Current And Media Affairs In The Public Services Assignment 1

Assignment 1

Current And Media Affairs In The Public Services

Tutor: Anna Walsh

Ahsanul Islam

07/11/2011

P1/M1

In this task I am going to describe and analyze how changes in technology have affected the gathering and presentation of information in different types of media and I am also going to talk about how all of this has the ability to affect events.

The changes in technology have affected the gathering and presentation of information in different types of media in so many ways e.g. the way the information is gathered nowadays by the journalists did 20/30 years ago is a lot easier as so many new technologies have come about.

Over the last fifteen years fibre optics and communication transmissions have been used within the media. There are so many advantages to this and one of them is that it has a large data capacity and isn’t subjected to electrical interference. Fibre optics transmissions are in infrared and as infrared light is a low frequency form of light it requires less energy to travel as far as it does. 

As the technology is getting more up to date day by day the changes in the media are much faster and this would come down to the use of satellite communication. Satellites can be used for sending information from places to places e.g. being able to use e-mails and send and receive messages in a matter of seconds anywhere in the world.

The changes that satellites have made to the media is that they can send and receive information much quicker than before as they are closer to the source of the signal, they do this by bouncing the sources off each other and then relaying it to the data and to the users desktop. Satellites are used in communications and media so that any media signal can be beamed around the world in a matter of seconds ensuring news and current events happening in one part of the world, so then it can be seen across the globe instantly. 

On normal television channels 1-5 the news is on every few hours on BBC1 whereas on digital television e.g. sky news this is on for 24 hours a day giving updates in the news so the media can always update us to what is going on around the world by us being just sat down at home. This shows how the changes in technology has made it easier for any major news to be passed on around the world.

Analogue transmissions have now moved to digital because analogue signals are transmitted via a continuous wave like form but due to it travelling so far the wave degrades. This is why digital is much better in quality and is degrades less as well as its capacity works much better than analogue. This change has affected TV, radios and mobile phones.

To sum up the change in media and how it has changed is that as technology has moved on over the years it has affected the way things are being presented and how it can get to any information within minutes, for example September 11^th was on our televisions just minutes after the first plane had crashed into the first tower, and how it came on our TV as ‘breaking news’ and that they had a news correspondent there live in New York.

P2

In this task I am going to outline how the media can affect events as well as reporting them and I am going to do this by talking about the England riots.

The England riots first kicked off when a police officer shot an innocent black man dead. The armed police officer shot the man dead when he thought the black man had shot him when it was his colleague that shot him by accident.

What happened then was that all the black youngsters started rioting with the police to get them back for shooting one of their own innocent people. When people seen riots kicking off in 1 part of London it slowly started spreading and most of the big areas and major cities started rioting with the police using that black guy getting shot as an excuse.

At the time of all of this kicking off there were so many different types of media that were reporting what was going on and this was on T.V, radio internet and newspapers.

The changes in the media made it in many ways harder and several ways easier to report this because as the riots were kicking off every minute in different areas it was hard for the media to report it straight away or hide any inappropriate actions that were taking place. E.g. the riots kicking off in Hackney, Clapham, Croydon, Peckham, Enfield, Camden, Bristol, Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds (Chapeltown).

The positive part to the change of the media is that whenever anything major happens it is instantly shown or told about on the news whereas many years ago people had to read only newspapers to find out what was going on around the world.

I think the media had a negative impact on the riots because when the riots were getting shown live on the news different people from around England were trying to get something to kick off in their area in order to in my opinion make their reputations bigger and riot with the police officers.

Ahsanul Islam