Archive for: Digital Media Technologies

Viral marketing is a set of marketing techniques that use existing social networks (both real and virtual) to achieve specific marketing objectives, through viral processes that resemble the spread of computer viruses. The central part of this process are the users, or potential audiences, which in certain way become marketing managers, constantly recruiting new marketing managers. It was necessary to fulfill one important prerequisite in order to reach the moment when the boundaries between different media formats are no longer of that much importance – erasing the boundaries between the real and the virtual space, creating a hybrid space, the so-called “real virtuality”. This article tries to cover recent US media practices related to viral campaigns in the film and television production, and other forms of media expression through media channels that are intertwined, denying borders between them, making members of the audience interactive and integral participants in this collaborative process.

This paper examines the causes and consequences of the phenomenon of information surplus in the world of digital media technologies, with particular emphasis on the functions of libraries in the selection and evaluation of information content. As Baudrillard showed, we lived in a world with more and more information and less and less sense. The excess of information undermines the very communication, and thus the essence of sociability. Obviously, information networks and digital technologies are fundamentally changing our habits and experience, producing a new culture and new institutional models and social paradigm. However, we must keep a measure of caution and healthy skepticism before we start believing that new technologies automatically solve the puzzle of human history. In the digital world, we must ask: Where is the knowledge we lost with information? Where is the wisdom we have lost with the knowledge? The authors remind us of the Jose Ortega y Gaset’s opening lecture at the Paris International Congress of Librarians and Bibliographers (1934) entitled Mission of the Librarian, and his statement that librarians have to leave the neutral position in the procurement, processing and organization of the records of human knowledge and take responsibility for producing and using knowledge. One could have rightly expected that the concept of redundant books and the necessity to control the flow of ideas and knowledge would trigger unanimous disapproval of expert circles. However, although Ortega’s speech sparked numerous debates and controversies, it has had a significant impact on defining the structure, function and mission of contemporary libraries and other information institutions. The fundamental issue in these controversies is: how to ensure a high quality selection of information and publications and, at the same time, avoid the dangers of censorship?

This paper presents the results of a field research about the level of knowledge and familiarity of journalists of Vojvodina’s newspapers and radio stations regarding the digitalization of TV production and broadcasting. According to the “Regulations on the transition from analogue to digital broadcasting of television programs and access to the multiplex in terrestrial digital broadcasting” (2011) the promotion of this process in public is an important element for its success. A key aspect of this is that not only reporters from state controlled television stations should have basic knowledge of, and interest in, this topic, but that other journalists (from local and regional newspapers and radio stations) do as well. Their public advocacy and preparation of citizens in local communities for the day when the television signal will fully switch to digital terrestrial broadcasting is very important. Initial digital broadcasting in Serbia began in March, 2012. The study shows that journalists of those media outlets are not empowered to take on the task set ahead of them.

This paper seeks to highlight the spectrum of electronic services offered by modern libraries, and the need for the creation of “digital offers” guided by the standards of library efficiency and effectiveness. When we talk about digital libraries, evaluation studies are very rare due to a number of reasons. Usage is just one of the criteria to evaluate digital libraries, and it includes usage patterns, usage statistics, and user studies. The ultimate goal of the evaluation of digital libraries is to determine to what extent and in what manner they affect the processes of learning, education, cultural development, research, preservation of national heritage, collective and personal identity. As the world is still expecting reliable criteria for evaluating the digital library, the positions from which we are waiting make all the difference. In Serbia, an environment that didn’t manage to introduce all the possibilities provided by the Internet, either in terms of e-government, e-commerce, or of e-education, libraries have launched major digitization projects and stepped in front of the needs of our society which is not ready/educated/trained/used to digital resources. The way out of this situation must be sought in strengthening of the information society, of its technical and technological, legal and regulatory assumptions, and also those assumptions related to information literacy of citizens, their awareness of how human knowledge is organized, how to find the right information and how to use it effectively to improve the quality of one’s own life.