Rapid sharing, efficient storage, interactivity, linear and non-linear paths, perfect copying. Every media dilemma later in this topic is one of these read from the other side.
Each property, what it gives, and the cost that shares its cause.
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Convergence: Digital media brings computing, communication and content together, so one device and one app now do what a camera, a phone, a radio and a newspaper once did separately. A single post can mix text, video and sound, and be watched, shared and commented on in the same place.
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Linear media runs in one order: a broadcast, a film in a cinema. Non-linear media lets the audience choose a path — which sounds like freedom and is also a design decision made by somebody else.
Linear
- One order, set by the maker
- Everyone sees the same thing
- A shared reference point in a society
- You cannot skip or search
Non-linear
- You choose where to go next
- Everyone sees something different
- No shared reference point
- Someone still chose which options exist
The consequence worth naming: When everyone watched the same broadcast, a correction reached the same audience as the claim. With non-linear media it does not, and that is a structural reason misinformation is harder to undo.
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The moment media can be interacted with, the interaction can be recorded. That is what turned an audience into a dataset.
What gets recorded
- What you watched, and for how long before stopping.
- What you scrolled past, which is often more revealing.
- When you did it, and from where.
- Who else engaged with the same thing.
Real-world examples you can name
YouTube's recommendation system — deep-learning system described 2016; borderline-content changes from January 2019
A ranking system that predicts what a viewer will watch next, which the company has said drives the majority of watch time. After criticism that it led viewers towards ever more extreme material, the company began demoting 'borderline' content rather than removing it.
Who it affected: Roughly two billion monthly viewers, and creators whose income depends on the ranking.
Facebook and Cambridge Analytica — disclosed March 2018; US FTC penalty July 2019
A personality-quiz app collected data not only from the people who installed it but from their friends, reaching tens of millions of profiles, which were then used to target political advertising. Facebook was fined US$5 billion by the FTC over its privacy practices.
Who it affected: Facebook users who never installed the app, and voters targeted by the campaigns.
How this is tested — you have to name a characteristic and then turn it into something that happens to people. It comes up two ways:
Paper 1 — structured question
- Part a: identify characteristics of digital media
- Part b: explain a consequence of one of them
Paper 2 — source-based question
- Q2: explain a claim about how media spreads
- Q4: synthesise sources on a platform's effects
The trap: listing properties: Naming rapid sharing is AO1. Saying that it makes a mistake unrecallable is AO2, and that is where the marks are.
Identify two characteristics of digital media.
Model answer plan
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Explain one reason why a correction rarely reaches everyone who saw the original claim.
Model answer plan
See the answer broken into clear points, with guidance on how each point earns marks.