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The Internet As Mass Medium. The Internet has become impossible to ignore
in the past two years. Even people who do not own a computer ...
... use the internet every day to check their e-mails or to get information they would
otherwise not get from other media. Television is a mass medium which is ...
... but there are many other kinds of mass media (Online ... often been called the most powerful
media medium ever invented ... A new rival is the Internet, it is changing ...
... and modems in the example of the Internet) reach a critical mass - the business ... ideology
(another religion, really) it demands "privatization" of the medium. ...
... Mr. Horrigan notes that the Internet is both a mass medium - dispensing everything
from newspaper articles to radio programs to specialized information - and a ...
Submitted by efei on July 9, 2008
Category: Technology
Words: 393 | Pages: 2
Views: 28
Popularity Rank: 117,503
Average Member Grade: N/A (Add a Comment / Grade this Paper)
The Internet has become impossible to ignore in the past two years. Even people who do not own a computer and have no opportunity to "surf the net" could not have missed the news stories about the Internet, many of which speculate about its effects on the ever-increasing number of people who are on line. Why, then, have communications researchers, historically concerned with exploring the effects of mass media, nearly ignored the Internet? With 25 million people estimated to be communicating on the Internet, should communication researchers now consider this network of networks [1] a mass medium? Until recently, mass communications researchers have overlooked not only the Internet but the entire field of computer-mediated communication, staying instead with the traditional forms of broadcast and print media that fit much more conveniently into models for appropriate research topics and theories of mass communication.
However, this paper argues that if mass communications researchers continue to largely disregard the research potential of the Internet, their theories about communication will become less useful. Not only will the discipline be left behind, it will also miss an opportunity to explore and rethink answers to some of the central questions of mass communications research, questions that go to the heart of the model of source-message-receiver with which the field has struggled. This paper proposes a conceptualization of the Internet as a mass medium, based on revised ideas of what constitutes a mass audience and a mediating technology. The computer as a new communication technology opens a space for scholars to rethink assumptions and categories, and perhaps even to find new insights into traditional communication technologies.
This paper looks at the Internet, rather than computer-mediated communication as a whole, in order to place the new medium within the context of other mass media. Mass media researchers have traditionally...
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