Today’s society seems to have an insatiable lust for information. This lust has led to a ‘hypermediated’ media front, with social media forums like Facebook and twitter dominating our screens. Smart phones and advancements in 3G have allowed this deluge of information to be more accessible than ever before.
Such a desire for more and more information has been met with programs flooding multiple stories at once; news headlines are shown in one corner of a screen with weather or stocks scrolling on the bottom while a presenter talks about and elaborates upon another story.
An alternative to this hypermediate news form is ‘multi-screening’. The advancement of mobile devices and the increasing percentage of homes having one or more mobile devices (be it a laptop, tablet, or smart phone) has led to people utilizing more than one device at a time. Many people will sit in front of the television, watching the news, while updating their twitter. More ‘advanced’ multi-screeners resort to ‘triple-screening’, where they will have, say, a laptop checking social media, a television program running, and a smartphone to text.
Such an overflow of information has made it both easy to communicate news and information and fast, with almost immediate updates flowing through these media forums.
