The year 2014 is still in its very early winter months as I'm sure you're aware. How could anyone fail to notice the dreadfully cold temperatures that keep the grass brown and our skin blue? 2014 very likely will offer many great new innovations to media in multiple forms. In fact, we can expect media to continue to evolve and change with each new year that comes and goes. Thus is the nature of such an innovative, intelligent, and mischievously curious species like human-kind. Social media tends to get the most attention these days. Social media is fun and practical, and it creates a LOT of ad revenue. Why wouldn't it be the most popular kid on the media playground? In 2013, social media saw the uprising the Vine phenomena that has entertained me and many others like me with silly looping videos that can't simply be watched just once. What can we expect from the next five years of media development? We mustn't forget that social media isn't the only types of media. Broadcast media (television and radio) and print media are also significant. Print media is struggling: it is quite obvious to most everyone that newspapers have been on their way to being obsolete for a number of years. Magazines occupy an interesting niche in the print media category. Magazines are kind of like specialized newspapers that have most or all of their content targeted toward a specific type of consumer, e.g., Sport Illustrated and Game Informer. Magazines are more efficient at reaching specialized market segments than newspapers and will likely survive for a number of years. Perhaps innovation in the magazine industry will even propel magazines to increased popularity and success. Newspapers will likely exist in some form five years from now, but there will almost certainly be less subscriptions being sold and fewer newspapers in operation. It is so easy for consumers to get online to read news articles that paying for a physical newspaper just doesn't make any sense unless one simply prefers to hold the paper from which he or she reads. Such a notion is common among older generations who heavily relied on the newspaper as their primary source of daily news before the Internet and even television dominated the news industry.
Radio will likely continue to be commonly used five years from now. However, cell phones connecting to mobile Internet threaten radio's primary application for its consumers, listening while driving. I turn on my car radio almost every time I crank up the engine. What better time to stress oneself out with the problems of the world by listening to news broadcasts or to distract oneself with loud music than when driving? I foresee Internet radio significantly suppressing the presence of traditional radio as soon as it becomes feasible for more individuals to own smart phones and subscribe to plans with lots of available data usage. Traditional television is also somewhat threatened by the media Goliath that is the Internet. It is becoming increasingly common for TV-watchers to forego subscriptions to cable and satellite networks to watch their favorite shows on the Internet at a much more efficient rate. Applications like Netflix as well as free websites like cokeandpopcorn.com and projectfreetv.com that post Internet links to TV shows contribute quite a bit to this trend among traditional consumers of broadcast television programs.
I don't foresee any of the mentioned media categories becoming nonexistent by 2019, but I cannot ignore how quickly the Internet is changing and dominating media as we have traditionally known it. If the Internet continues to push broadcast and print media out of the picture, then there will inevitably be a lot of cultural and societal issues to arise concerning ethics and privacy. Those topics, however, are topics of discussion for another time.
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