How the Shift to an Online, On-Demand World of Content Could Impact Political Discourse

Political news is used to be obtainable from television, newspaper and other medias. However, the internet is able to do more than providing news to the audience and indeed political decisions can be discussed at any place and time. Therefore, the shift of paradigm towards new media is unavoidable in line with the fast paced, modern and digitally oriented contextual lifestyle in this era (Lessig 2004).

Source: Pew Research Center

As such, public forums allows the people to point out their views in the political conversation conveniently via any gadgets which allows internet access such as mobile phones, laptops or smart phones. Political discussion online is important where information and persuasion are they key factor to greater deliberativeness in discussions. According to Lapadat (2002), such communication leads to more detailed and deliberative discussion as the interaction are slower and more thoughtful. As such, more information can be obtained from the public’s opinion rather than the politicians themselves where these would help to improve the community too.

Another source of political disclosure would be obtaining from networking source such as Facebook and Tweeter. News travel faster than ever before with such convenient tools and gadgets where one can pass on the political news before it is release on television, radio or newspaper via social networking online. As agreed by Walsh (2006), the affordance of new internet media provides the technological edge of being capable of reaching a wide range of audience within seconds. On top of that, blog is able to provide political news, the blogger’s opinion of the content and comments from the public’s view of the news. Therefore, such the availability of such tools, the public is also able to decide, point out their views and arguments in days of political election where people would be then influence of such news as well as their voting. Besides that, different viewpoints in political discussion where some impoliteness from opposing discussants, tougher issues could be brought up which increases democratic potential of such discussion (Ng & Detenber 2005).

As such, people tend to use more of the internet tools to garner news in political discourse where the sites are more interactive and user friendly.

References:

Lessig, L 2004, Free culture: How big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity, Penguin Press, New York.

Lapadat, JC 2002, Written interaction: A key component in online learning, Journal of Computer-mediated Communication, 7 (4), viewed 14 June 2010, http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol7/issue4/lapadat.html.

Walsh, M 2006, “‘Textual shift’: Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts,” Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol.29, no.1, p.24-37.

Ng, EWJ & Detenber, B 2005, The impact of synchronicity and civility in online political discussions on perceptions and intentions to participate, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 10(3), article 4, http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue3/ng.html.