Times are changing. There is no escape from that. Flat screen televisions, palm computers, cars that run on rechargeable batteries, smart-phones that have similar processing abilities to those of NASA’s computers from 1969, when they sent a man to the moon.
Remember the days when “getting the morning paper” was a standard morning ritual for every man or woman that wanted to stay updated on current events?
Well, these times have definitely changed. Now days, all you need is a computer with an internet access and nothing more. Not only all the major newspapers and news channels these days have websites, but there are also many news providers that are work exclusively over the internet. There are also many bloggers that work as journalists and their blog posts attract millions of people, but what made the biggest impact on the media, are the social networks.
Imagine a protester in Syria, a country where freedom of journalism and freedom of speech is merely a dream for the common people, in the middle of a large protest against the government. No foreign press is allowed to enter the country, the government is using tanks, snipers and special forces in order to terminate the protest and hundreds of people are dying almost every day. The internet access is limited, as well as the access to to social networks and only a few people are capable of breaching the governments internet security networks. Our protester, who is one of those few people, is filming the protest using his smart-phone while the military is firing live ammunition on the protesters. He then uploads the video on Youtube, from Youtube he shares the video on Facebook and on Twitter and then there is no way of stopping the snow ball that he created. The whole world will see what’s really going on in Syria and it’s all because of the huge part that the internet and social networks take in our life. Even the pictures from those protests that are shown on newspapers are taken from sites like Twitter, Facebook and from blogs that are written by some of the protesters.
Our generation can’t be kept in the dark anymore, whether governments want to keep us there or not. We are no longer limited to the information that is given to us by newspapers that some of them belong to billionaires with political agenda. Printed media Is destined to stay in the past but not only for the above-mentioned reasons. Just like the case with electric cars, it benefits our planet tremendously as well. Thousands of forests worldwide were destroyed over the course of history because of our need for newspapers and books. Less printed media means less tree mining and advancing technologically while paying attention to our planet means a brighter future for us all.