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CHAPTER 1Mass Communication

A Critical Approach

On March 24th, 2018, a demonstration led by student survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School mass shooting gathered more than 1.2 million people to advocate for stricter gun control laws.

·
CULTURE AND THE EVOLUTION OF MASS COMMUNICATION

·
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MEDIA AND THEIR ROLE IN OUR SOCIETY

·
SURVEYING THE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE

·
CRITIQUING MEDIA AND CULTURE

AFTER THE 2018 school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where fourteen students and three staff members died, the Washington Post compiled a twenty-first-century list of U.S. school shootings: “Since 2000 . . . there have been more than 130 shootings at elementary, middle and high schools, and 58 others at colleges and universities.”
1
 But something happened after Parkland that did not happen after the murders of twenty schoolchildren and six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, or the 2017 Las Vegas mass murder of fifty-eight concertgoers.

After the Parkland tragedy, young people took to social media and sustained an online debate over gun control and gun violence that lasted much longer than those following previous shooting tragedies, in which social media and TV news reports usually died down after a couple of weeks. Take a look at the story leads from several newspapers from around the world after Parkland:

“Florida students have turned social media into a weapon for good. Teenagers’ use of Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram is social media at its best—a cudgel against political discourse that desperately needs to change.” —Guardian, 2/21/18

“A spontaneous show of anger from the survivors of the Friday school shooting has suddenly morphed into a national movement of young Americans calling for gun control.” —Australian, 2/23/18

“Teenage survivors of the Parkland . . . shooting [have] amassed huge followings on social media in the weeks since the gunman attacked their school, assembling powerful social media tools in the national debate over guns and mass shooting.” —The Hill, 3/3/18

The Hill reported at the time that one survivor of the shooting, senior Emma Gonzales, had more than 1.1 million followers on Twitter, compared to just 600,000 for the NRA (National Rifle Association), which exerts powerful sway over the nation’s lawmakers.
2
 In describing the social media storm after Parkland, the Guardian noted: “It took teenagers with smartphones and . . . confronted with injustice to jostle us out of that studied complacency.”
3

The question remains, however, whether the use of social media by young people can actually change laws and swing elections. Two months after the Parkland shooting, NPR and Marist pollsters offered this report: “While almost half of all registered voters (46 percent) say a candidate’s position on gun policy will be a major factor in deciding whom to vote for, that number is down 13 points from February [when the Parkland shooting occurred].”
4

In the end, Darrell West from the Brookings Institution noted in the months after Parkland that at the congressional level, efforts to pass reasonable gun control laws had “gone nowhere.” However, West noted that if more young people turn out to vote in serious numbers on issues they care about—like gun control—they could determine an election that could change a law. “In 2010, when Republicans gained 63 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and six in the U.S. Senate,” West writes, “only 21 percent of young voters between the ages of 18 and 24 cast ballots. This was well below the 61 percent turnout for senior citizens and the overall total of 45 percent for the eligible population.” According to West, “These turnout numbers were devastating for Democrats because young people are more liberal than the population as a whole and more likely to support meaningful action on gun violence.”
5

In a democracy, we depend on eligible voters to vote, and we rely on newspapers like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Guardian to provide information and analyses to help us make good decisions about our laws and leaders. And as Parkland demonstrated, we are seeing the power of social media to confront wrongdoing and organize a movement that might make things better. Despite their limitations, the media—from Twitter to the Times—serve as watchdogs, monitoring the social landscape and bringing problems to light. It is all of our jobs to point a critical lens back at the media and describe, analyze, and interpret news stories, political opinions, and social movements, arriving at informed judgments about the media’s overall performance. This textbook offers a map to help us become more media literate, critiquing the variety of media that surround us, not as detached cynics or rabid partisans but as informed citizens with a stake in the outcome and with the power to effect change.

SO WHAT EXACTLY ARE THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF NEWSPAPERS AND MEDIA IN GENERAL? In an age of economic and social upheaval, how do we demand the highest standards from our media to describe and analyze complex events and issues? At their best, in all their various forms—from mainstream newspapers and radio talk shows to blogs—media try to help us understand the events that affect us. But at their worst, media’s appetite for telling and selling stories leads them not only to document tragedy but also to misrepresent or exploit it. Many viewers and critics disapprove of how media, particularly TV and the Internet, hurtle from one event to another, often dwelling on trivial, celebrity-driven content.


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Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture and use LearningCurve to review concepts from this chapter.

In this book, we examine the history and business of mass media and discuss the media as a central force in shaping our culture and our democracy. We start by examining key concepts and introducing the critical process for investigating media industries and issues. In later chapters, we probe the history and structure of media’s major institutions. In the process, we develop an informed and critical view of the influence these institutions have had on national and global life. The goal is to become media literate—to become critical consumers of mass media institutions and engaged participants who accept part of the responsibility for the shape and direction of media culture. In this chapter, we will:

· Address key ideas, including communication, culture, mass media, and mass communication

· Investigate important periods in communication history: the oral, written, print, electronic, and digital eras

· Examine the development of a mass medium from emergence to convergence

· Learn about how convergence has changed our relationship to media

· Look at the central role of storytelling in media and culture

· Discuss the skyscraper and map models for organizing and categorizing culture

· Trace important cultural values in both modern and postmodern societies

· Study media literacy and the five stages of the critical process: description, analysis, interpretation, evaluation, and engagement

As you read through this chapter, think about your early experiences with the media. Identify a favorite media product from your childhood—a song, book, TV show, or movie. Why was it so important to you? How much of an impact did your early taste in media have on your identity? How has your taste shifted over time? What do your current media preferences indicate about your identity now? Do your current tastes reveal anything about you? For more questions to help you think about the role of media in your life, see “
Questioning the Media
” in the Chapter Review.

CULTURE AND THE EVOLUTION OF MASS COMMUNICATION

One way to understand the impact of media on our lives is to explore the cultural context in which media operate. Often, culture is narrowly associated with art—the unique forms of creative expression that give pleasure and set standards about what is true, good, and beautiful. Culture, however, can be viewed more broadly as the ways in which people live and represent themselves at particular historical times. This idea of culture encompasses fashion, sports, literature, architecture, education, religion, and science, as well as mass media. Although we can study discrete cultural products, such as novels or songs, from various historical periods, culture itself is always changing. It includes a society’s art, beliefs, customs, games, technologies, traditions, and institutions. It also encompasses a society’s modes of 
communication
: the creation and use of symbol systems that convey information and meaning (e.g., languages, Morse code, motion pictures, and binary computer codes).

Culture is made up of both the products that a society fashions and, perhaps more importantly, the processes that forge those products and reflect a culture’s diverse values. Thus, 
culture
 may be defined as the symbols of expression that individuals, groups, and societies use to make sense of daily life and to articulate their values. According to this definition, when we listen to music, read a book, watch television, or scan the Internet, we are not usually asking “Is this art?” but trying to identify or connect with something or someone. In other words, we are assigning meaning to the song, book, TV program, or website. Culture, therefore, is a process that delivers the values of a society through products or other meaning-making forms. For example, the American ideal of “rugged individualism”—depicting heroic characters overcoming villains or corruption—has been portrayed on television for decades through a tradition of detective stories and police procedurals, such as PBS’s Sherlock and Endeavor and CBS’s Elementary and various incarnations of NCIS.

Culture links individuals to their society by providing both shared and contested values, and the mass media help circulate those values. The 
mass media
 are the cultural industries—the channels of communication—that produce and distribute songs, novels, TV shows, newspapers, movies, video games, Internet services, and other cultural products to large numbers of people. The historical development of media and communication can be traced through several overlapping phases or eras in which newer forms of technology disrupted and modified older forms—a process that many critics and media professionals began calling convergence with the arrival of the Internet.

These eras, which all still operate to some degree, are oral, written, print, electronic, and digital. The first two refer to the communication of tribal or feudal communities and agricultural economies. The last three feature the development of 
mass communication
: the process of designing cultural messages and stories and delivering them to large and diverse audiences through media channels as old and distinctive as the printed book and as new and converged as the Internet. Hastened by the growth of industry and modern technology, mass communication accompanied the shift of rural populations to urban settings and the rise of a consumer culture.

Oral and Written Eras in Communication

In most early societies, information and knowledge first circulated slowly through oral traditions passed on by poets, teachers, and tribal storytellers. As alphabets and the written word emerged, however, a manuscript—or written—culture began to develop and eventually overshadowed oral customs. Documented and transcribed by philosophers, monks, and stenographers, the manuscript culture served the ruling classes. Working people were generally illiterate, and the economic and educational gap between rulers and the ruled was vast. These eras of oral and written communication developed slowly over many centuries. Although exact time frames are disputed, historians generally consider these eras as part of Western civilization’s premodern period, spanning the epoch from roughly 1000 BCE to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.

Early tensions between oral and written communication played out among ancient Greek philosophers and writers. Many philosophers who believed in the superiority of the oral tradition feared that the written word would threaten public discussion. In fact, Plato sought to banish poets, whom he saw as purveyors of ideas less rigorous than those generated in oral, face-to-face question-and-answer discussions. These debates foreshadowed similar discussions in our time in which we ask whether TV news, Twitter, or online comment sections cheapen public discussion and discourage face-to-face communication.

The Print Revolution

While paper and block printing developed in China around 100 CE and 1045, respectively, what we recognize as modern printing did not emerge until the middle of the fifteenth century. At that time in Germany, Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of movable metallic type and the printing press ushered in the modern print era. Printing presses and publications spread rapidly across Europe in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Early on, the size and expense of books limited their audience to the wealthy and powerful, but as printers reduced their size and cost, books became available and affordable to more people.

Books eventually became the first mass-marketed products in history because of the way the printing press combined three necessary elements. First, machine duplication replaced the tedious system in which scribes hand-copied texts. Second, duplication could occur rapidly, so large quantities of the same book could be reproduced easily. Third, the faster production of multiple copies brought down the cost of each unit, making books more affordable to less-affluent people.

Since mass-produced printed materials could spread information and ideas faster and farther than ever before, writers could use print to disseminate views counter to traditional civic doctrine and religious authority—views that paved the way for major social and cultural changes, such as the Protestant Reformation and the rise of modern nationalism, as people began to think of themselves as part of a country whose interests were broader than local or regional concerns. Whereas oral and written societies had favored decentralized local governments, the print era supported the ascent of more centralized nation-states.

Eventually, machine production became an essential factor in the mass production of other goods, which led to the Industrial Revolution, modern capitalism, and the consumer culture of the twentieth century. With the revolution in industry came the rise of the middle class and an elite business class of owners and managers who acquired the kind of influence formerly held only by nobility or clergy. Print media became key tools that commercial and political leaders used to distribute information and maintain social order.

As with the Internet today, however, it was difficult for a single business or political leader, certainly in a democratic society, to gain exclusive control over printing technology (although many leaders tried). Instead, the mass publication of pamphlets, magazines, and books in the United States helped democratize knowledge, and literacy rates rose among the working and middle classes. Industrialization required a more educated workforce, but printed literature and textbooks also encouraged compulsory education, thus promoting literacy and extending learning beyond the world of wealthy upper-class citizens.

