How Digital Media Affects Society

Digital media has become an integral part of society in every way as the age of information is coming up with newer and more life-changing technologies every day. For example, the speed at which an event that happens anywhere in the world, uploaded to an online news website, and read by thousands of people at a time is being more easily done and closing the gap to immediate every day. How this affects society has been debated long before this blog post. The free flow of information and it's accessibility is becoming overwhelming to the point of being intrusive to the lives of people. With sites such as facebook, myspace, twitter, and so on, coupled with the technology of miniature cameras installed in cellphones and other technologies puts anything and everything you do to potentially being permanently posted on the internet. Things like this can be humiliating to anyone who has the ability to access to the internet, costing you a job in the future, or how anyone really views you.
Nonetheless, in my opinion which can of course be argued, digital media has had an overall positive affect on the world. The archiving of information on millions of servers and computer networks around the globe that are readily accessible by literally anyone and everyone is a powerful aspect when you think about it, and provides anyone with the ability to research the world around them including any topic whether is be history, politics, online discussion and debate, etc. The use of a library is nearly to the point of having no use if they didn't install their own public computers with internet access next to the bookshelves. These are but a few of the resulting effects of Digital Media on society as a whole.
Digital media constitutes almost everything we do during a regular day. You wake up to the sound of a news broadcast on your radio, check your facebook, update your blog, and play video games. Some would say that we've become addicted to the digital world as we know it and would be lost without it, and this is true to a certain extent. Could you really imagine yourself not using a cellphone to text anybody, living life without sitting in front of a computer for an hour or two a day, or god forbid checking the twitter of your favorite starlet every five seconds to see if they've finished washing dishes yet?! Even though it seems infantile and pretentious, I see the answer to those questions as a definite "yes". Along with any age in time, there will always be addictions to anything society deems legally and morally satisfying, and in our age, it's one of the constant free flow and access of information regarding anything that can be digitally written to a hard drive.