New Media Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

New Media - Essay Example Its examples are the Internet, websites, DVDs, CD-ROMs, vide-games, and computer multimedia. These new media technologies have not only become a necessary part of our daily lives but also have dramatically changed our way of living, affecting almost all aspects of our lives in various ways. As new media technologies have become increasingly the ordinary way by which we transact our daily businesses, its positive impact cannot be denied. In the first place, if the new media has not been beneficial to the lives of individuals and the society as a whole, it would have not been widely used and would have not become as pervasive as it is today. However, against its beneficial effects is its negative impact of what many critics termed as the digital divide, which various definitions (OECD, 2001; Boyd, 2002; Wolff & MacKinnon, 2002; Hilbert, 2011) can be summarized as the disproportionate distribution of new media technologies in terms of access, capability, and usage. Just like the undeniable beneficial impacts of new media technologies, so is the digital divide as statistics show. According to the Digital Divide Network (2002), more or less 429 million online users worldwide actually correspond to only 6% of the entire world population. The small proportion of online users is true even in highly developed countries (Sweden at 61% and Spain at 20%), meaning there exists a digital divide even in highly industrialized countries. But this becomes far greater when access and usage are compared between the â€Å"have† and the â€Å"have not† countries – the International Labor Organization (2001) reports that industrialized countries account for 90% of online users worldwide, with the United States and Canada leading both at 57%. On the contrary, the combined online users of Africa and the Middle East account for only 1% of global online users (as cited in Boyd, 2002, p. 113) The emergence of the digital divide, as can be gleaned from