Just as the printing press fostered nationalism, it also nourished the ideal of individualism. People came to rely less on their local community and their commercial, religious, and political leaders for guidance. By challenging insulated tribal life and rituals, the printing press “fostered the modern idea of individuality,” disrupting “the medieval sense of community and integration.”6 By the mid-nineteenth century, the ideal of individualism affirmed the rise of commerce and increased resistance to government interference in the affairs of self-reliant entrepreneurs. The democratic impulse of individualism became a fundamental value in American society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  instantaneous—unencumbered by stagecoaches, ships, or the pony express.7 Second, in combination with the rise of mass-marketed newspapers, the telegraph transformed “information into a commodity, a ‘thing’ that could be bought or sold irrespective of its uses or meaning.”8 By the time of the Civil War, news had become a valuable product. Third, the telegraph made it easier for military, business, and political leaders to coordinate commercial and military operations, especially after the installation of the transatlantic cable in the late 1860s. Fourth, the telegraph led to future technological developments, such as wireless telegraphy (later named radio), the fax machine, and the cell phone, which ironically resulted in the telegraph’s demise: In 2006, Western Union telegraph offices sent their final messages.

The rise of film at the turn of the twentieth century and the development of radio in the 1920s were early signals of the electronic phase of the Information Age, but it really boomed in the 1950s and 1960s with the arrival of television and its dramatic influence on daily life. Then, with the coming of ever more communication gadgetry—personal computers, cable TV, DVDs, DVRs, direct broadcast satellites, cell phones, and smartphones—the Information Age passed into its digital phase, where old and new media began to converge, thus dramatically changing our relationship to media and culture.

The Digital Era

In 
digital communication
, images, texts, and sounds are converted (encoded) into electronic signals—represented as varied combinations of binary numbers (ones and zeros)—that are then reassembled (decoded) as a precise reproduction of, say, a TV picture, a magazine article, a song, or a telephone voice. On the Internet, various images, texts, and sounds are digitally reproduced and transmitted globally.

New technologies, particularly cable television and the Internet, developed so quickly that traditional leaders in communication lost some of their control over information. For example, starting with the 1992 presidential campaign, the network news shows (ABC, CBS, and NBC) began to lose their audiences to cable channels and partisan radio talk shows. By the 2012 national elections, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites had become key players in news and politics, especially as information resources for younger generations who had grown up in an online and digital world.

Moreover, e-mail—a digital reinvention of oral culture—followed by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat (among other social media), assumed many of the functions of the postal service and is outpacing attempts to control communication beyond national borders. Furthermore, many repressive and totalitarian regimes have had trouble controlling messages sent out over the borderless Internet. In the old snail mail days, it was easier for governments to monitor communication coming in and going out of a country.

In reinventing oral culture, social media have enabled people from all over the world to have ongoing online conversations, share stories and interests, and generate their own media content. This turn to digital media forms has fundamentally disrupted traditional media business models, the ways we engage with and consume media products, and the ways we organize our daily lives around various media choices.

The Linear Model of Mass Communication

The digital era also brought about a shift in the models that media researchers have used over the years to explain how media messages and meanings are constructed and communicated in everyday life. One older and outdated explanation of how media operate viewed mass communication as a linear process of producing and delivering messages to large audiences. According to this model, senders (authors, producers, and organizations) transmitted messages (programs, texts, images, sounds, and ads) through a mass media channel (newspapers, books, magazines, radio, television, or the Internet) to large groups of receivers (readers, viewers, and consumers). In the process, gatekeepers (news editors, executive producers, and other media managers) functioned as message filters. Media gatekeepers made decisions about what messages actually got produced for particular receivers. The process also allowed for feedback, in which citizens and consumers, if they chose, returned messages to senders or gatekeepers through phone calls, e-mail, web postings, talk shows, or letters to the editor.

But the problem with the linear model was that in reality, media messages—especially in the digital era—do not usually move smoothly from a sender at point A to a receiver at point Z. Words and images are more likely to spill into one another, crisscrossing in the daily media deluge of product ads, TV shows, news reports, social media, smartphone apps, and everyday conversation. Media messages and stories are encoded and sent in written and visual forms, but senders often have very little control over how their intended messages are decoded or whether the messages are ignored or misread by readers and viewers.

A Cultural Model for Understanding Mass Communication

A more contemporary approach to understanding media is through a cultural model. This concept recognizes that individuals bring diverse meanings to messages, given factors and differences such as gender, age, educational level, ethnicity, and occupation. In this more complex model of mass communication, audiences actively affirm, interpret, refashion, or reject the messages and stories that flow through various media channels. And audiences can assign completely opposite meanings to the same message. For example, when President Trump has referred to CNN or the New York Times as “fake news,” his supporters have interpreted such language as a justified attack on elite out-of-touch news media, whereas his critics have viewed this kind of unsubstantiated generalization as an attack on the First Amendment and the news media’s essential job to report on government leaders.

While the linear model may have shown how a message gets from a sender to a receiver, the cultural model suggests the complexity of this process and the lack of control that senders (such as media executives, moviemakers, writers, news editors, and ad agencies) often have over how audiences receive messages and interpret their intended meanings. Sometimes the producers of media messages seem to be the active creators of communication, with audiences serving merely as passive receptacles. But as the Trump example illustrates, research shows that consumers and citizens in general shape media messages to fit or support their own values and viewpoints. This phenomenon is known as 
selective exposure
: People typically seek messages and produce meanings that correspond to their own cultural beliefs, values, and interests. For example, studies have shown that people with political leanings toward the left or the right seek out blogs or news outlets that reinforce those preexisting views.

In addition, a cultural approach to media focuses us on how meaning is produced rather than on how messages are transmitted. Under this model, a key point is understanding that meaning emerges at the tangled intersection of (1) the creator’s vision, usually conveyed in story form; (2) the industry’s control of production and distribution processes, or the telling and selling of stories; and (3) audiences’ fragmented responses—that is, why we choose and enjoy particular stories (and not others), how we use and consume various media, and how we impose our own varied meanings on the array of media available.

The rise of the Internet and social media has also complicated the communication and meaning-making process. While there are still senders and receivers, the borderless, decentralized, and democratic nature of the Internet means that anyone can become a sender of media messages—whether it’s by uploading a video mash-up to YouTube or by writing a blog post. The Internet has also largely eliminated the many gatekeepers. Although some governments try to control Internet servers, and some websites have restrictions on what can and cannot be posted, the Internet for the most part allows senders to transmit content without obtaining approval—or undergoing editing—from a gatekeeper. For example, some authors who are unable to find a traditional book publisher for their work turn to self-publishing on the Internet. And musicians who don’t have deals with major record labels can promote, circulate, and sell their music online.

EARLY BOOKS

Before the invention of the printing press, books were copied by hand in a labor-intensive process. This beautifully illuminated page is from an Italian Bible made in the early fourteenth century.

The Electronic Era

In Europe and the United States, the impact of industry’s rise was enormous: Factories replaced farms as the main centers of work and production. During the 1880s, roughly 80 percent of Americans lived on farms and in small towns; by the 1920s and 1930s, most had moved to urban areas, where new industries and economic opportunities beckoned. The city had overtaken the country as the focal point of national life.

The gradual transformation from an industrial, print-based society to one grounded in the Information Age began with the development of the telegraph in the 1840s. Featuring dot-dash electronic signals, the telegraph made four key contributions to communication. First, it separated communication from transportation, making media messages instantaneous—unencumbered by stagecoaches, ships, or the pony express.7 Second, in combination with the rise of mass-marketed newspapers, the telegraph transformed “information into a commodity, a ‘thing’ that could be bought or sold irrespective of its uses or meaning.”8 By the time of the Civil War, news had become a valuable product. Third, the telegraph made it easier for military, business, and political leaders to coordinate commercial and military operations, especially after the installation of the transatlantic cable in the late 1860s. Fourth, the telegraph led to future technological developments, such as wireless telegraphy (later named radio), the fax machine, and the cell phone, which ironically resulted in the telegraph’s demise: In 2006, Western Union telegraph offices sent their final messages.

The rise of film at the turn of the twentieth century and the development of radio in the 1920s were early signals of the electronic phase of the Information Age, but it really boomed in the 1950s and 1960s with the arrival of television and its dramatic influence on daily life. Then, with the coming of ever more communication gadgetry—personal computers, cable TV, DVDs, DVRs, direct broadcast satellites, cell phones, and smartphones—the Information Age passed into its digital phase, where old and new media began to converge, thus dramatically changing our relationship to media and culture.

The Digital Era

In 
digital communication
, images, texts, and sounds are converted (encoded) into electronic signals—represented as varied combinations of binary numbers (ones and zeros)—that are then reassembled (decoded) as a precise reproduction of, say, a TV picture, a magazine article, a song, or a telephone voice. On the Internet, various images, texts, and sounds are digitally reproduced and transmitted globally.

New technologies, particularly cable television and the Internet, developed so quickly that traditional leaders in communication lost some of their control over information. For example, starting with the 1992 presidential campaign, the network news shows (ABC, CBS, and NBC) began to lose their audiences to cable channels and partisan radio talk shows. By the 2012 national elections, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites had become key players in news and politics, especially as information resources for younger generations who had grown up in an online and digital world.

Moreover, e-mail—a digital reinvention of oral culture—followed by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat (among other social media), assumed many of the functions of the postal service and is outpacing attempts to control communication beyond national borders. Furthermore, many repressive and totalitarian regimes have had trouble controlling messages sent out over the borderless Internet. In the old snail mail days, it was easier for governments to monitor communication coming in and going out of a country.

In reinventing oral culture, social media have enabled people from all over the world to have ongoing online conversations, share stories and interests, and generate their own media content. This turn to digital media forms has fundamentally disrupted traditional media business models, the ways we engage with and consume media products, and the ways we organize our daily lives around various media choices.

The Linear Model of Mass Communication

The digital era also brought about a shift in the models that media researchers have used over the years to explain how media messages and meanings are constructed and communicated in everyday life. One older and outdated explanation of how media operate viewed mass communication as a linear process of producing and delivering messages to large audiences. According to this model, senders (authors, producers, and organizations) transmitted messages (programs, texts, images, sounds, and ads) through a mass media channel (newspapers, books, magazines, radio, television, or the Internet) to large groups of receivers (readers, viewers, and consumers). In the process, gatekeepers (news editors, executive producers, and other media managers) functioned as message filters. Media gatekeepers made decisions about what messages actually got produced for particular receivers. The process also allowed for feedback, in which citizens and consumers, if they chose, returned messages to senders or gatekeepers through phone calls, e-mail, web postings, talk shows, or letters to the editor.

But the problem with the linear model was that in reality, media messages—especially in the digital era—do not usually move smoothly from a sender at point A to a receiver at point Z. Words and images are more likely to spill into one another, crisscrossing in the daily media deluge of product ads, TV shows, news reports, social media, smartphone apps, and everyday conversation. Media messages and stories are encoded and sent in written and visual forms, but senders often have very little control over how their intended messages are decoded or whether the messages are ignored or misread by readers and viewers.

