Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

18 Online Journalism
including such memory-hungry media as video, to consumers is ultimately
limited by the capacity of the networks. A news service based
on video and sound requires consumption of information at
megabits per second and, while capacity has risen at the same rate as
processing power (indeed the technologies are closely linked) and
prices have dropped, the web’s natural operational level constantly
seems to lie just beyond the limits of its capacity. In an information
society we can expect bandwidth to take on the importance borne by
oil in the second half of the twentieth century. It will both fuel the
economy and set its limits. Those states or corporations in the
position to turn it on and off will have a stranglehold on the global
economy and will become the Gulf States of the twenty-first century.
New Models of News and Readership
Nicholas Negroponte suggests that intelligent multimedia computers,
able to ‘read’ effectively on our behalf, will filter, sort, prioritise, and
manage our daily intake of information. Part of that intake will come,
along with the advertising that pays for it, from local and global news
providers. Those media, the Guardian’s newsUnlimited for instance,
will, however, only forward those elements of the news which it
knows we might be interested in. To this core of news will be added
a range of stories (again with advertisments and other subsidiary
information) which the computer has sent out agents to collect.
These might come from anywhere on the web’s billion or so pages
and from media titles that we have never even heard of.
The millions of ‘channels’ that the Internet potentially offers thus
provide opportunities for readers which were largely unforeseen by
the global media corporations. Consumers can tailor their news
precisely to their own interests. Cricket fans can access reports on
games from around the world, as well as profiles of players, scorecards,
both historical and contemporary, and gossip. This news
package might come from a range of locations or all from one aggregating
website (cricinfo.com). A cricket fan who is also a financial
analyst could easily combine a diet of sports news with regular
updates on the state of the market (in any country), corporate
reports and commentary. The news package will come from a
mixture of agencies, brand name newsites (BBC News Online, MSNBC)
and special interest newsgroups or bulletin boards.