Mass media

• 1. Introduction

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  The largest media deal in history was the acquisition of Time Warner by AOL Inc. for 164,746.86 million US dollars. That single transaction sits inside a far larger story. Between 1985 and 2018, roughly 76,720 deals were announced in the media industry, summing to around 5,634 billion US dollars. Mass media is the name for the forms of media that reach large audiences through mass communication. It includes broadcast, digital, print, and social media, along with streaming, advertising, and events. But the term itself was born long before any of these. It was coined alongside print, the first example of mass media as we use the phrase today. How did a Latin Bible printed in 1453 become the ancestor of the podcast and the RSS feed? Why do some thinkers now argue that mass media no longer exists at all? And how can a single fabricated press release fool the very systems built to inform millions?

• 2. From Diamond Sutra To Rotary Press

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  The first dated print book, the Diamond Sutra, was printed in China in 868 AD, though books were clearly printed earlier. Movable clay type followed in China in 1041. Yet literacy spread slowly there and paper was costly, so the earliest printed mass medium was probably European popular prints from about 1400. These were produced in huge numbers, but very few early examples survived, and most printed before about 1600 are gone.

  Johannes Gutenberg printed the Latin Bible on a printing press with movable type in 1453. His invention let books be produced on a scale never before possible, giving rise to some of the first forms of mass communication. Still, books stayed too expensive to count as a mass medium for at least a century afterward.

  Newspapers developed from about 1612, with the first English example in 1620, but they took until the 19th century to reach a mass audience. The first high-circulation papers arose in London in the early 1800s, among them The Times. They were made possible by the high-speed rotary steam printing press and by railroads that carried copies across wide areas. That same surge in circulation cut off feedback from readers, turning the newspaper into a one-way medium and setting the pattern that broadcast would later inherit.

• 3. The Seven Mass Media

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  In the late 20th century, mass media split into eight industries: books, the Internet, magazines, movies, newspapers, radio, recordings, and television. The explosion of digital communication technology soon challenged that scheme. By the early 2000s a new classification, the seven mass media, came into use. It lists print from the late 15th century, recordings from the late 19th century, cinema around 1900, radio around 1910, television around 1950, the Internet around 1990, and mobile phones around 2000.

  The sixth and seventh of these, the Internet and mobile phones, are often grouped together as digital media. Radio and television, the fourth and fifth, are grouped as broadcast media. Some argue that video games have grown into a distinct mass form of their own.

  The phrase "the media" began to be used in the 1920s. Until after the Second World War, the notion of mass media was generally restricted to print. Radio, television, and video then arrived and proved enormously popular. They offered both information and entertainment, and it was simply easier for the public to passively watch television or listen to the radio than to actively read.

• 4. The Economics Of Replication

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  Vast fortunes were made in mass media, built on what the source calls the economics of linear replication. Physical duplication technologies such as printing, record pressing, and film duplication churned out books, newspapers, and movies cheaply for huge audiences. Radio and television then allowed the electronic duplication of information for the first time.

  A single work could make money in proportion to the number of copies sold. As volumes rose, unit costs fell, which widened profit margins further. That arithmetic rewarded scale above all else.

  Mass media is often controlled by media conglomerates, which can take in organisations, companies, and networks, and which may be susceptible to media capture. In 2012, an article asserted that 90 percent of US mass media, including radio, video news, and sports entertainment, were owned by six major companies: GE, News-Corp, Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, and CBS. Some consider this concentration of media ownership a threat to democracy. The mergers reinforced the point. Three major waves of dealmaking hit the sector, in 2000, 2007, and 2015, and 2007 alone saw around 3,808 deals.

• 5. Knowledge Gaps And Cultivation

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  In 1997, J. R. Finnegan Jr. and K. Viswanath identified three main effects of mass media. The first is the knowledge gap, shaped by how appealing the material is, how accessible the channels are, and how much social conflict and diversity a community holds.

  Agenda setting is the second effect. People are influenced in how they think about issues by the selective choices media groups make for public consumption. J. J. Davis observed that when risks are highlighted in great detail, agenda setting tends to track how much public outrage and threat is provoked. Finnegan and Viswanath wrote that groups, institutions, and advocates "compete to identify problems, to move them onto the public agenda, and to define the issues symbolically."

  The third effect is cultivation, the way media exposure shapes audience perceptions over time. S. W. Littlejohn described television, a common experience in places like the United States, as a "homogenising agent." Prolonged exposure to violence on television or in film might lead a viewer to see community violence as a serious problem, or instead as justifiable. The resulting belief is likely to differ depending on where people live.

• 6. Hoaxes And Distortion

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  Media artist Joey Skaggs has shown how easily mass media can be manipulated, using fabricated press releases, staged events, and fictitious experts. His long-running series of hoaxes reveals how news outlets can be drawn to sensational narratives, often publishing stories with minimal fact-checking. His work has been cited as a critique of journalistic practices and a case study in the vulnerabilities of modern media systems.

  Distortion can also be steady rather than staged. Through framing and agenda-setting, particular facts can be highlighted while others are dropped, so coverage may not reflect the whole situation. Mass media, like propaganda, can reinforce or introduce stereotypes to the general public.

  Stephen Balkaran, in his article "Mass Media and Racism," examined how mass media shaped the way white Americans perceive African Americans. Historical media focus on African Americans in contexts of crime, drug use, and gang violence produced a distorted and harmful public perception. Balkaran wrote that the media "has played a key role in perpetuating the effects of this historical oppression and in contributing to African Americans' continuing status as second-class citizens."

• 7. Sound, Screen, And Signal

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  Sony's Walkman gave a major boost to the mass distribution of music, following the compact cassette of the 1960s. The wider field of sound recording began with the phonograph and its purely mechanical techniques. It then advanced through electrical recording, the mass production of the 78 record, the magnetic wire recorder, the tape recorder, and the vinyl LP. Digital recording and the compact disc arrived in 1983, bringing large improvements in ruggedness and quality.

  Film works by a trick of the eye. Movies comprise a series of individual frames, but shown in rapid succession they create an illusion of motion. The flicker between frames goes unseen because of persistence of vision, by which the eye holds a visual image for a fraction of a second after the source is gone. The perception of motion itself is tied to a psychological effect called beta movement.

  The newspaper traces back to Johann Gutenberg around 1450, with the first paper being the German-language Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien, first published in 1605. Broadcasting carried these ideas into the air, and in 2004 a number of technologies combined to produce podcasting.

• 8. Did Mass Media Disappear

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  Mobile phones were introduced in Japan in 1979, but they became a mass medium only in 1998, when the first downloadable ringing tones appeared in Finland. Toward the end of the 20th century, the arrival of the World Wide Web marked the first era in which most individuals could reach others on a scale comparable to mass media itself. That shift unsettled the very definition of the term.

  Theorist Lance Bennett argues that, excluding a few major events, it is now uncommon for a group large enough to be called a mass to watch the same news through the same medium. People more often receive different stories from completely different sources, which he says means mass media has been re-invented. Social media blurs the line between mass communication and interpersonal communication, deepening the confusion.

  The older system once put filters on what the public would see, since journalists decided what would or would not be printed. That gatekeeping is harder in a society of social media. The Hallin and Mancini media model, built on traditional indicators, no longer fully fits today's media ecosystem. Television still targets a more mature audience and upholds professional journalism standards, while digital journalism bends those standards toward audience preferences. The next chapter of mass media may belong to whoever controls communications, since a highly industrialised country, in the words of the source, "belongs to the person who controls communications."