New Media
We can look at the Internet as being a factor in creating knowledge monopolies. Those who have the skills to use the technology have the power to choose what information is communicated. The significance of the Internet in the creation of these monopolies, in more recent years, has been somewhat diminished due to increased knowledge and awareness of how to use the technology. At the same time, the ever-increasing complexity of digital technologies strengthens monopolies of knowledge as the New York Times points out in a series which began on April 27, 2009 called The Digital Arms Race:
he Pentagon has commissioned military contractors to develop a highly classified replica of the Internet of the future. The goal is to simulate what it would take for adversaries to shut down the country’s power stations, telecommunications and aviation systems, or freeze the financial markets — in an effort to build better defenses against such attacks, as well as a new generation of online weapons.
Wherever new media arise, so too do monopolies of knowledge concerning how to use the technologies to reinforce the power and control of elite groups.
Read more about this topic: Monopolies Of Knowledge
Famous quotes containing the word media:
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)
“The media no longer ask those who know something ... to share that knowledge with the public. Instead they ask those who know nothing to represent the ignorance of the public and, in so doing, to legitimate it.”
—Serge Daney (1944–1992)