Nutrition and Dietetics in New Media

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New Communication Technologies and New Media

It is essential to know the technological background of digital information in order to examine its nature. The word technology is used to mean the outputs accomplished by some tools and methods in the researches of scientists. However, the term “technology” comes from Greek words “tekhne” (art, craft) and “logos” (knowledge, word). It means “craft comes from knowledge” in Ancient Greece (Atabek, 2005: 62). Therefore, it is a concept that is based on knowledge, includes the process of the things and tangible products such as hardware and materials and creates an experience about this process. Particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries, it was possible to talk about the concept of information communication technologies (ICT) with the increase in technical knowledge, new fields of study and the discovery/widespread use of communication tools. Information communication technologies can be identified as communication tools that provide source, message and receiver among users through standard applications with its microprocessors. ICT includes a wide and increasingly expanding area from basic electronic circuit components to integrated circuits (microchips), lasers, fiber optic cables and components, a wide variety of electro-mechanical components, sound and image sensors and transmitters (TÜBİTAK, 2004: 4). “As computers caused crucial transformations in the structure of telecommunication technologies, the development in communication tools was seen evidently as of the early 1970’s” (Çakır, 2004: 169). After the 1990s, a technological leap occurred with the help of ← 9 | 10 →developing and transforming technological devices. With the increase in the possibilities offered by the computers, all institutions in the public and private sectors began to adapt to this and a systematic transformation was realized. Therefore, the information communication technology label became prominent with all the different possibilities that computers had. In the 1990s, important steps were seen in a digital era in parallel with information communication technologies. As the Romans count numbers with their fingers, the concept of digitilization comes from “Digitus”, which means finger in Latin. In other words, this means numbers for them. Coding is formed as 0 and 1, and these numbers combined with different versions create the presence of a visual whole. The concept of digitilization refers to the display of data in an electronic environment and being non-analog in Turkish. In other words, it means that data in electronic environment can be created and stored on the basis of numbers, not images. As a result, it can provide convenience in terms of protection, storage/archive and transfer of the data.

Digitalization has occurred in many different areas with the development of technology, and has created new opportunities, especially in the field of communication. Internet-based technologies have replaced analog technologies and caused social, economic and cultural innovations in communication processes (Ergüney, 2017: 1477). Digital communication is just one of them. Digital communication refers to the realization of messages created by coding on 1 and 0 in the virtual environment with processes similar to the real life communication process. When it comes to digital communication in societies, only internet can come to mind; however, the internet is only a virtual power with network properties for applications that exist in the digital ← 10 | 11 →environment. In this sense, it is possible to handle all applications in digital media within the framework of digital communication (Yücel and Adiloğlu, 2019: 58).