper's income, is shifting from print to online; some commentators, nevertheless, point out that historically new media such as radio and television did not entirely supplant existing.
Software publishing
A software publisher is a publishing company in the software industry between the developer and the distributor. In some companies, two or all three of these roles may be combined (and indeed, may reside in a single person, especially in the case of shareware).
Software publishers often license software from developers with specific limitations, such as a time limit or geographical region. The terms of licensing vary enormously, and are typically secret.
Developers may use publishers to reach larger or foreign markets, or to avoid focussing on marketing. Or publishers may use developers to create software to meet a market need that the publisher has identified.
Mass wire media
Mass wire media is a new frontier of news reporting in the high-tech age. A few decades ago news reporting was through newspapers and radio and television. The radio broadcasts that were made famous by Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II changed the way radio was looked at. These fireside chats made the radio news and news radio. Things are different now as we are witnessing a revolution of people-oriented reporting in real time and other times. This element of intimate knowledge of the event or story being reported has dramatically changed the way we all view news stories.
This is called by some the Social Media Revolution. This revolution has intrinsically altered the way news is reported almost the way it happens. The trend of people-oriented reporting is only on the rise as reporting news becomes more personal and more accurate - although also more subjective.

• Video games,
A video game is a computer-controlled game where a video display such as a monitor or television is the primary feedback device. The term "computer game" also includes games which display only text (and which can therefore theoretically be played on a teletypewriter) or which use other methods, such as sound or vibration, as their primary feedback device, but there are very few new games in these categories. There always must also be some sort of input device, usually in the form of button/joystick combinations (on arcade games), a keyboard & mouse/trackball combination (computer games), or a controller (console games), or a combination of any of the above. Also, more esoteric devices have been used for input. Usually there are rules and goals, but in more open-ended games the player may be free to do whatever they like within the confines of the virtual universe.

Personal media
Non-mass or "personal" media (point-to-point and person-to-person communication) include:
• Gestures
• Interactive
• Internet
• Mail
• Speech
• Telephony
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_media

What should be your role within this environment?
In the environment of mass media, we all have the benefit of having been the receiver of such information that the mass media brings about. My role now is just to see and benefit with the information the mass media delivers to us. Sometimes the mass media brings out the consciousness of people and leading them to be active in the society. It is a challenge for us to be aware of what is happening to the environment and thanks to the mass media for relaying such information to us.