Characteristics of the new media

- The change in the way information is stored and transmitted. All info, regardless of format, is now converted into binary code.

- The convergence of different types of info into a single delivery system. Boyle (2005) notes, digitalisation allows info to be delivered across a range of media platforms that were once seperate.

- Media and telecommunication industries that once produced seperate systems of communication began to make economic alliances with each other because digitalisation reduced the boundaries between media sectors. (multimedia delivery systems)

-  Changing the way people interact with each other and the media. For example, in 2012, OECD found that 6/10 British adults use the internet to buy products such as food, clothes, music etc.

-  New media is reponsive in 'real time' to user input through clicking on links with a mouse. The internet epitomises such interactive media because it lets users select the stories they want or watch, in the order they want to.

- Jenkins argues that media audiences can now interact with a variety of media, often on one device. This means that today's new media audience has a greater degree of choice compared to pre-1990s.

-Boyle (2005) notes that society's use of TV has eveolved from a suplly-led TV to a demand-led TV organised around the idea that users can choose what they want to watch and when.

- New media users are no longer passive recievers of entertainment, knowledge and so on. Instead they often acitively collaborate with new media and other users by uploading content onto Facebook, Youtube etc.

- Jenkins argues that media producers and consumers no longer occupy seperate roles - they are now participants who interact with each other according to a new set of rules that are constantly evolving.

- Jenkins notes that we all know something and so that we should all combine our skills/knowledge. He also claims that new media content is an alternative user-led sources of info that is often critical of info produced top-down by traditional forms of media.

Since 2005, changes in the media include:

- 84% of adults in the UK accessed the internet comapred with 54% in 2005.

- 69% of people accessed the internet via smartphones and tablets as well as PCs and laptops.

- The claimed weekly hours of internet use among all adults had doubled from 9.9 hours to 20.5 hours.