ABSTRACT
In Chapter 2, Lee Rainie, Director of Internet and Technology Research for the Pew Research Center, a non-partisan “fact tank,” examines the digital revolution and the increasing complexity of digital media platforms and content. The chapter identifies five important trends: changes in the ways people use their time; the increasing place-agnostic nature of consumed media; media usage of multiple devices, simultaneously; consumption of media content through increasingly politically polarized lenses; the dangers of “gamified” participatory media, which may influence engagement; and use of digital gadgets as body enhancers. The author recognizes changes in news consumption and the way people think about news due to changing media usage patterns or flow in news. Rainie discusses what he calls five new media and attention zones that are distinct from “classic” media: signals (alerts that prompt awareness), snacking (bite-size media interactions), social streams (places of information flow that may promote engagement), split-screen (multi-tasking activity), and “spree-ville” (sustained engagement). The author considers the possibility of a sixth zone he calls “synthesized spaces,” a world created by virtual and augmented reality technologies that can summon and share services that will impact interactions with the world. Finally, Rainie speculates about a future with new kinds of data, with new forms of analytics, and new ways of deriving insights; and how life will be shaped by the “Datacosm,” where humans are quantifiable, predictable, and possibility empowered, but maybe manipulated.