A Cultural Model for Understanding Mass Communication

A more contemporary approach to understanding media is through a cultural model. This concept recognizes that individuals bring diverse meanings to messages, given factors and differences such as gender, age, educational level, ethnicity, and occupation. In this more complex model of mass communication, audiences actively affirm, interpret, refashion, or reject the messages and stories that flow through various media channels. And audiences can assign completely opposite meanings to the same message. For example, when President Trump has referred to CNN or the New York Times as “fake news,” his supporters have interpreted such language as a justified attack on elite out-of-touch news media, whereas his critics have viewed this kind of unsubstantiated generalization as an attack on the First Amendment and the news media’s essential job to report on government leaders.

While the linear model may have shown how a message gets from a sender to a receiver, the cultural model suggests the complexity of this process and the lack of control that senders (such as media executives, moviemakers, writers, news editors, and ad agencies) often have over how audiences receive messages and interpret their intended meanings. Sometimes the producers of media messages seem to be the active creators of communication, with audiences serving merely as passive receptacles. But as the Trump example illustrates, research shows that consumers and citizens in general shape media messages to fit or support their own values and viewpoints. This phenomenon is known as 
selective exposure
: People typically seek messages and produce meanings that correspond to their own cultural beliefs, values, and interests. For example, studies have shown that people with political leanings toward the left or the right seek out blogs or news outlets that reinforce those preexisting views.

In addition, a cultural approach to media focuses us on how meaning is produced rather than on how messages are transmitted. Under this model, a key point is understanding that meaning emerges at the tangled intersection of (1) the creator’s vision, usually conveyed in story form; (2) the industry’s control of production and distribution processes, or the telling and selling of stories; and (3) audiences’ fragmented responses—that is, why we choose and enjoy particular stories (and not others), how we use and consume various media, and how we impose our own varied meanings on the array of media available.

The rise of the Internet and social media has also complicated the communication and meaning-making process. While there are still senders and receivers, the borderless, decentralized, and democratic nature of the Internet means that anyone can become a sender of media messages—whether it’s by uploading a video mash-up to YouTube or by writing a blog post. The Internet has also largely eliminated the many gatekeepers. Although some governments try to control Internet servers, and some websites have restrictions on what can and cannot be posted, the Internet for the most part allows senders to transmit content without obtaining approval—or undergoing editing—from a gatekeeper. For example, some authors who are unable to find a traditional book publisher for their work turn to self-publishing on the Internet. And musicians who don’t have deals with major record labels can promote, circulate, and sell their music online.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF MEDIA AND THEIR ROLE IN OUR SOCIETY

The mass media today constitute a wide variety of industries and merchandise. The word media is, after all, a Latin plural form of the singular noun medium, meaning an intervening substance through which something is conveyed or transmitted. Television, newspapers, music, movies, magazines, books, billboards, radio, broadcast satellites, and the Internet are all part of the media, and they are all quite capable of either producing worthy products or pandering to society’s worst desires, prejudices, and stereotypes. Let’s take a look at how mass media develop, how they work, and how they are interpreted in society and by individuals.

The Evolution of Media: From Emergence to Convergence

The development of most mass media is initiated not only by the diligence of inventors, such as Thomas Edison, but also by social, cultural, political, and economic circumstances. For instance, both telegraph and radio evolved as newly industrialized nations sought to expand their military and economic control and to transmit information more rapidly. The Internet is a contemporary response to new concerns: transporting messages and sharing information more rapidly for an increasingly mobile and interconnected global population.

Media innovations typically go through four stages. First is the emergence, or noveltystage, in which inventors and technicians try to solve a particular problem, such as making pictures move, transmitting messages from ship to shore, or sending mail electronically. Second is the entrepreneurial stage, in which inventors and investors determine a practical and marketable use for the new device. For example, the Internet had its roots in the ideas of military leaders, who wanted a communication system that was decentralized and distributed widely enough to survive nuclear war or natural disasters.

The third phase in a medium’s development involves a breakthrough to the mass medium stage. At this point, businesses figure out how to market the new device or medium as a consumer product. Although the Pentagon and government researchers helped develop early prototypes for the Internet, commercial interests and individual entrepreneurs extended the Internet’s global reach and business potential.

Finally, the fourth and newest phase in a medium’s evolution is the convergence stage. This is the stage in which older media are reconfigured in various forms into newer media. However, this does not necessarily mean that the older forms cease to exist. For example, you can still get the New York Times in print, but it’s also now accessible on laptops and smartphones. During this stage, we see the merging of many different media forms onto online platforms, but we also see the fragmenting of large audiences into smaller niche markets. With new technologies allowing access to more media options than ever before, mass audiences are morphing into audience subsets that consume and chase particular products, lifestyles, politics, hobbies, and forms of entertainment.

Media Convergence

Developments in the electronic and digital eras enabled and ushered in this latest stage in the development of media—
convergence
—a term that media critics and analysts use when describing all the changes that have occurred over the past decade, and are still occurring, in media content and within media companies. The term actually has two meanings—one referring to technology and one to business—and describes changes that have a huge impact on how media companies are charting a course for the future.

The Dual Meanings of Media Convergence

The first meaning of media convergence involves the technological merging of content across different media channels—the magazine articles, radio programs, songs, TV shows, video games, and movies now available on the Internet through laptops, tablets, and smartphones.

MEDIA CONVERGENCE

In the 1950s, television sets—like radios in the 1930s and 1940s—were often encased in decorative wood and sold as stylish furniture that occupied a central place in many American homes. Today, we can use our computers to listen to a radio talk show, watch a movie, or download a favorite song—usually on the go—as older media forms are now converged online.

Such technical convergence is not entirely new. For example, in the late 1920s, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) purchased the Victor Talking Machine Company and introduced machines that could play both radio and recorded music, helping radio survive the eventual emergence of television with more music-based content. However, contemporary media convergence is much broader than the simple merging of older and newer forms. In fact, the eras of communication are themselves reinvented in this “age of convergence.” Oral communication, for example, finds itself reconfigured in part in e-mail and social media. And print communication is re-formed in the thousands of newspapers now available online. Also, keep in mind the wonderful ironies of media convergence: The first major digital retailer, Amazon, made its name by selling the world’s oldest mass medium—the book—on the world’s newest mass medium—the Internet.

A second meaning of media convergence—sometimes called 
cross platform
 by media marketers—describes a business model that involves consolidating various media holdings, such as cable connections, phone services, television transmissions, and Internet access, under one corporate umbrella. The goal is not necessarily to offer consumers more choice in their media options but to better manage resources and maximize profits. For example, a company that owns TV stations, radio outlets, and newspapers in multiple markets—as well as in the same cities—can deploy a reporter or producer to create three or four versions of the same story for various media outlets. So rather than having each radio station, TV station, newspaper, and online news site generate diverse and independent stories about an important issue or a significant event, a media corporation employing the convergence model can use fewer employees to generate multiple versions of the same story.

Media Businesses in a Converged World

The ramifications of media convergence are best revealed in the business strategies of digital age companies like Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and especially Google—the most profitable company of the digital era so far. Google is the Internet’s main organizer because it finds both “new” and “old” media content—like videos and newspapers—and aggregates that content for vast numbers of online consumers. Although Google does own YouTube, the company does not produce traditional media content but functions instead as a delivery or distribution site. Most consumers who find a news story or magazine article through a Google search pay nothing to the original media content provider or to Google. Instead, Google—as the distributor, or intermediary—makes most of its money by selling ads that accompany search results. But not all ads are created equal; as writer and journalism critic James Fallows points out, much of the company’s money comes from shopping-related searches rather than from the information searches for which it is best known. In fact, Fallows writes that Google, which has certainly done its part in contributing to the decline of newspapers, still has a large stake in seeing newspapers succeed online.9 Over the last few years, Google has attempted to help older news media make the transition into the converged world. Since they aren’t in the content creation business, Google executives depend on news organizations to produce the quality information and news stories that healthy democracies need—and that Google can deliver.

Still, as the website Mashable reported late in 2017, “The internet is filled with too many fake news websites . . . and Google’s taking another step to stop this garbage from misleading people. The tech giant is now blocking websites from showing up in search results on Google News when they mask their country of origin.”10 Here is Google’s policy:

Sites included in Google News must not misrepresent, misstate, or conceal information about their ownership or primary purpose, or engage in coordinated activity to mislead users. This includes, but isn’t limited to, sites that misrepresent or conceal their country of origin or are directed at users in another country under false premises.

As Mashable noted at the time of the policy announcement: “The change may seem small, but it will have wide-ranging impact. By not including websites that mask their country of origin, Google is effectively burying fake news and reducing its chances of spreading.”

Today’s converged media world has broken down the old definitions of distinct media forms like newspapers and television—both now available online and across multiple platforms. And it favors players like Google, whose business model works in a world where customers expect to get their media in multiple places—and often for free. But the challenge ahead in the new, converged world is not only distinguishing legitimate sites from fake ones but also resolving who will pay for quality content and how that system will emerge. In the upcoming industry chapters, we take a closer look at how media convergence is affecting each industry in terms of both content production and business strategies.

Media Convergence and Cultural Change

The Internet and social media have led to significant changes in the ways we consume and engage with media culture. In the pre-Internet days (say, back in the late 1980s), most people would watch popular TV shows like DallasHappy Days, or M.A.S.H. at the time they originally aired. Such scheduling provided common media experiences at specific times within our culture. Although we still watch TV shows, we are increasingly likely to do so at our convenience through websites like Hulu, Amazon, and Netflix or through DVR/on-demand options. We are also increasingly making our media choices on the basis of Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter recommendations from friends. Or we upload our own media—from photos of last night’s party to homemade videos of our hobbies, exploits, and pets—to share with friends instead of watching traditional network programs. While these options allow us to connect with friends or family and give us more choices, they also break down old rituals, like a family’s gathering one evening a week to watch the comedy lineup on ABC or NBC. Instead, most media experiences find us chasing our individual interests online and on our smartphones. However, the upside in the digital age is that today, many families gather on weekends or during holidays to binge-watch TV series they’ve missed during the week.

The ability to access many different forms of media in one place is also changing the ways we engage with and consume media. In the past, we read newspapers in print, watched TV on our television sets, and played video games on a console. Today, we are able to do all these things on a computer, tablet, or smartphone, making it easy—and very tempting—to multitask. Media multitasking has led to growing media consumption, particularly for young people. A Kaiser Family Foundation study found that today’s youth packed ten hours and forty-five minutes’ worth of media content into the seven and a half hours they spent daily consuming media.11 And even though much of this consumption involves social connections, are we really engaging with our friends when we communicate with them by texting or posting on Facebook or Twitter? Some critics and educators feel that media multitasking means that we are more distracted, that we engage less with each type of media we consume, and that we often pay much closer attention to the media device in our hand than to the person standing next to us.

