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10.03.2011

THE WEB TURNS INTO THE MAIN SOURCE OF INFORMATION

   

Samvel Martirosyan

The Internet wins position on the information field in the world with an incredible pace. Printed media lose their grounds as a source of information and now television follows their example of losing the role of the main informer. At the same time, in recent years and months, the Internet occupies leading positions among the most socially active part of the population – the youth.

General growth of the number of the users of the Internet, increase of the computer literacy rate, reduction of price of communication and hardware all over the world in general, as well as such factors as development of mobile technologies, easing of publication of the information on the Internet, unification of the users in global social networks, development of the civil web journalism and etc. boost the increase of the significance of the Internet. At the same time it is already rather difficult to call this source of information the Internet in its traditional sense, because today combined network is formed. Merging of network, computer and mobile technologies is taking place; combined clusters of information dissemination are formed.

Mobile Internet is doubled

Mobile technologies, which transform the network, have no small part in the shift of the structure of the modern Internet. According to the State of the Mobile Web1 by Opera Software Company, the producer of one of the most popular mobile browsers, the growth of the mobile Internet in 2010 was breaking through. Thus, the number of the Opera Mini mobile browser users in November 2010 was about 80 million, and the growth as compared with the November 2009, constituted 91.8%. The number of the browsed pages on the web for 11 months in 2010 had reached the number of 340 billion; meanwhile the analogous rate in 2009 was only 129 billion. In fact, for the last year the mobile Internet has doubled.

Taking into consideration the fact that the number of the users of smart phones, different pads is growing fast and the price of the mobile Internet is reducing, one can forecast a qualitative breakthrough in the sphere of using the Web. However, the breakthrough can already be observed in the high-tech countries. E.g., according to Nielson and Forrester Research2, this year in the US the number of the smart phones and the number of common mobile phones has already leveled. Currently in the US half of the Facebook users use mobile access.

Correspondingly, the information field is also being changed; the Internet users may pass from the background TV watching to the targeted search of information on the web at any time. The shift towards the Internet is also boosted by the development of social networks, blogs and micro blogs, where the exchange of the information among people who trust each other takes place. Correspondingly, there is no necessity to monitor the Internet looking for the needed information – instead of one person the entire network community, which filters the information field, takes up this function.

Television cedes its positions

According to the recent data by Pew Research Center3, traditional mass media are swiftly loosing their positions of the news sources for the Americans. Only television is still challenging the Internet. If for the average American of the elder generation the Internet has not yet become the main source of information, for the overwhelming majority of the Americans of 18-29 years old (65%) it has been playing the role of the main source of news for two years, thus doubling its indices since 2006.

Despite the fact that in the aspect of the maturity of the Internet the US has essentially outstripped most of the countries, this tendency is of global character for the rest of the world either and obtaining such showings is just a matter of time.

Television cedes in Armenia either

The decline of the television’s audience is a global trend and it can be observed not only in such a developed from the point of view of technologies country as the US. E.g., in Armenia the explosive growth of the Internet use is accompanied by the processes of recession of the audience of the traditional television. According to the data for 2007-2009, published by AGB Nielsen4, both the number of the TV audience and the time spent before TV has reduced.

Besides, most of the Armenian TV channels are broadcasting on the Internet too. In particular, main popular shows and programmes are placed on YouTube. According to YouTube data, the average downloading speed in Armenia is 1Mb/s. Despite the fact that it is approximately for times lower than the world rate, however, this speed allows the users from Armenia freely watch video on the web. Thus, availability of popular TV shows on the Internet makes them more attractive than watching them on TV: the Internet allows watching them at any time; you can watch separate fragments, show it to your friends and etc. In this connection, we can suppose that such factors, as, e.g., competent placing of the TV shows on the web will have an impact on the rating of the TV channels5.

1 http://www.opera.com/smw/2010/11/

2 http://www.mobilemarketingwatch.com/smartphone-owners-to-overtake-feature-phone-owners-by-the-end-of-2011-8708/

3 http://actualweb.ru, http://people-press.org/report/689/

4 http://www.agbnielsen.am/en/news/8/

5 E.g. there have been about 3.5 million viewings of different TV shows of “Shant” TV Company on YouTube for the recent 9 months. http://www.youtube.com/user/TheShantTV

“Globus National Security”, issue 1, 2011

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