Week 2: New Media News

Whilst getting ready for my day this morning, I caught a glimpse of a story on the news based around new media and communication in the UK. I found it highly interesting and thought that it related to ideas that we have been looking at these past 2 weeks. The British government has plans to boost digital and communication industries to try and help the British Economy. A British digital report is being fashioned to help the British economy and will be released sometime this year. In the clip on the news this morning Prime Minister Gordon Brown mentioned trying to get every age group and household to have access to the internet. He also went on to say that digital technology was as important in this day and age as "roads, bridges and trains were in the 20th Century".

As the summary was very brief, I couldn’t write everything down so I decided to investigate a little further with help from the wonderful Internet. It turns out that this report will highlight various positive and negative aspects in the digital and communication industry. They are also set to improve and expand on various areas of digital and communication technology including broadband development, internet technology development, digital radio and public service broadcasting. It was suggested that by 2012 there may be a set broadband speeds to enable users to get the most out of the Internet. Prime Minister Gordon Brown also commented "Every aspect of our lives... will be dependent on the services that the digital network provides" (Brown, G: 2009). How relevant do you think this comment is to our developing country?

Not only is the report going to discuss positive subjects and ideas around digital and communications but it is also going to look at negative aspects such as the safety of children on the internet, illegal downloading/ file sharing and, internet fraud, gambling games on the internet and restricting areas of social networking sites for youngsters.
I found this story very interesting as it just shows how important the digital and communication industries are to our society. It also shows that the government are thinking of our own welfare. I guess this could be questioned though as they may only be trying to be on par with other countries that have a higher level of digital and internet communication.

I've attatched the link to the news article that I looked at at the bottom of the blog, but there are a few more that are attached to its link which are also interesting :)

Any opinions guys?

Amy x x

BBC, (29.01.09), 'Broadband in every home by 2012', http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7858498.stm [Accessed 29.01.09]