Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The term media monopoly – concentrated control of major mass communications within a society – took on a new life in the second half of the twentieth century, thanks to global changes. These included new communications technology; growth of literacy in the population; demographics that increased the size of potential audiences; increasing democratization in the less developed world that heightened interest in politics and the media; and high profits and political influence that stimulated conglomerate ownership of all major means of mass communications. Since citizens increasingly depended on these media for political information and entertainment, the concentrated control by a small number of large business concerns inevitably produced public controversy. Modern usage of the term mass media has its origins in the past. The word “mass,” for example, in its ancient Greek origin meaning a shapeless dough, to the present, has carried a disparaging implication that it is designed for what the nineteenth-century British prime minister William Gladstone called the “lower orders” of society. Twentieth and twenty-first century usage commonly referred to the least elegant publications as “mass circulation magazines,” implying Gladstone's “lower orders.” Its partner, “media,” has been troublesome from the start because the word encompasses so many disparate meanings. The plural, “media,” ... log in or subscribe to read full text