However, media multitasking can have other effects. In the past, we would wait until the end of a TV program, or even the next day, to discuss it with our friends. Now, with the proliferation of social media, we can discuss that program with our friends—and with strangers—as we watch the show. Many TV shows now gauge their popularity with audiences by how many people are “live-tweeting” them and by how many related trending topics they have on Twitter. This type of participation could indicate that audiences are in fact engaging more with the media they consume, even though they are multitasking. Some media critics even posit that having more choice actually makes us more engaged media consumers, because we have to actively choose the media we want to consume from the growing list of options.

Stories: The Foundation of Media

The stories that circulate in the media can shape a society’s perceptions and attitudes. During the first years of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, courageous professional journalists covered armed conflicts, telling stories that helped the public comprehend the magnitude and tragedy of such events. In the 1950s and 1960s, network television news stories on the Civil Rights movement led to crucial legislation that transformed the way many white people viewed the grievances and aspirations of African Americans. In the late 1990s, news and tabloid magazine stories about the President Clinton–Monica Lewinsky affair sparked heated debates over private codes of behavior and public abuses of authority. Today, impassioned discourse led by the eloquent survivors of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School has once again turned the topic of gun violence and control into a national dialogue. In each of these instances, the stories told through a variety of media outlets played a key role in changing individual awareness, cultural attitudes, and public perception.

Although we continue to look to the media for narratives today, the kinds of stories we seek out and tell are changing in the digital era. During Hollywood’s Golden Age in the 1930s and 1940s, as many as ninety million people went to the movies each Saturday. In the 1980s, during TV’s Network Era, most of us sat down each evening to watch professionally produced news or scripted sitcoms and dramas, written by paid writers and performed by seasoned actors. But in the digital age, many of the performances feature nonprofessionals. The stories we watch on YouTube and read on blog sites are mostly produced by amateurs. Audiences are fascinated by stories of couples finding love, relationships gone bad, and backstabbing friends on franchise shows like The Bachelor or Real Housewives. Some reality shows—like Big BrotherBorn This Way, and Shark Tank—give us glimpses into the lives and careers of everyday people, while others entertain us by pitting amateurs against each other on talent, singing, and cooking competitions such as America’s Got TalentThe Voice, and Top Chef. While these shows are all professionally produced, the performers are for the most part “ordinary” people (or celebrities and professionals performing alongside amateurs). This is part of the appeal of reality TV—relating to the characters or comparing our lives with theirs because they seem just like us. Part of the appeal, too, is feeling superior to characters who often make bad decisions that we can judge or laugh about.

Online, many of us are entertaining and informing one another with videos of our pets, Facebook posts about our achievements or relationship issues, photos of a good meal, or tweets about the latest school shooting and gun control. This cultural blending of old and new ways of telling stories and offering opinions—told by both professionals and amateurs—is just another form of convergence that has disrupted and altered the media landscape in the digital era. More than ever, ordinary citizens are able to participate in, and have an effect on, the stories told in the media. Our varied media institutions and outlets are, after all, in the 
narrative
—or storytelling—business. Media stories put events in context, helping us better understand both our daily lives and the larger world. As psychologist Jerome Bruner argues, we are storytelling creatures, and as children, we acquire language to tell the stories we have inside us.12 The common denominator, in fact, between our entertainment and information cultures is the narrative. It is the media’s main cultural currency—whether it’s a hilarious and heartwarming Super Bowl commercial, a post on a gossip blog, a Fox News “exclusive,” a New York Times article, or a tweet praising a local restaurant about a recent dining experience. The point is that the popular narratives of our culture are complex and varied. Narratives are, in the end, the dominant way we make sense and meaning of our experiences. As writer Joan Didion once put it, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”13

Media Stories in Everyday Life

The earliest debates, at least in Western society, about the impact of cultural narratives on daily life date back to the ancient Greeks. Socrates, himself accused of corrupting young minds, worried that children exposed to popular art forms and stories “without distinction” would “take into their souls teachings that are wholly opposite to those we wish them to be possessed of when they are grown up.”14 He believed that art should uplift us from the ordinary routines of our lives. The playwright Euripides, however, believed that art should imitate life, that characters should be “real,” and that artistic works should reflect the actual world—even when that reality is sordid.

VIETNAM WAR PROTESTS

On October 21, 1967, a crowd of 100,000 protesters marched on the Pentagon, demanding the end of the Vietnam War. Sadly, violence erupted when some protesters clashed with the U.S. Marshals protecting the Pentagon. However, this iconic image from the same protest appeared in the Washington Post the next day and went on to become a symbol for the peaceful ideals behind the protests. When has an image in the media made an event “real” to you?

launchpadworks.com

Agenda Setting and Gatekeeping

Experts discuss how the media exert influence over public discourse.

Discussion:

How might the rise of the Internet cancel out or reduce the agenda-setting effect in media?

In The Republic, Plato developed the classical view of art: It should aim to instruct and uplift. He worried that some staged performances glorified evil and that common folk watching might not be able to distinguish between art and reality. Aristotle, Plato’s student, occupied a middle ground in these debates, arguing that art and stories should provide insight into the human condition but should entertain as well.

The cultural concerns of classical philosophers are still with us. In the early 1900s, for example, newly arrived immigrants to the United States, who spoke little English, gravitated toward cultural events whose enjoyment did not depend solely on understanding English. Consequently, these popular events—such as boxing, vaudeville, and the emerging medium of silent film—became a flash point for some groups, including the Daughters of the American Revolution, local politicians, religious leaders, and police vice squads, who not only resented the commercial success of immigrant culture but also feared that these “low” cultural forms would undermine what they saw as traditional American values and interests.

In the United States in the 1950s, the phenomenal popularity of Elvis Presley set the stage for many of today’s debates over hip-hop lyrics and television’s influence, especially on young people. In 1956 and 1957, Presley made three appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show. The public outcry against Presley’s “lascivious” hip movements was so great that by the third show, the camera operators were instructed to shoot the singer only from the waist up. In some communities, objections to Presley and rock and roll were motivated by class bias and racism. Many white adults believed that this “poor white trash” singer from Mississippi was spreading rhythm and blues, a “dangerous” form of black popular culture.

Today, with the reach of print, electronic, and digital communications and the amount of time people spend consuming them (see Figure 1.1), mass media play an even more controversial role in society. Many people are critical of the quality of much contemporary culture and are concerned about the overwhelming amount of information now available. Many see popular media culture as unacceptably commercial and sensationalistic. Children, who on average watch more than forty thousand TV commercials each year, are particularly vulnerable to marketers selling junk food, toys, and “cool” clothing.15

FIGURE 1.1

DAILY MEDIA CONSUMPTION BY PLATFORM, 2017


Data from “Average Time Spent with Major Media per Day in the United States as of September 2017 (in Minutes),” 


www.statista.com/statistics/276683/media-use-in-the-us

.

Yet how much the media shape society—and how much they simply respond to existing cultural issues—is still unknown. Although some media depictions may worsen social problems, research has seldom demonstrated that the media directly cause our society’s major afflictions. With American mass media industries earning more than $700 billion in 2017 (according to the U.S. Department of Commerce), the economic and societal stakes are high. Large portions of media resources now go toward studying audiences, capturing their attention through stories, and taking in their consumer dollars. To increase their revenues, media outlets try to influence everything from how people shop to how they vote. Like the air we breathe, the commercially based culture that mass media help create surrounds us. Like the air, its impact is often taken for granted. But to monitor that culture’s “air quality”—to become media literate—we must attend more thoughtfully to a vast array of media stories that are too often taken for granted. (For further discussion, see “Examining Ethics: Covering War and Displaying Images”.)

SURVEYING THE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE

Some cultural phenomena gain wide popular appeal, and others do not. Some appeal to certain age groups or social classes. Some, such as rock and roll, jazz, and dance music, are popular worldwide; other forms, such as Tejano, salsa, and Cajun music, are popular primarily in certain regions or ethnic communities. Certain aspects of culture (e.g., opera) are considered elite in one place (the United States) and popular in another (Italy). Though categories may change over time and from one society to another, two metaphors offer contrasting views about the way culture operates in our daily lives: culture as a hierarchy, represented by a skyscraper model, and culture as a process, represented by a map model.

Culture as a Skyscraper

Throughout much of the twentieth century, critics and audiences generally perceived culture as a hierarchy, with supposedly superior products at the top and inferior ones at the bottom. This can be imagined, in some respects, as a modern skyscraper. In this model, the top floors of the building house 
high culture
, such as ballet, the symphony, art museums, and classic literature. The bottom floors—and even the basement—house popular or 
low culture
, including such icons as reality television, teen pop music, TV wrestling shows, and violent video games (see Figure 1.2). High culture, identified with “good taste” and higher education and supported by wealthy patrons and corporate donors, is associated with fine art, which is available primarily in libraries, theaters, and museums. In contrast, low or popular culture is aligned with the “questionable” tastes of the masses, who enjoy the commercial “junk” circulated by the mass media. Whether or not we agree with this cultural skyscraper model, the high–low hierarchy often determines or limits the way we view and discuss culture today.16 Using this model, critics have developed at least five areas of concern about so-called low culture: the depreciation of fine art, the exploitation of high culture, the disposability of popular culture, the decline of high culture, and the deadening of our cultural taste buds.


FIGURE 1.2

CULTURE AS A SKYSCRAPER

Culture is diverse and difficult to categorize. Yet throughout the twentieth century, we tended to think of culture not as a social process but as a set of products sorted into high, low, or middle positions on a cultural skyscraper. Look at this highly arbitrary arrangement, and decide whether you agree or disagree. Write in some of your own examples.

Why do we categorize or classify culture in this way? Who controls this process? Is control of making cultural categories important? Why or why not?

EXAMINING ETHICS

Covering War and Displaying Images

At the outset of 2018, the United States still had more than fourteen thousand troops in Afghanistan—fighting a war that was in its seventeenth year (by far the longest war in U.S. history)—but news coverage of Middle East war efforts had declined dramatically. This was partly due to news organizations’ losing interest in events that drag on and become “old news.” The news media are, after all, biased in favor of timeliness and current events. But war reporting also declined because of the financial crisis and overall reduction in traditional reporting jobs at daily newspapers (more than two hundred thousand reporters lost their jobs or took buyouts between 2001 and 2016). In fact, most news organizations stopped sending reporters to cover the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan years ago, depending instead on wire service reporters, foreign correspondents from other countries, or major news organizations like the New York Times or CNN for their coverage. These major organizations have covered the rise of stateless terrorist organizations like ISIS—and their use of social media for propaganda and recruitment. Despite the decrease in coverage of Afghanistan, the news media continue to confront ethical challenges about the best way to cover the wars, including reporting on the deaths of soldiers; documenting drug abuse or the high suicide rate among Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans; dealing with First Amendment and national security issues; and self-censoring what audiences view, read, or hear.

