Fake IPL blogger Anupam Mukerji?s life changed with the Internet; and the other 10% of India?s population that is networked would also agree that life wouldn?t be the same without the Net.
The new media is an explosion that is only getting bigger and bigger, steadily engulfing populations globally. The Indian story is no different. Vinay Goel, president products, Google India, puts things in perspective. ?In 2007, while 2% of India?s population was on the Internet, today it?s 10%. And, this number will swell by another 600-800 million in the next 5-10 years. In fact, no other market in the world has that kind of population who are still to become Internet users,? he says.
These numbers are just the tip of the iceberg of this fascinating story. Here are more: Until 2005, only about five exabytes of information had been generated since the beginning of time in any format. That amount of information is now generated every two days. Ten years ago, less than 2% of the global population was online, whereas today two billion people are online. More than just being a medium of consumption of information and content, new media has democratised the media and changed the way we actually function in every sphere of our lives, from personal to professional. Businesses depend on things like enterprise messaging and real-time stock updates. Books can be downloaded and read on tablets and Kindle. E-mails have changed the way we correspond and get in touch with people across the board, pushing snail-mail to having legacy value. We now stream videos, and ?webisodes? of TV shows and watch even live feed online according to our convenience, and carry and buy music sans the tapes and CDs. No more do you need to wait for the day?s newspaper or for the next news bulletin to know what?s happening, as the world and all the information about it is just a click away. And can we now really imagine life without search engines?
?We are always in the quest for information and that?s what made the Google search big. From the quest for information, we moved to accessing information quickly and today we stand in time where ?I want it now!? defines the way we consume information and content through the online media. That has really changed our habits and the way we treat and access information. All conventional media are forced to converge on the point of delivering information ?now?,? says Ashwin Razdan, an online journalist and marketer, and author of a book on new media, New Media: Techniques and Trends.
While experts feel that with low broadband penetration in India, the new media explosion is still in its infancy, its effect is not to be underestimated. ?New media definitely has had a huge impact on urban consumers. Rather than being a ?push? medium, it is a ?pull? medium, where the consumer decides himself what he wants and then demands that content from the medium. In a push model, editors decide the content to be pushed to the consumer,? says Jehil Thakkar, executive director, KPMG.
Goel predicts for India: ?We are already finding that a growing number of people are coming online from their mobile phones and not from computers. In a couple of years, this would make India one of the few countries in the world where Internet connections on mobile phones would surpass those on computers. Mobile telephony has a great penetration in the Indian market and that would facilitate Internet connectivity in a massive way.? For this reason, all hopes are being pinned on roll-out of 3G technology in mobile telephony. ?With 3G everything you thought you wanted to do on the phone is now possible. Customers can watch movies, download content, network with people, make video calls, etc. Broadband penetration in India is still one of the lowest in the world, as is the teledensity ratio. 3G will enable to not only bridge the digital divide, but also help connect entire India to the world,? says Shireesh Joshi, chief marketing officer, mobile services, Bharti Airtel.
Even advertising and marketing is converging on to the mobile screen. ?We are looking at mobile Internet-based advertising very seriously. There is already a lot of traction in that space. Businesses have already started investing in it in terms of time, money and people. We are looking at innovative ways to help advertisers to maximise the advantage of mobile Internet. For example, we are working to connect the visual ad on the Internet connection on mobile phones directly to the call centre of that company, so a transaction on the spot can be facilitated. Therefore, like we click on an ad on our computers and get directed to the website of that company, instead of that, the phone will dial the call centre of the company,? says Sridhar Seshadri, online sales head, Google India.
Similarly, the TV entertainment business, too, seems to be excited about new platforms and their expected reach and impact. ?Every screen will start talking to you. Be it a mobile phone screen, a television screen, a computer screen and so on. That will certainly impact how the content is packaged. As broadcasters, we just can?t afford to talk only about television anymore. We already post all our full episodes on YouTube,? says Rajesh Kamat, CEO, Colors, and COO, Viacom 18. While Kamat declines to divulge details on his network?s strategy, he asserts that technology will be the driving force for the entertainment business in the years to come.
But beyond just device convergence, Goel feels that the real convergence lies in cloud computing going mass in the time to come. ?All your data, information and content would be there on the cloud and you won?t need to carry it with you. You?ll be able to access the cloud through various platforms and won?t have to worry about the data storage capacity of your device. A truck can then run over your laptop and your phone, and you would still not lose any data at all. The cloud is the future really,? he says.
But concerns have been there about the larger impact of new media and our dependence on it for an increasingly large number of things we do. Razdan asserts that Internet and communication technology, apart from making things quite convenient, have really revved up the pace in our lives and made us a lot more busy. ?With this sudden burst of information and real time information sources, people tend to get confused in the clutter. Our attention spans have come down drastically and made us very impatient consumers of media and information. Basically, as users we need to mature to actually know what is good for us and what is not. Unfortunately, the pace of development in Internet and new media content seems to have surpassed our speed of catching up with it. So it will take a while before we can be confident about handling it,? he says. Dependence on online sources of information and readymade research too comes as a cause of concern with fears being raised that heavy dependence on such sources prevents pro-active research and analysis, especially in professions like journalism. ?New media sources and email make it possible to interview people who are not within reach, and also make it possible for reporters or writers to do spot surveys by contacting several people at the same time. The Internet makes it possible for depth to be added to a story, through Net research for facts and figures. On the downside, the Net has increased instances of plagiarism because of carelessness in doing such research. The tendency is to lift paras wholesale and think nobody will notice. And a whole new generation of reporters resorting to email and mobile phones don?t need to go out and do field research any more,? says Sevanti Ninan, media critic and editor of watchdog website, The Hoot. On the question of the trend in online journalism, like the Wikileaks or the Niira Radia tapes controversy, where raw data is posted online for people to interpret in their own way, Ninan feels that it has both positives and negatives. ?I agree that this development in online news is a bit unnerving. Wikileaks is supposed to have endangered the lives of American soldiers; we need to see direct evidence of that happening. What it has done through the Afghanistan war papers is to tell us how much damage it is causing to the local people. The gossip aired in the Radia tapes is unfortunate when it needlessly damages reputations through unsubstantiated gossip between two people about others. But where people implicate themselves by the way they talk to her, and through what they agree to do, well, those bits are a public service,? she says.
But those from the online world believe that enough mechanisms are in place to keep the clutter aside, and to safeguard ourselves against unwanted information. ?I feel we have already learnt to keep the clutter aside and avoid it altogether. We are personalising and customising our Internet experience rapidly like our searches being more pull based rather than push. Information has grown and would continue to multiply, but with it also come effective and convenient tools to refine and filter and get exactly what one is looking for,? says Goel.
All in all, the new media story is an exciting saga of rapid growth, reach and impact. It is not only changing our media habits, it is also changing us. As we look at the road ahead, Indian consumers are adapting to newer innovations in technology really fast and easily. According to experts, this hasn?t been witnessed in other mature markets and it increasingly puts more power on our fingertips. What we may call the next information and media revolution seems to have just begun.
