New type of media came to Lithuania. Now it is rather controversial and there are a lot of legal and moral problems to be discussed.

The history is turning back now: people start discussion weather printed press will disappears or not. The same was when radio and TV were invented and applied for public welfare. Now Internet is being put into a position of dangerous innovator. Human is a unique creature. One of these unique things is tradition. If one thinks that his future will not differ from his past and that it should not change, it’s just because of the deep-rooted traditions. Now printed media is a tradition for sure. For younger people TV and radio is a tradition also. All of them have their own positive and negative sides to be condemned for psychological effects, influence to society in decision-making etc. Now the new phenomenon is threatening the world society – Internet. Internet has quite similar history as radio and TV, but the spectrum of possibilities, especially now, is definitely vaster and bigger. Before radio, TV and Internet were introduced to masses for public usage they were serving military and developed for military purposes: transmit data as fast as possible. Only recently Internet became capable of connecting radio, TV and newspaper to one unity. The main reason is data transmission speed. Fiber optics can do what nobody expected: to transmit enormous amounts of data in a minimum time. This is the main reason why people do not reject as useless and dangerous. Some of them do, but Neo-Luddism is not so popular as it was during the Industrial revolution in England. Internet media has much in common with printed media. But some people try to make it equal to print media, but in vain. A lot of problems arise from misunderstanding, that media cannot change. It changes rapidly. Just take Lithuania as an example, small poor country with really conservative mentality and population. The circulation of the main dailies cannot reach 100.000, and Internet situation is even more complicated. Computerization level is also low in comparison with other Baltic States, Latvia and Estonia. Still there are a number of Internet newspapers and magazines, portals and even TVs. Bringing the new trends to Lithuanian mass media together they bring more confusion. The main law on information does not mention the Internet media at all, so it means that the laws cannot be applicable to Internet media. On Internet everybody can post their comments. The question is if the online newspaper should correct the opinions or even delete them if it is necessary. The necessity to delete some comments is when they are only insulting words and nothing more. Or comments can insult particular groups of society: minorities for example. There are plenty of questions to be answered and a lot of new laws to approve in order to guarantee the freedom of Internet without insults and other negative things. How to do that? On of the best ways to control media is to let media control itself. That means, media creates some kind of rules and does not violate them. In the case of violation, all the problems are solved in the court. Also sets some kind of norms: what we are going to talk about and what not? Are we going to show dead or naked body as it is, or with a little cover? Such kind of norms can help to keep the quality of information. Now this principle is tested and seems to be positive, so why not using it on Internet? It is not very difficult to gather all the publishers of online magazines and newspapers and portals and to discuss the broad strategy. This situation could probably happen in the nearest future, because now media and people of influence talk a lot about information society, free flows of information, e-business and online media. They can influence the government to take some kind of actions and to amend legislature.