29. Amazon bought the video game streaming service Twitch for almost $1 billion because
______.
a. showing people playing video games is a good way to attract video game customers to the
Amazon online store
b. lots of people like to watch people playing video games
c. Twitch has approximately 7 million users a day
d. All of the above.
30. The expression “everything is data” means that ______.
a. everything we know has been digitized and is available online
b. we make decisions using all kinds of contradictory information
c. the transmission of digital data online is gradually replacing other forms of media
d. none of the above
31. Social media are online services that allow users to ______.
a. generate content
b. comment
c. tag
d. all of the above
True/False
1. Online media differ from traditional media because it contains elements of interpersonal,
group, and mass communication.
2. Employers are increasingly wanting to view the social media sites for people they are
considering hiring.
3. Approximately 43 percent of the people living on the African continent have access to the
Internet.
4. The Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is the address of content placed on the Web.
5. HTML consists of a series of tags that say how text ought to be represented, where
graphics should be placed, and what links should be included.
6. The World Wide Web was developed almost entirely as a for-profit venture.
7. The purpose of hypertext is to let people move electronically from one document to
another without necessarily knowing which computers the documents are located on.
8. The authoritative LexisNexis news database now contains entries from a number of blogs.
9. A blog is a collection of links and commentary in hypertext that can be created and posted
on the Internet.
10. Bloggers have been successful in fact-checking news stories from Big Media outlets.
11. The Chinese government allows its citizens to freely search the Internet.
12. The hacker movement is characterized by people who think that computers and the
Internet are an evil force destroying American society.
13. By 2014, less than half of Americans were online with mobile devices like smartphones
and tablets.
14. By 2016, 84 percent of American adults were online in one way or another.
15. By 2016, two-thirds of Americans reported going online with their mobile device.
16. Convergence is the process of bringing together the characteristics of multiple media on
the Internet.
Essay
1. What is the Internet?
2. The creators of ______ never intended for it to be used for e-mail or other forms of
interpersonal communication.
3. Internet e-mail-based online group discussions are also known as ______.
4. Tim Berners-Lee is best known for inventing ______.
5. High-speed Internet service is also known as ______.
6. What are aggregator sites?
7. What is a weblog or blog?
8. What is citizen journalism?
9. List two of the four principles of the hacker ethos.
10. What is reverse synergy?
11. Name two of the three ways you can post messages to the social networking tool Twitter.
12. In a brief essay, discuss how bloggers can serve as a force to correct mistaken news
published by legacy media.
13. In a brief essay, discuss how cell phones and user-generated video sites such as YouTube
can be used as a channel for citizen journalism.
14. In a brief essay, explain what Wired magazine meant when they wrote in 2010 that “the
web is dead.”
15. In a brief essay, explain why video games are considered by many to be a new form of
mass media. Use specific examples.