When President Obama took office in 2009, he suspended the previous Bush administration ban on media coverage of soldiers’ coffins returning to U.S. soil from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. First Amendment advocates praised Obama’s decision, although after a flurry of news coverage of these arrivals in April 2009, media outlets grew less interested in this subject matter. Later, the Obama administration upset some of the same First Amendment supporters when it withheld prisoner and detainee abuse photos from earlier in the wars, citing concerns for the safety of current U.S. troops and fears of further inflaming anti-American opinion. Both issues—one opening up news access and one closing it down—suggest the difficult and often tense relationship between presidential administrations and the news media.

In May 2011, these issues surfaced again when U.S. Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden, long credited with perpetrating the 9/11 tragedy. As details of the SEAL operation began to emerge, the Obama administration weighed the appropriateness of releasing photos of bin Laden’s body and video of his burial at sea. While some news organizations and First Amendment advocates demanded the release of the photos, the Obama administration ultimately decided against it, saying that the government did not want to spur any further terrorist actions against the United States and its allies.

IMAGES OF WAR

How much freedom should the news media have to cover a war?

Back in 2006, President George W. Bush criticized the news media for not showing enough “good news” about U.S. efforts to bring democracy to Iraq. Bush’s remarks raised ethical questions about the complex relationship between the government and the news media during times of war: How much freedom should the news media have to cover a war? How much control, if any, should the military have over reporting a war? Are there topics that should not be covered?

These kinds of questions have also created ethical quagmires for local TV stations that cover war and its effects on communities where soldiers have been called to duty and then injured or killed. In one extreme case, the nation’s largest TV station owner—Sinclair Broadcast Group—would not air the ABC News program Nightline in 2004 because it devoted an episode to reading the names of all U.S. soldiers killed in the Iraq War up to that time. Here is an excerpt from a New York Times account of that event:

Sinclair Broadcast Group, one of the largest owners of local television stations, will preempt tonight’s edition of the ABC News program “Nightline,” saying the program’s plan to have Ted Koppel [who then anchored the program] read aloud the names of every member of the armed forces killed in action in Iraq was motivated by an antiwar agenda and threatened to undermine American efforts there.

The decision means viewers in eight cities, including St. Louis and Columbus, Ohio, will not see “Nightline.” ABC News disputed that the program carried a political message, calling it “an expression of respect which simply seeks to honor those who have laid down their lives for their country.”

But Mark Hyman, the vice president of corporate relations for Sinclair, who is also a conservative commentator on the company’s newscasts, said tonight’s edition of “Nightline” is biased journalism. “Mr. Koppel’s reading of the fallen will have no proportionality,” he said in a telephone interview, pointing out that the program will ignore other aspects of the war effort.

Mr. Koppel and the producers of “Nightline” said earlier this week that they had no political motivation behind the decision to devote an entire show, expanded to 40 minutes, to reading the names and displaying the photos of those killed. They said they only intended to honor the dead and document what Mr. Koppel called “the human cost” of the war.1

Given such a case, how might a local TV news director today—under pressure from the station’s manager or owner—formulate guidelines to help negotiate such ethical territory? While most TV news divisions have ethical codes to guide journalists’ behavior in certain situations, could ordinary citizens help shape ethical discussions and decisions? Following is a general plan for dealing with an array of ethical dilemmas that media practitioners face and for finding ways in which nonjournalists might participate in this decision-making process.

Arriving at ethical decisions about the appropriate use of photos and videos requires a particular kind of criticism involving several steps: (1) laying out the case; (2) pinpointing the key issues; (3) identifying the parties involved, their intents, and their potentially competing values; (4) studying ethical models and theories; (5) presenting strategies and options; and (6) formulating a decision or policy.2

As a test case, let’s look at how local TV news directors might use the six steps to establish ethical guidelines for war-related events or domestic tragedies, such as mass shootings at schools, churches, movie theaters, and concerts. The goal of this exercise is to make ethical decisions and to lay the groundwork for policies that address videos or photographs that are disturbing, whether they are images of war or domestic terrorism. (See Chapter 14 for details on confronting ethical problems.)

Examining Ethics Activity

As a class or in smaller groups, design policies that address one or more of the issues raised here. Start by researching the topic, gathering as much information as possible. For example, you can research guidelines that local TV stations already use by contacting local news directors and TV journalists.

Do the local TV stations have guidelines in place? If so, are they adequate? Are there certain types of images they will not show? Based on your research and the six steps, design a set of policies that you believe local TV stations should follow when reporting on war or domestic tragedies. Regarding school shootings, for example, consider whether TV stations should air or post footage from the smartphones of victims. Finally, if time allows, send the policies you designed to various TV news directors or station managers. Request their evaluations, and ask whether they would consider implementing the policies.

An Inability to Appreciate Fine Art

Some critics claim that popular culture—in the form of contemporary movies, television, and music—distracts students from serious literature and philosophy, thus stunting their imagination and undermining their ability to recognize great art.17 This critical view pits popular culture against high art, discounting a person’s ability to value Bach and the Beatles or Shakespeare and The Simpsons concurrently. The assumption is that because popular forms of culture are made for profit, they cannot be experienced as valuable artistic experiences in the same way as more elite art forms, such as classical ballet, Italian opera, modern sculpture, or Renaissance painting, even though many of what we regard as elite art forms today were once supported and even commissioned by wealthy patrons.

A Tendency to Exploit High Culture

Another concern is that popular culture exploits classic works of literature and art. A good example is Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s dark gothic novel Frankenstein, written in 1818 and ultimately transformed into multiple popular forms. Today, the tale is best remembered by virtue of two movies—a 1931 film version starring Boris Karloff as the towering and tragic monster, and the 1974 Mel Brooks comedy Young Frankenstein—alongside offshoots like the sitcom The Munsters, action movies like I, Frankenstein, and even a once popular cereal introduced in 1971. Shelley’s powerful themes about abusing science and judging people on the basis of appearances are often lost or trivialized in favor of a simplistic horror story, a comedy spoof, or a form of junk food.

A Throwaway Ethic

Unlike an Italian opera or a Shakespearean tragedy, many elements of popular culture have a short life span; a hit song, for example, might top the charts for a few weeks at a time. Although endurance does not necessarily denote quality, many critics think that so-called better or higher forms of culture have more staying power. In this argument, lower or popular forms of culture are unstable and fleeting; they follow rather than lead public taste.

EXPLOITING HIGH CULTURE

Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, might not recognize our popular culture mutations of her gothic classic. First published in 1818, the novel has inspired numerous interpretations, everything from the scary—Boris Karloff in the classic 1931 movie—to the silly—the Mel Brooks spoof Young Frankenstein. Can you think of another example of a story that has developed and changed over time and through various media transformations?

A Diminished Audience for High Culture

Some observers also warn that popular culture has inundated the cultural environment, driving out higher forms of culture and cheapening public life.18 This concern is supported by data showing that TV sets are in use in the average American home for nearly eight hours a day, exposing adults and children each year to thousands of hours of trivial TV commercials, violent crime dramas, and superficial reality programs. According to one story critics tell, the prevalence of so many popular media products prevents the public from experiencing genuine art—though this view fails to note the number of choices and options now available to media consumers.

Dulling Our Cultural Taste Buds

Another cautionary story suggests that popular culture, especially its more visual forms (such as TV advertising and YouTube videos), undermines democratic ideals and reasoned argument. According to this view, popular media may inhibit not only rational thought but also social progress by transforming audiences into cultural dupes lured by the promise of products. Seductive advertising images showcasing the buffed and airbrushed bodies of professional models, for example, frequently contradict the actual lives of people who cannot hope to achieve a particular “look” or lifestyle and who may not have the means to obtain high-end cosmetics, clothing, or cars. In this environment, art and commerce have become blurred, restricting the audience’s ability to make cultural and economic distinctions. Sometimes called the “Big Mac” theory, this view suggests that people are so addicted to mass-produced media menus that they lose their discriminating taste for finer fare and, much worse, their ability to see and challenge social inequities.

Culture as a Map

While the skyscraper model is one way to view culture, another way to view it is as a map. Here, culture is an ongoing and complicated process—rather than a high–low vertical hierarchy—that allows us to better account for our diverse and individual tastes. In the map model, we judge forms of culture as good or bad based on a combination of personal taste and the aesthetic judgments a society makes at particular historical times. Because such tastes and evaluations are “all over the map,” a cultural map suggests that we can pursue many connections across various media choices and can appreciate a range of cultural experiences without simply ranking them from high to low.

Our attraction to and choice of cultural phenomena—such as the stories we read in books or watch at the movies—represent how we make our lives meaningful. Culture offers plenty of places to go that are conventional, familiar, and comforting. Yet at the same time, our culture’s narrative storehouse contains other stories that tend toward the innovative, unfamiliar, and challenging. Most forms of culture, however, demonstrate multiple tendencies. We may use online social networks because they are both comforting (an easy way to keep up with friends) and innovative (new tools or apps that engage us). The map offered here (see Figure 1.3) is based on a subway grid. Each station represents tendencies or elements related to why a person would be attracted to particular cultural products. More popular cultural forms congregate in certain areas of the map, while less popular cultural forms are outliers. This multidirectional, antihierarchical model serves as a more flexible, multidimensional, and inclusive way of imagining how culture actually works.

FIGURE 1.3

CULTURE AS A MAP

In this map model, culture is not ranked as high or low. Instead, the model shows culture as spreading out in several directions across a variety of dimensions. For example, some cultural forms can be familiar, innovative, and challenging, like the Harry Potter books and movies. This model accounts for the complexity of individual tastes and experiences. The map model also suggests that culture is a process by which we produce meaning—that is, make our lives meaningful—as well as a complex collection of intersecting media products and texts. The map shown is just one interpretation of culture. What cultural products would you include in your own model? What dimensions and intersections would you identify with, and why?

The Comfort of Familiar Stories

The appeal of culture is often its familiar stories, pulling audiences toward the security of repetition and common landmarks on the cultural map. Consider, for instance, early television’s Lassie series, about the adventures of a collie named Lassie and her owner, young Timmy. Of the more than five hundred episodes, many have a familiar and repetitive plotline: Timmy, who arguably possessed the poorest sense of direction and suffered more  concussions than any TV character in history, gets lost or knocked unconscious. After finding Timmy and licking his face, Lassie goes for help and saves the day. Adult critics might mock this melodramatic formula, but many children found comfort in the predictability of the story. This quality is also evident when children ask their parents to read Goodnight Moon or Where the Wild Things Are night after night.

THE POPULAR NETFLIX SERIES STRANGER THINGS represents many cultural forms with its elements of nostalgia, mystery, action, and sci-fi all rolled into one binge-able package. Where would you place Stranger Things on the map above?

Innovation and the Attraction of “What’s New”

Like children, adults also seek comfort, often returning to an old Beatles or Guns N’ Roses song, a William Butler Yeats or an Emily Dickinson poem, or a TV rerun of Seinfeld or Andy Griffith. But we also like cultural adventure. We may turn from a familiar film on cable’s AMC to discover a new movie from Iran or India on the Sundance Channel. We seek new stories and new places to go—those aspects of culture that demonstrate originality and complexity. For instance, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) created language anew and challenged readers, as the novel’s poetic first sentence illustrates: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.” A revolutionary work, crammed with historical names and topical references to events, myths, songs, jokes, and daily conversation, Joyce’s novel remains a challenge to understand and decode. His work demonstrated that part of what culture provides is the impulse to explore new places, to strike out in new directions, searching for something different that may contribute to growth and change.

