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Media for the people. Mass media is an ever changing entity, as we have observed over the past years. It has been very useful and has played a big role in the formation and extraction of the people’s opinion; it is also a way to reflect their ideas of many relevant issues. It has been a bridge to communicate with the people around the world, introducing new things to new people.
Thru the years, mass media has seen great changes, revisions and additions.
It has introduced much more complex interactions between media and the society, continuously providing information to those who seek it. The latest addition to mass media is the internet, one of the most efficient ways of communicating over a large group of people. In the advent of internet, the two-way interaction between mass media and the people began to change, introducing much more ways to reach people.
Mass media revolution
There are a lot of factors which have driven the changes in mass media.
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These factors have been the fuel to the ongoing media revolution, which sparked the emergence of trends in mass media. The first factor that contributes to this revolution is the changing landscape of content that is presented to the viewers. Content-wise, precise.
Everything in mass media became content-wise, form print, to blogs, to commercials, to newscasts on television. They are conscious of what is in them, what is packed inside for their consumers – the people. They are concerned about the information they carry, whether or not the people will like it.
Because of this, it gave the people wider boundaries of the entire concept of content, the message, information and all. Every aspect is being furnished to the people’s liking, aiming for their patronage of the information they offer.
Means of distribution. As content draws more interest to the people, the means of distribution and who it’s being distributed to, is affecting mass media. The first concern is the way in which content reaches the people, the audience, has made the mass media even more reachable. This flood of content availability is greatly changing the people’s way of assimilating media. Taking for example the internet, it provides a great deal of information to the people, so much more than what people could take.
In order to face this great deal of information, improved searching capabilities like search engines made it easier to process the information, may it a lot easier to classify the ones you need and the ones you don’t need. The distribution aspect of this information is going mobile, from hand-held gadgets like iPods, cellular phones to other wireless means, people are able to acquire different information anywhere and anytime they want to. Because of this, the people who creates this contents are responsible for the information overload problem it poses, thus leaving them the tasks of improving the content even more as time goes by.
The target audience. With the increased means of disseminating information, there is also a great change in the ones who will be using this content – the people. The people, the main audience of these changes in content and much more, are the ones who need to understand it more. The concern then is how the different groups of people accessing this information will be able to assimilate them, how these messages will be appropriate for them. The accessibility of information to these people is very great; you can get information just like any other people anywhere in the world (Tanner, 2005).
The internet. The internet has been the main trend that media is experiencing now. It has been the primary driving force of the mass media revolution that we are having now. The internet enabled its users to access tons and tons of information of a great variety. In the internet, you could find information about other countries, famous and infamous people, the latest technologies, and latest breakthroughs in science, medicine, the arts, and so much more. It enables you to have business transaction whenever, wherever you are. You can buy and sell things, thus creating a “paperless society.” In the internet, you could have your daily dose of news and information, sports updates and weather forecasts.
You can virtually do anything over the internet
The internet debate. The internet has opened its users to unlimited amounts of contents, thus creating a debate over the idea of “net neutrality,” whether or not certain content should be open or restricted to the people. The future of mass media depends on how this issue will be resolved. If it leads to the point where the ability to view the internet freely is removed, the availability of the content will greatly affect mass media. But recently, the inseparability between traditional mass media and the internet has been a growing trend. Because of this, the content available to the people is affected, again being altered in more ways than one.
The internet is an open communication forum. Because of this, it allows the people who created and manufactured the content to freely associate and interact with other media. An example situation is placing audio and video on a magazine’s webpage. It tackled other mass media devices: magazine, which is a print media; the video, which is a visual media, and audio, the essence of the radio broadcast media. These examples of traditional mass media have been assimilated into one, all because of the internet (Mazzucco, 2006).
The dangerous end of the trend
The emergence of the internet surely created a “scene” in the world of mass media. It offered a lot, especially in delivery of information to the people, promising loads of relevant and timely information to its users. But as it emerges, some of mass media’s players before the advent of internet are slowly getting off the scene.
The end of the road for print media? The famous “paperless society” concept that was tagged along with the internet spelled danger for the society’s paper media. The print media composed of news papers, magazines, and many others are losing to the internet. A lot of households nowadays have computers and internet access, thus they spend less time reading the paper. They would rather prefer to stay on-line and “surf” the internet for the latest scoops on fashion, news, and sports. If the print media doesn’t do anything to get their patrons back, then it could mean the end for them (Fletcher, 1997).
Television’s competition. Along with the print media, the television is also being endangered with the emergence of the internet. Because of video streaming and video archiving, people can access things in the internet, faster that waiting for the timeslot of a television show. Television commercials are also faced with the problem, if ever television runs out of a viewing public. The internet has plenty of advertisements, putting them on the same footing with television and its commercials. Just like print, television’s existence is at risk, unless they do anything to attract back their viewers (Sollinge, 2005).
The future of mass media. With these trends in hand, one could have a clear view of what’s in store for mass media in the future. It is clear that with the emergence of the internet, a lot has changed with media. It is a challenge to its competitors, the other players of mass media if they can stand up to the internet, or be out of the scene for good.
References:
FLETCHER, J. (1997) Types of Mass Media - Descriptions and Comparative Advantages.
MAZZUCCO, N. (2006) Wrap It Up.
SOLLINGE, J. D. (2005) Danish Mass Media.
TANNER, A. (2005) Trends in Mass Media Education in the Age of Media Convergence: Preparing students for careers in a converging news environment. Toronto, Canada, University of Toronto Press.
The current trends in mass media. (2017, Mar 04). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/the-current-trends-in-mass-media-essay
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