Today in this progressing society, new media technologies have changed on how we communicate socially. According to webopedia (2003) new media are defined as a generic term for many different forms of electronic communication that are made possible through the use of computer technology. With new forms of media publishing available to the public at the click of a mouse, it is not surprised that website like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook & alternative online newspapers have changed the roles of journalism & communication. Furthermore in comparison to the old media, new forms of media publishing relies on wide range communication modalities such as text, images, video, & graphics as well as heightened on audience involvement and hypermedia (Pavlik, 2001)
Originally it used to be that the main purpose of a blog is for an individual to reflect their life and function as an online diary. However with the availability of the internet and wide range of interest from the public, blog have expanded to many different types of genre. What's more, the content is delivered differently from others.
Take YouTube for example. This new forms of media publishing are popular throughout the World Wide Web. The popularity of YouTube can be explained by the conflation of three “revolutions”: relatively inexpensive video cameras and accompanying software; the advent and popularity of virtual communities; and the desire for unfiltered, as opposed to “slick,” information (Grossman, 2006). The freedoms of users when one are able to upload and share their video online for free and viewed by audiences from all over the world are some of the benefits when using the vlog.
To some extent YouTube has been immensely successful, averaging 65,000 daily uploads and being visited by 20% of Internet users every day (Kruitsboch & Nack, 2008) With this phenomena, other video blogging websites such as daily motion, twitter vlog, Google videos, AOL video blog has lead to the emergence of the new media ecosystem.
Although YouTube benefits majority of the online users, the video blogging website also has some issue and problems. The copyrighted material for instance is one of the most talked about issue faced by the company. Since majority of the video uploads are free, registered user have this privilege on uploading any kind of video format such as drama, movies, music videos, and documentary. However due to violation of copyright law, most of the videos will be immediately removed by the primary owner.
According to Atwood (2007), 90 percent of the content on the site is copyrighted and used without permission. One of the notable copyright infringement case when media conglomerate giant, Viacom sued You Tube for $1 billion on publishing their programmes intentionally & illegally throughout the site. Such effort the company has taken on combating the issue is a warning to the users when uploading any copyrighted video materials.
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