A Wide Range of Messages

We know that people have complex cultural tastes, needs, and interests based on different backgrounds and dispositions. It is not surprising, then, that our cultural treasures, from blues music and opera to comic books and classical literature, contain a variety of messages. Just as Shakespeare’s plays—popular entertainments in his day—were packed with both obscure and popular references, TV episodes of The Simpsons have included allusions to the Beatles, Kafka, Tennessee Williams, Apple, Star TrekThe X-Files, Freud, Psycho, and Citizen Kane. In other words, as part of an ongoing process, cultural products and their meanings are “all over the map,” spreading out in diverse directions.

Challenging the Nostalgia for a Better Past

Some critics of popular culture assert—often without presenting supportive evidence—that society was better off before the latest developments in mass media. These critics resist the idea of reimagining an established cultural hierarchy as a multidirectional map. The nostalgia for some imagined “better past” has often operated as a device for condemning new cultural phenomena. This impulse to criticize something that is new is often driven by fear of change, cultural differences, or political differences. Back in the nineteenth century, in fact, a number of intellectuals and politicians worried that rising literacy rates among the working class would create havoc: How would the aristocracy and intellectuals maintain their authority and status if everyone could read? A recent example includes the fear that some politicians, religious leaders, and citizens have expressed about the legalization of same-sex marriage, claiming that it violates older religious tenets or the sanctity of past traditions.

Cultural Values of the Modern Period

To understand how the mass media have come to occupy their current cultural position, we need to trace significant changes in cultural values from the modern period until today. In general, U.S. historians and literary scholars think of the 
modern period
 as beginning with the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century and extending until about the mid-twentieth century. Although there are many ways to define what it means to be “modern,” we will focus on four major features, or values, that resonate best with changes across media and culture: efficiency, individualism, rationalism, and progress.

Modernization involved captains of industry using new technology to create efficient manufacturing centers, produce inexpensive products to make everyday life better, and make commerce more profitable. Printing presses and assembly lines made major contributions to this transformation, and then modern advertising spread the word to American consumers. In terms of culture, particularly in architecture, the modern mantra has been “form follows function.” For example, the growing populations of big cities placed a premium on space, creating a new form of building that fulfilled that functional demand by building upward. Modern skyscrapers made of glass, steel, and concrete replaced the supposedly wasteful decorative and ornate styles of premodern Gothic cathedrals. This new value was echoed in journalism, where a front-page style rejected decorative and ornate adjectives and adverbs for “just the facts.”

Cultural responses to and critiques of modern efficiency often manifested themselves in the mass media. For example, in Brave New World (1932), Aldous Huxley created a fictional world in which he cautioned readers that the efficiencies of modern science and technology posed a threat to individual dignity. Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times (1936), set in a futuristic manufacturing plant, also told the story of the dehumanizing impact of modernization and machinery. Writers and artists, in their criticisms of the modern world, have often pointed to technology’s ability to alienate people from one another, capitalism’s tendency to foster greed, and government’s inclination to create bureaucracies whose inefficiency oppresses rather than helps people.

While the values of the premodern period (before the Industrial Revolution) were guided by a strong belief in a natural or divine order, modernization elevated individual self-expression to a more central position. Modern print media allowed ordinary readers to engage with new ideas beyond what their religious leaders and local politicians communicated to them. Modern individualism and the Industrial Revolution also triggered new forms of hierarchy in which certain individuals and groups achieved higher standing in the social order.

To be modern also meant valuing the ability of logical and scientific minds to solve problems by working in organized groups and expert teams. Progressive thinkers maintained that the printing press, the telegraph, and the railroad, in combination with a scientific attitude, would foster a new type of informed society. At the core of this society, the printed mass media—particularly newspapers—would educate the citizenry, helping build and maintain an organized social framework.19

The idea of a well-informed rational society emerged out of the 
Progressive Era
—a period of political and social reform that lasted roughly from the 1890s to the 1920s. On both local and national levels, Progressive Era reformers championed social movements that led to constitutional amendments for both Prohibition and women’s suffrage, political reforms that led to the secret ballot during elections, and economic reforms that ushered in the federal income tax in order to foster a more equitable society. Muckrakers—journalists who exposed corruption, waste, and scandal in business and politics—represented media’s significant contribution to this era (see Chapter 9).

Influenced by the Progressive movement, the notion of being modern in the twentieth century meant throwing off the chains of the past, breaking with tradition, and embracing progress. For example, twentieth-century journalists, in their quest for modern efficiency, focused on “the now” and the reporting of timely, new events. Newly standardized forms of front-page journalism that championed “just the facts” helped reporters efficiently meet tight deadlines. But modern newspapers often failed to take a historical perspective or to analyze sufficiently the ideas and interests underlying important events.

Shifting Values in Postmodern Culture

For many people, the changes occurring in the 
postmodern period
—from roughly the mid-twentieth century to today—are identified by a confusing array of examples: music videos, remote controls, Nike ads, shopping malls, fax machines, e-mail, video games, blogs, USA Today, YouTube, iPads, hip-hop, and reality TV (see Table 1.1). Some critics argue that postmodern culture represents an entirely different way of seeing—a new condition, or even a malady, of the human spirit. Although there are many ways to define the postmodern, this textbook focuses on four major characteristics, or values, that resonate best with changes across media and culture: populism, diversity, nostalgia, and paradox.

TABLE 1.1

TRENDS ACROSS HISTORICAL PERIODS

Trend

Premodern (pre-1800s)

Modern Industrial Revolution (1800s–1950s)

Postmodern (1950s–present)

Work hierarchies

peasants/merchants/rulers

factory workers/managers/national CEOs

temp workers/global CEOs

Major work sites

field/farm

factory/office

office/home/“virtual” (or mobile) office

Communication reach

local

national

global

Communication transmission

oral/manuscript

print/electronic

electronic/digital

Communication channels

storytellers/elders/town criers

books/newspapers/magazines/radio

television/cable/Internet/multimedia

Communication at home

quill pen

typewriter/office computer

personal computer/laptop/smartphone/social networks

Key social values

belief in natural or divine order

individualism/rationalism/efficiency/antitradition

antihierarchy/skepticism (about science, business, government, etc.)/diversity/multiculturalism/irony and paradox

Journalism

oral and print based/partisan/controlled by political parties

print based/“objective”/efficient/timely/controlled by publishing families

TV and Internet based/opinionated/conversational/controlled by global entertainment conglomerates

As a political idea, populism tries to appeal to ordinary people by highlighting the differences or even creating an argument or conflict between “the people” and “the elite.” In virtually every political campaign, politicians evoke populism by telling stories and running ads that pit one group of Americans against another. Meant to resonate with middle-class values and regional ties, campaign narratives generally pit southern or midwestern small-town “family values” against the supposedly coarser, even corrupt, urban lifestyles associated with big cities like New York or Los Angeles.

In postmodern culture, populism manifests itself in many ways. For example, some artists and performers—like Chuck Berry in “Roll Over Beethoven” (1956) or Queen in “Bohemian Rhapsody” (1975)—intentionally blur the border between high and low culture. In the visual arts, following Andy Warhol’s 1960s pop art style, advertisers borrow from both fine art and street art, while artists appropriate styles from commerce and popular art.

Other forms of postmodern style blur modern distinctions not only between art and commerce but also between fact and fiction. For example, television programs—such as MTV’s Are You the One? and Teen Mom—blur boundaries between the staged and the real, mixing serious themes and personal challenges with comedic interludes and romantic entanglements. Satiric news programs, like HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, combine real, insightful news stories with biting (and often hilarious) critiques of traditional broadcast and cable news programs.

Closely associated with populism, another value (or vice) of the postmodern period is the emphasis on diversity and fragmentation, including the wild juxtaposition of old and new cultural styles. Part of this stylistic diversity involves borrowing and transforming earlier ideas from the modern period. In music, hip-hop deejays and performers sample R&B, soul, and rock classics, both reinventing old songs and creating something new. In postmodern architecture, such sampling is called “quoting,” as new buildings (or sports stadiums) feature homages to old buildings. Critics of postmodern style contend that such borrowing devalues originality, emphasizing surface over depth and recycled ideas over new ones.

Another tendency of postmodern culture involves rejecting rational thought as “the answer” to every social problem, reveling instead in nostalgia for the premodern values of small communities, traditional religion, and even mystical experience. Rather than seeing science purely as enlightened thinking or rational deduction that relies on evidence, some artists, critics, and politicians criticize modern values for laying the groundwork for dehumanizing technological advances and bureaucratic problems. For example, in the renewed debates over evolution, one cultural narrative pits scientific evidence against religious belief and literal interpretations of the Bible. And in popular culture, many TV programs—such as The X-FilesFringe, The Walking Dead, and Stranger Things—emerged to offer mystical and supernatural responses to the “evils” of our daily world and the limits of science and the purely rational.

Lastly, the fourth aspect of the postmodern period is the willingness to accept paradox. Whereas modern culture emphasized breaking with the past in the name of progress, postmodern culture stresses integrating—or converging—retro beliefs and contemporary culture. So at the same time that we seem nostalgic for the past, we embrace new technologies with a vengeance. For example, fundamentalist religious movements that promote outdated traditions (e.g., rejecting women’s rights to own property or seek higher education) also embrace the Internet and modern technology as recruiting tools or as channels for spreading their messages. Culturally conservative politicians, who seem most comfortable championing the perceived values of the 1950s nuclear family, welcome talk shows, Twitter, Facebook, and Internet and social media ad campaigns as venues to advance their causes.

FILMS OFTEN REFLECT THE KEY SOCIAL VALUES of an era, as represented by the modern and postmodern movies pictured here. Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936, left) satirized modern industry and the dehumanizing impact of a futuristic factory on its overwhelmed workers. Similarly, the science-fiction TV series Black Mirror (2011–present, right) takes a dark and satirical look at technology’s impact on today’s society. In an interview with the Guardian, series creator Charlie Brooker explains how the series relates to our world: “Like an addict, I check my Twitter timeline the moment I wake up. . . . If technology is a drug—and it does feel like a drug—then what, precisely, are the side-effects? This area—between delight and discomfort—is where Black Mirror . . . is set.”

Although, as modernists predicted, new technologies can isolate people or encourage them to chase their personal agendas (e.g., a student following her individual interests online), new technologies can also draw people together to advance causes; to solve community problems; or to discuss politics on radio talk shows, blog sites, or smartphones. Our lives today are full of such incongruities.

CRITIQUING MEDIA AND CULTURE

In contemporary life, cultural boundaries are being tested; the arbitrary lines between information and entertainment have become blurred. Consumers now read newspapers on their smartphones and tablets. Media corporations do business globally. We are witnessing media convergence, in which everything from magazines to movies is channeled onto screens through the Internet, TV, tablets, and smartphones.

