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Digital media

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Digital media, a term that denotes any media form that utilizes electronic devices for its dissemination, encompasses a broad spectrum of components such as software, digital images, digital videos, video games, web pages, and websites. These elements can be created, observed, altered, and disseminated via digital electronic devices. The prominence of digital media grew with the advent of digital computers, which facilitated the binary representation of information. As the years have passed, digital media has undergone significant evolution, leading to substantial societal and cultural transformations. It has also exerted a profound influence on diverse sectors like journalism, publishing, education, and entertainment. Concurrently, digital media has spawned new trends and posed legal challenges, particularly concerning copyright laws. The consumption of digital media has seen a swift surge due to increased internet^[1] access and the emergence of various social media platforms.

Terms definitions

1. ↑ internet. The Internet, a global network of interconnected computer systems, utilizes standardized communication protocols, predominantly TCP/IP, to connect devices across the globe. The term 'Internet' has its roots in the 1849 term 'internetted' and was later adopted by the US War Department in 1945. The inception of the Internet can be traced back to the 1960s when computer scientists developed time-sharing systems, which eventually led to the creation of ARPANET in 1969. The Internet operates autonomously, without any central control, and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) manages its primary name spaces. It has revolutionized traditional communication methods and has seen an exponential growth, with the number of internet users growing by 20% to 50% every year. In 2019, more than half of the global population was using the Internet. The Internet protocol suite, comprising TCP/IP and four conceptual layers, directs internet packets to their intended destinations. Fundamental services such as email and Internet telephony function on the Internet. The World Wide Web, an extensive network of interconnected documents, serves as a crucial element of the Internet.

Digital media (Wikipedia)

In mass communication, digital media is any communication media that operates in conjunction with various encoded machine-readable data formats. Digital content can be created, viewed, distributed, modified, listened to, and preserved on a digital electronic device, including digital data storage media (in contrast to analog electronic media) and digital broadcasting. Digital is defined as any data represented by a series of digits, and media refers to methods of broadcasting or communicating this information. Together, digital media refers to mediums of digitized information broadcast through a screen and/or a speaker. This also includes text, audio, video, and graphics that are transmitted over the internet for viewing or listening to on the internet.

Digital media platforms, such as YouTube, Vimeo, and Twitch, accounted for viewership rates of 27.9 billion hours in 2020. A contributing factor to its part in what is commonly referred to as the digital revolution can be attributed to the use of interconnectivity.

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