Today, young people are redefining the means of communication in a way that probably the human race has never seen before.
It said that the current generation would rather surf the internet for information than read the newspaper and the trend that we are taking as young people is beginning to threaten and force new initiative on the old methods of communication.
It’s possible for a mother not to be able to get the attention of her 13year old child even when she is screaming his/her name a few yards from the teenager because there is an iPod glued to the ear of the teenager playing the latest hit on the top ten chat.
Does this mean that the only thing that sells for young people is entertainment and fun? My answer is NO. However young people of today are constantly looking for an easier and a “cool” means of passing across information and one of it is the camera phone or camera enabled gadget.
Due to our constantly active and creative minds, young people’s flare for visual pictures has a means of speaking without talking is on the increase.
Pictures of events, travels , fun filled moments, great works and staggering information on the condition of life are passed across to other young people, friends, relatives and appropriate higher authorities through pictures posted on social sites, blogs and even through multimedia messages.
Newspaper establishments are now taking comments from readers on event and happenings in their environment through messaging with visual images of pictures on phone.
This trend and fashion as used today was usually not the case in the time past, now you don’t have to be a professional photographer to pass across a good picture image to the next person.
How will this trend affect the future of media? Hmm! First and foremost it would determine a lot about what people think of a story and how fast it reaches them. Imagine that the picture of a riot in a town in Nigeria has been passed across to over 1000 young people within the hour it happened and one of the chooses to post in on his/her blog of 10,000 viewers and the next day a media report watering down the riot is placed in a newspaper, which one do you think people would believe?
It would definitely ensure transparency in reporting and reduce the number of unethical doctored reports that media houses report about young people in various countries because it means that our media is right in our hands and we are already using it!
It would change the perspective the society has about young people and create the image that we want to project and not the one sod to us on TV and in the magazines.
More importantly, it will be fun way of reaching across to ourselves and building new bridges across old boundaries and that is ‘COOL’