Considering the diversity of mass media, to paint them all with the same broad brush would be inaccurate and unfair. Yet that is often what we seem to do, which may in fact reflect the distrust many of us have of prominent social institutions, from local governments to daily newspapers. While revelations about phone hacking and government surveillance make this distrust understandable, it’s ultimately more useful to replace cynicism with genuine criticism. To deal with these shifts in how we experience media and culture, as well as their impact, we need to develop a profound understanding of the media, focused on what they offer or produce and what they downplay or ignore.

Media Literacy and the Critical Process

Developing 
media literacy
—that is, attaining an understanding of mass media and how they construct meaning—requires following a 
critical process
 that takes us through the steps of 
description

analysis

interpretation

evaluation
, and 
engagement
 (see “Media Literacy and the Critical Process”). We will be aided in our critical process by keeping an open mind, trying to understand the specific cultural forms we are critiquing, and acknowledging the complexity of contemporary culture.

MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS

It is easy to form a cynical view about the stream of TV advertising, reality programs, video games, celebrity gossip blogs, tweets, and news tabloids that floods the cultural landscape. But cynicism is no substitute for criticism. To become literate about media involves striking a balance between taking a critical position (developing knowledgeable interpretations and judgments) and becoming tolerant of diverse forms of expression (appreciating the distinctive variety of cultural products and processes).

A cynical view usually involves some form of intolerance and either too little or too much information. For example, after enduring the glut of news coverage and political advertising devoted to the 2016 presidential election, we might have easily become cynical about our political system. However, information in the form of “factual” news bits and knowledge about a complex social process such as a national election are not the same thing. The critical process stresses the subtle distinctions between amassing information and becoming media literate.

Developing a media-literate critical perspective involves mastering five overlapping stages that build on one another:

· Description: paying close attention, taking notes, and researching the subject under study

· Analysis: discovering and focusing on significant patterns that emerge from the description stage

· Interpretation: asking and answering “What does that mean?” and “So what?” questions about one’s findings

· Evaluation: arriving at a judgment about whether something is good, bad, or mediocre, which involves subordinating one’s personal taste to the critical “bigger picture” resulting from the first three stages

· Engagement: taking some action that connects our critical perspective with our role as citizens and watchdogs to question our media institutions, adding our voice to the process of shaping the cultural environment

Let’s look at each of these stages in greater detail.

1. DESCRIPTION If we decide to focus on how well the news media serve democracy, we might critique the fairness of several segments or individual stories from, say, 60 Minutes or the New York Times. We would start by describing the segments or articles, accounting for their reporting strategies and noting those featured as interview subjects. We might further identify central characters, conflicts, topics, and themes. From the notes taken at this stage, we can begin comparing what we have found to other stories on similar topics. We can also document what we think is missing from these news narratives—the questions, viewpoints, and persons that were not included—and other ways to tell the story.

2. ANALYSIS In the second stage of the critical process, we isolate patterns that call for closer attention. At this point, we decide how to focus the critique. Because 60 Minutes has produced thousands of hours of programming in its nearly fifty-year history, our critique might spotlight just a few key patterns. For example, many of the program’s reports are organized like detective stories, reporters are almost always visually represented at a medium distance, and interview subjects are generally shot in tight close-ups. In studying the New York Times, we might limit our analysis to social or political events in certain countries that get covered more often than events in other areas of the world. Or we could focus on recurring topics chosen for front-page treatment, or the number of quotes obtained from male and female experts.

3. INTERPRETATION In the interpretation stage, we try to determine the meanings of the patterns we have analyzed. The most difficult stage in criticism, interpretation demands an answer to the “So what?” question. For instance, the greater visual space granted to 60 Minutes reporters—compared with the close-up shots used for interview subjects—might mean that the reporters appear to be in control. They are given more visual space in which to operate, whereas interview subjects have little room to maneuver within the visual frame. As a result, the subjects often look guilty and the reporters look heroic—or, at least, in charge. Likewise, if we look at the New York Times, its attention to particular countries could mean that the paper tends to cover nations in which the United States has more vital political or economic interests, even though the Times might claim to be neutral and evenhanded in its reporting of news from around the world.

4. EVALUATION The fourth stage of the critical process focuses on making an informed judgment. Building on description, analysis, and interpretation, we are better able to evaluate the fairness of a group of 60 Minutes or New York Times reports. At this stage, we can grasp the strengths and weaknesses of the news media under study and make critical judgments measured against our own frames of reference—what we like and dislike, as well as what seems good or bad or missing, in the stories and coverage we analyzed.

This fourth stage differentiates the reviewer (or previewer) from the critic. Most newspaper reviews, for example, are limited by daily time or space constraints. Although these reviews may give us key information about particular programs, they often begin and end with personal judgments—“This is a quality show” or “That was a waste of time”—which should be saved for this fourth stage in the critical process. Regrettably, many reviews do not reflect such a process; they do not move much beyond the writer’s own frame of reference or personal taste.

5. ENGAGEMENT To be fully media literate, we must actively work to create a media world that helps serve democracy. Thus, we have added a fifth stage in the critical process—engagement. In our 60 Minutes and New York Times examples, engagement might involve something as simple as writing a formal letter or an e-mail to these media outlets to offer a critical take on the news narratives we are studying.

But engagement can also mean participating in online discussions; contacting various media producers or governmental bodies, such as the Federal Communications Commission, with critiques and ideas; organizing or participating in public media literacy forums; or learning to construct different types of media narratives ourselves—whether print, audio, video, or online—in order to participate directly in the creation of mainstream or alternative media. Producing actual work for media outlets might involve writing news stories for a local newspaper (and its website), producing a radio program or podcast on a controversial or significant community issue, or constructing a website that critiques various news media. The key to this stage is to challenge our civic imaginations, to refuse to sit back and cynically complain about the media without taking some action that lends our own voices and critiques to the process.

Just as communication cannot always be reduced to the old linear sender-message-receiver model, many forms of media and culture are not easily represented by the high–low model. We should, perhaps, strip culture of such adjectives as high, low, popular, and mass, which can artificially force media into predetermined categories. We might instead look at a wide range of issues generated by culture, from the role of storytelling in the media to the global influence of media industries on the consumer marketplace. We should also be moving toward a critical perspective that takes into account the intricacies of the cultural landscape. A fair critique of any cultural form, regardless of its social or artistic reputation, requires a working knowledge of the particular book, program, or music under scrutiny. For example, to understand W. E. B. Du Bois’s essays, critics immerse themselves in his work and in the historical context in which he wrote. Similarly, if we want to develop meaningful critiques of TV series such as Stranger Things or the media’s obsession with celebrities like Katy Perry or Drake, it is essential to understand the contemporary context in which these cultural phenomena and icons are produced.

To begin this process of critical assessment, we must imagine culture as richer and more complicated than the high–low model allows. We must also assume a critical stance that enables us to get outside our own preferences. We may like or dislike hip-hop, R&B, pop, or country, but if we want to critique these musical genres intelligently, we should understand what the various types of music have to say and why their messages appeal to particular audiences that may be different from us. The same approach applies to other cultural forms. If we critique a newspaper article, we must account for the language that is chosen and what it means; if we analyze a film or TV program, we need to “rewind,” or slow down the images, in order to understand how they make sense and create meaning.

Benefits of a Critical Perspective

Developing an informed critical perspective and becoming media literate allow us to participate in a debate about media culture as a force for both democracy and consumerism. On the one hand, the media can be a catalyst for democracy and social progress. Consider the role of television in spotlighting racism and injustice in the 1960s; the use of video technology to reveal oppressive conditions in China and Eastern Europe or to document crimes by urban police departments; and the role of blogs and Twitter in debunking bogus claims or protesting fraudulent elections. The media have also helped renew interest in diverse cultures around the world and other emerging democracies.

 

On the other hand, competing against these democratic tendencies is a powerful commercial culture that reinforces a world economic order controlled by relatively few multinational corporations. For instance, when Poland threw off the shackles of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, one of the first things its new leadership did was buy and dub the American soap operas Santa Barbara and Dynasty. For some, these shows were a relief from sober Soviet political propaganda, but others worried that Poles might inherit another kind of indoctrination—one starring American consumer culture and dominated by large international media companies.

This example illustrates that contemporary culture cannot easily be characterized as one thing or another. Binary terms such as liberal and conservative or high and low have less meaning in an environment where so many boundaries have been blurred, so many media forms have converged, and so many diverse styles and cultures coexist. Modern distinctions between print and electronic culture have begun to break down largely because of the increasing number of individuals who have come of age in what is a melting pot of print, electronic, and digital culture.
20
 Either/or models of culture, such as the high–low approach, are giving way to more inclusive and varied ideas, like the map model for culture discussed earlier.

What are the social implications of the new, blended, and merging cultural phenomena? How do we deal with the fact that public debate and news about everyday life now seem to come more from Facebook, Twitter, John Oliver, SNL, and bloggers than from the Wall Street Journal, the NBC Nightly News, and Time magazine?
21
 Clearly, such changes challenge us to reassess and rebuild the standards by which we judge our culture. The search for answers lies in recognizing the links between cultural expression and daily life. The search also involves monitoring how well the mass media serve democracy, not just by providing us with consumer culture but by encouraging us to help improve political, social, and economic practices. A healthy democracy requires the active involvement of everyone. Part of this involvement means watching over the role and impact of the mass media, a job that belongs to every one of us—not just paid media critics and watchdog organizations.

FIGURE 1.5

WHO USES THE INTERNET

The Internet and its availability are vitally important as so many people, both in the United States and around the world, rely on the information and resources that it provides.


Data from: 



www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheet/internet-broadband/

Chapter 1 Review

COMMON THREADS

In telling the story of mass media, several plotlines and major themes recur and help provide the big picture—the larger context for understanding the links between the forms of mass media and popular culture. Under each thread that follows, we pose a set of questions that we will investigate together to help you explore media and culture:

· Developmental stages of mass media. How did media evolve, from their origins in ancient oral traditions to their incarnation on the Internet today? What discoveries, inventions, and social circumstances drove the development of different media? What roles do new technologies play in changing contemporary media and culture?

· The commercial nature of mass media. What roles do media ownership and government regulation play in the presentation of commercial media products and serious journalism? How do the desire for profit and other business demands affect and change the media landscape? What role should government oversight play? What role do we play as ordinary viewers, readers, students, critics, and citizens?

· The converged nature of media. How has convergence changed the experience of media from the print to the digital era? What are the significant differences between reading a printed newspaper and reading the news online? What changes have to be made in the media business to help older forms of media, such as newspapers, transition to the online world?

· The role that media play in a democracy. How are policy decisions and government actions affected by the news media and other mass media? How do individuals find room in the media terrain to express alternative (nonmainstream) points of view? How do grassroots movements create media to influence and express political ideas?

· Mass media, cultural expression, and storytelling. What are the advantages and pitfalls of the media’s appetite for telling and selling stories? As we reach the point where almost all media exist on the Internet in some form, how have our culture and our daily lives been affected?

