Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Discussions of media in a social context are generally concerned with mass media and, more recently, new media. Mass media are defined as communication systems by which centralized providers use industrialized technologies to reach large and geographically scattered audiences, distributing content broadly classified as information and entertainment. Media reaching mass populations emerged in the late nineteenth century – newspapers, magazines, the film industry – and expanded to include radio from the 1920s and television broadcasting from the 1950s. A range of “new media” developed from the 1980s, including video, cable and pay TV, CD-ROMs, mobile/cellular phones, and the Internet. In twenty-first-century societies media are pervasive and integral to modern life. Even in less developed societies they are widespread, although disparities in access remain. Economic profitability is also seen as a defining feature of modern media, reflecting the importance of commercial considerations to media institutions. The newspaper press was the first “mass medium.” In the late nineteenth century social and economic change (industrialization, growing urban populations, expanding education and rising literacy, changing patterns of work and leisure), technological developments (telegraph, telephone, printing technologies, the spread of railways), and policy changes such as the abolition of stamp ... log in or subscribe to read full text