"New News": What's to Come with Web 3.0 (Lecture 2)

The second lecture really enabled us to begin scratching the surface of the world of modern journalism. This lecture was all about "new news"; examining the three iterations of the world wide web. This was a welcome surprise from the previous week, which was primarily focused on all that painfully boring admin stuff. Well, it had to be done at some stage, I suppose. It's better to get into the nitty-gritty of the assessment tasks and due dates as early as possible.

We started off talking about "old media". This encompasses the more traditional, mainstream means of mass communication. Newspapers, magazines, radio reports and televised news make up some of the most common media platforms that fall under the category of old media. Old media is rarely capable of targeting a specific audience, being typically limited to whoever is watching a certain TV channel during primetime, or whoever regularly runs through a copy of The Courier Mail with their morning cup of coffee. I'd love to throw in a "back in my day" quote here, however mass communication in "my day" was, for a large portion of my life, all about the internet.

Transmission of information from various sources 
through Web 2.0 to specific social groups.

Image Source: inlog.org

The information web, or Web 1.0 was all about companies. It was raw information, with a lot of advertising thrown in there. This was really when the web was just beginning, and so it still suffered the "unspecific audience" problem that old media had to some extent. Web 1.0 was followed by the efficaciously-named "Web 2.0", which is where things got sociable. Facebook and a horde of other sites of social media allowed for highly specific social groups with similar interests to interact, which allowed the advertising industry to target people that were actually likely to consider their product and/or service. Web 3.0 is set to go even deeper than just these social groups, targeting specific individuals. Accessing the immense load of information about any given person online, Web 3.0, "the semantic web", can figure out exactly what tickles one's fancy, and suggest products, services and even community events from regions they regularly visit. How cool is that, seriously? It's a whole new level of media that, only a decade ago, would've seemed very much unrealistic.