I believe that the media will still be a very strong driving force behind how people get their information in the future. I think that the new media culture and technology will still have a similar effect, if not a stronger one, on my peers and myself in the future. Being a Strategic Communications major at DU, I have realized that many of my classes have taught me how to correctly operate social media sites to promote businesses. Also, as an intern this past fall term, I was in charge of doing majority of the Facebook, Twitter, and blog posts that promoted the festival I was interning for. A while ago, a major teaching you this line of work was unheard of. Now, it seems to be a norm throughout many schools (however, they usually call it just Media Studies or Communications). This new major opportunity in colleges leads me to predict that the media will be a very important tool used by all companies in the future, as many are hopping on that bandwagon now. I think that my peers and I will be using more types of social media outlets and seeing the news on mainly a computer screen in the future.
I think that the future of media and the lives of the future children will be a brighter outlook. Though I spent most of my time outdoors as a kid and occasionally a computer/video game or two, I feel that the future generation of children will be spending much more time on the newer kid-friendly tablets that they are creating for children. I will definitely still make my kids play outside, because that is the fun of being a kid, but I think that the new children will be very accustomed to the new technologies since it seems to be a trend that kids 8 years and older have tablets (once saw a 3 year old with an iPad; don’t know the logic behind that one). The new program that is all over commercials, ABC Mouse, is a testament to how young children are using technology to further their education. I feel that the new generation of kids will be extremely technologically savvy.
I also predict that many of the social media outlets, such as Facebook and Twitter, will be slowly filtered out to make way for newer and more efficient social media sites. I also feel that there will be more social media sites in the future, which has the potential to complicate things.
What began as a futuristic way to send and spread information has now seemed to engulf many people’s lives in a swirl of different social media sites. I for see this trend continuing in the future. I predict that different forms of media (typically technological media) expanding and the print media slowly dissipating. I hope print media does not die out entirely, but I see it fading into the background by the time our generation has passed on.