New Media and Women Empowerment

Thesis from the year 2009 in the subject Communications - Multimedia, Internet, New Technologies, , course: Ph.D, language: English, abstract: The branch of New medium is a growing avenue in the field of mass communication. Internet is an ever-growing and everlasting new medium, as new features are added up everyday to it. Internet being the latest and continuing new medium, it helps to take long-unheard information, including the experience and opinions of millions of women which are now being heard, according to the researchers in new media. By the way, empowerment gives individuals the power or authority to do something, or to give somebody more control over their own lives or the situation they are in. In the context of women¿s empowerment, the term ¿empowerment¿ indicates women¿s political, economic and educational advancement. So, it is imperative to assess whether the Internet empowers the women who use it. If so, it is also imperative to estimate the empowering potential of Internet. If empowerment is the result of the present research, the usage of Internet can be encouraged as a tool for empowerment, thereby changing women¿s daily lives, their hopes, their aspirations and their future. In this context, the researcher has made an attempt to study the influence of Internet towards empowerment among the women of the state of Tamil Nadu, India.A descriptive research design was adopted to find out the Internet habits of women and their empowerment through Internet. The survey method was used for collecting data from the women Internet users. In fact, the women Internet users in Tamil Nadu were selected by stratified random sampling to form the population of the study. All the available fields in which women work, were identified and listed. It was found that there were categories of women on the basis of the fields where they work, like home-making, studies (students), academics, information technology, medicine, law, marketing, business, banking, engineering, self-help groups, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), auditing, and journalism and media. All the other possible fields, where the women work were kept under ¿others¿. From each stratum, 25 members were selected. So, on a total, 350 respondents were given the questionnaires. The information collected from all these respondents formed the backbone of the present research.