Eight Traits of the New Media Landscape - Henry Jenkins

 At the very beginning of university in one of my very first sessions of networked media we looked at Henry Jenkins eight traits.

Looking through what he has written looks very long and very confusing but once you get started it is actually really interesting.

The section that stood out to me was number three – Everyday. It explains how people are so used to technology improving and new things coming out every week that we have stopped noticing the change all together.

We now have facilities like home cinemas and every gadget going in our homes. People are now able to find reasons not to communicate because of the pile of technology that there is. It is a way that you isolate yourself from everybody.

Henry Jenkins says ‘the iPod is like the soundtrack to our lives.” Which is true as you find that most people listen to music everyday and everywhere that they go so no matter what you have listened to that day it all has been like a soundtrack to your day.

Henry also points out that now we can take our technology with us wherever we go. We now have laptops, mobile phones, iPods and even portable books. You can find out information at the click of a button. If you want to know what’s happening in the news or to log on to Facebook or any other website, you can by just going on to the Internet which you can access wirelessly on your phone or laptop. You can call people and text so nowadays things are way more advance.

From looking further into this I have a better understanding of technology. Before I never really thought about how advanced we all are now and just took for granted the fact that I have a mobile phone and a laptop. Now I know that you definitely don’t need all these things but people have grown so used to having them now that everyone would find it hard to live without them.

Technology is such a big part of our lives now and it is developing every day and know one knows what ideas are flickering around or what is being in the process of being developed but we do know that anything that is going to be made is going to be bigger and better than what is already around and people are definitely going to want to have it. There are a lot of people who can just afford to buy these things but there are a lt of people who want these products just to have them and show off.

I have learnt that technology has its strong points and its weak points but people are always going to see the good points in it just because it is so useful to them. Technology has become very powerful and there is no telling where it will go next.

http://henryjenkins.org/2006/11/eight_traits_of_the_new_media.html