· Critical analysis of the mass media. How can we use the critical process to understand, critique, and influence the media? How important is it to be media literate in today’s world? At the end of each chapter, we will examine the historical contexts and current processes that shape media products. By becoming more critical consumers and more engaged citizens, we will be in a better position to influence the relationships among mass media, democratic participation, and the complex cultural landscape that we all inhabit.

KEY TERMS

The definitions for the terms listed below can be found in the glossary at the end of the book. The page numbers listed with the terms indicate where the term is highlighted in the chapter.

· communication

· culture

· mass media

· mass communication

· digital communication

· selective exposure

· convergence

· cross platform

· narrative

· high culture

· low culture

· modern period

· Progressive Era

· postmodern period

· media literacy

· critical process

· description

· analysis

· interpretation

· evaluation

· engagement

For review quizzes, chapter summaries, links to media-related websites, and more, go to 
launchpadworks.com
.

REVIEW QUESTIONS

Culture and the Evolution of Mass Communication

1. Define culture, mass media, and mass communication, and explain their interrelationships.

2. What key technological breakthroughs accompanied the transition to the print and electronic eras? Why were these changes significant?

3. Explain the limitations of the old linear model of mass communication.

The Development of Media and Their Role in Our Society

4. Describe the development of a mass medium from emergence to convergence.

5. In looking at the history of popular culture, explain why newer and emerging forms of media seem to threaten status quo values.

Surveying the Cultural Landscape

6. Describe the skyscraper model of culture. What are its strengths and limitations?

7. Describe the map model of culture. What are its strengths and limitations?

8. What are the chief differences between modern and postmodern values?

Critiquing Media and Culture

9. What are the five steps in the critical process? Which of these is the most difficult, and why?

10. What is the difference between cynicism and criticism?

11. Why is the critical process important?

QUESTIONING THE MEDIA

1. Drawing on your experience, list the kinds of media stories you like and dislike. You might think mostly of movies and TV shows, but remember that news, sports, political ads, and product ads are typically structured as stories. Conversations on Facebook can also be considered narratives. What kinds of stories do you like and dislike on Facebook, and why?

2. Cite some examples in which the media have been accused of unfairness. Draw on comments from parents, teachers, religious leaders, friends, news media, and so on. Discuss whether these criticisms were justified.

3. Pick an example of a popular media product that you think is harmful to children. How would you make your concerns known? Should the product be removed from circulation? Why or why not? If you think the product should be banned, how would you do so?

4. Make a critical case either defending or condemning Comedy Central’s South Park, a TV or radio talk show, a hip-hop group, a soap opera, or TV news coverage of a recent mass shooting. Use the five-step critical process to develop your position.

5. Although in some ways postmodern forms of communication, such as e-mail, MTV, smartphones, and Twitter, have helped citizens participate in global life, in what ways might these forms have harmed more traditional or native cultures?

LAUNCHPAD FOR MEDIA & CULTURE

Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture at 
launchpadworks.com
 for additional learning tools:

· REVIEW WITH LEARNINGCURVE

· LearningCurve, available on LaunchPad for Media & Culture, uses gamelike quizzing to help you master the concepts you need to learn from this chapter.

· VIDEO: THE MEDIA AND DEMOCRACY

· This video traces the history of the media’s role in democracy, from newspapers and television to the Internet.


CHAPTER

1

Mass Communication

A Critical Approach

CHAPTER 1Mass Communication

A Critical Approach

PART 1Digital Media and Convergence

Think about the media technologies in your life when you were growing up. How did you watch TV shows, listen to music, or communicate with friends? And how have those technologies changed since then?

Ever-increasing download speeds and more portable devices have fundamentally changed the ways in which we access and consume media. As you can see on the infographic on the opposite page, media didn’t always develop this quickly; an early medium, like radio, could take decades to fully emerge, while today a website or an app can reach similar audience thresholds in a matter of years or even days. With these changes, the history of mass media has moved from emergence to convergence. While electronic media have been around for a long time, it was the emergence of the Internet as a mass medium that allowed an array of media to converge in one space and be easily shared, leading us to the 

digital turn

. This shift will continue to shape our media consumption for years to come.

The digital turn has made us more fragmented—but also more connected. Facebook and Twitter have made it easier to tell friends—and strangers—what we’re watching, reading, and listening to. And while digital media have led to positive social movements, they have also made it easier for bad actors to harass us or sow discord in our politics. For better and worse, mass media are more integrated into our lives than ever before.


launchpadworks.com

Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture
 to explore an interactive time line of the history of mass communication; practice your media literacy skills; test your knowledge of the concepts in the textbook with LearningCurve; and explore and discuss current trends in mass communication with video activities, video assessment tools, and more.

Top: Data from: “comScore 2017 U.S. Mobile App Report,” August 24, 2017, 


www.comscore.com/Insights/Presentations-and-Whitepapers/2017/The-2017-US-Mobile-App-Report


.

Bottom: Data from: Simon Khalaf and Lali Kesiraju, “U.S. Consumers Time-Spent on Mobile Crosses 5 Hours a Day,” Flurry, March 2, 2017, 


http://flurrymobile.tumblr.com/post/157921590345/us-consumers-time-spent-on-mobile-crosses-5


.

CHAPTER 2The Internet, Digital Media, and Media Convergence

FOMO, or Fear of Missing Out, is the anxiety that something exciting may be happening while you’re off doing something else. The uninterrupted Internet connection we get from smartphones allows us to be in constant contact with friends through social media. But at what cost?

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE INTERNET AND THE WEB

SOCIAL MEDIA AND DEMOCRACY

CONVERGENCE AND MOBILE MEDIA

THE ECONOMICS AND ISSUES OF THE INTERNET

THE INTERNET AND DEMOCRACY

FOR AT LEAST some of us, the social mediated version of ourselves becomes the predominant way we experience the world. As Time magazine has noted, “Experiences don’t feel fully real” until we have “tweeted them or tumbled them or YouTubed them—and the world has congratulated [us]for doing so.”1 Social media is all about us—we are simultaneously the creators and the subjects. But the flip side of promoting our own experiences on social media as the most awesome happenings ever (and too bad you aren’t here) is the social anxiety associated with reading about other people’s experiences and realizing that you are not actually there.

This problem is called Fear of Missing Out (FOMO), and it has been defined as “the uneasy and sometimes all-consuming feeling that you’re missing out—that your peers are doing, in the know about or in possession of more or something better than you [are].”2 There are plenty of platforms for posting about ourselves and anxiously creeping on others—Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, LinkedIn, and Instagram are just a few of the sites that can feed our FOMO problem. The fear of missing out has been around since long before social media was invented. Party chatter, photos, postcards, and holiday letters usually put the most positive spin on people’s lives. But social media and mobile technology make being exposed to the interactions you missed a 24/7 phenomenon. There is potentially always something better you could have/should have been doing, right?

With FOMO, there is a “desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing.” Therefore, the person suffering from the anxiety continues to be tethered to social media, tracking “friends” and sacrificing time that might be spent having in-person, unmediated experiences.3 And though spending all this time on social media is a personal choice, it may not make us happy. In fact, a study by University of Michigan researchers found that the use of Facebook makes college students feel worse about themselves. The two-week study found that the more the students used Facebook, the more two components of well-being declined: how people feel moment to moment, and how satisfied they are with their lives—regardless of how many Facebook “friends” they had in their network.4

Studies about happiness routinely conclude that the best path to subjective well-being (happiness) and life satisfaction is having a community of close personal relationships. Social psychologists Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener acknowledge that the high use of mobile phones, text messaging, and social media is evidence that people want to connect. But they also explain that “we don’t just need relationships: we need close ones.” They conclude, “The close relationships that produce the most happiness are those characterized by mutual understanding, caring, and validation of the other person as worthwhile.”5 Thus, frequent contact isn’t enough to produce the kinds of relationships that produce the most happiness.

Ironically, there has never been a medium better than the Internet and its social media platforms to bring people together. How many people do you know who met online and went on to have successful friendships or romantic relationships? How often have social media connections enhanced close relationships for you? Still, according to Diener and Biswas-Diener, maintaining close relationships may require a “vacation” from social media from time to time, experiencing something together with a friend or friends. Of course (and we hate to say it), you will still need to text, message, e-mail, or call to arrange that date (see also “Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Note to Self for Healthy Digital Consumption”).

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE INTERNET AND THE WEB

From its humble origins as a military communications network in the 1960s, the 
Internet
 became increasingly interactive by the 1990s, allowing immediate two-way communication and one-to-many communication. By 2000, the Internet was a multimedia source for both information and entertainment, as it quickly became an integral part of our daily lives. For example, in 2000, about 50 percent of American adults were connected to the Internet; today, about nine out of ten American adults use the Internet.6 Although the Internet is an American invention, the Internet is now global in scale and use. Asia has about half the world’s Internet users, and in 2017, India surpassed the United States in the number of active Facebook accounts.7

The Birth of the Internet

The Internet originated as a military-government project, with computer time-sharing as one of its goals. In the 1960s, computers were relatively new, and there were only a few of the expensive, room-sized mainframe computers across the country for researchers to use. The Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) developed a solution to enable researchers to share computer processing time beginning in the late 1960s. This original Internet—called 
ARPAnet
 and nicknamed the Net—enabled military and academic researchers to communicate on a distributed network system (see Figure 2.1). First, ARPA created a wired network system in which users from multiple locations could log into a computer whenever they needed it. Second, to prevent logjams in data communication, the network used a system called packet switching, which broke down messages into smaller pieces to more easily route them through the multiple paths on the network before reassembling them on the other end.

FIGURE 2.1

DISTRIBUTED NETWORKS

In a centralized network (a), all the paths lead to a single nerve center. Decentralized networks (b) contain several main nerve centers. In a distributed network (c), which resembles a net, there are no nerve centers; if any connection is severed, information can be immediately rerouted and delivered to its destination. But is there a downside to distributed networks when it comes to the circulation of network viruses?


Information from Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).

launchpadworks.com

Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture and use LearningCurve to review concepts from this chapter.

Ironically, one of the most hierarchically structured and centrally organized institutions in our culture—the national defense industry—created the Internet, possibly the least hierarchical and most decentralized social network ever conceived. Each computer hub in the Internet has similar status and power, so nobody can own the system outright, and nobody has the power to kick others off the network. There isn’t even a master power switch, so authority figures cannot shut off the Internet—although as we will discuss later, some nations and corporations have attempted to restrict access for political or commercial benefit.

An essential innovation during the development stage of the Internet was e-mail. It was invented in 1971 by computer engineer Ray Tomlinson, who developed software to send electronic mail messages to any computer on ARPAnet. He decided to use the @ symbol to signify the location of the computer user, thus establishing the “login [email protected] computer” convention for e-mail addresses.

At this point in the development stage, the Internet was primarily a tool for universities, government research labs, and corporations involved in computer software and other high-tech products to exchange e-mail and post information. As the use of the Internet continued to proliferate, the entrepreneurial stage quickly came about.

The Net Widens

From the early 1970s until the late 1980s, a number of factors (both technological and historical) brought the Net to the entrepreneurial stage, in which it became a marketable medium. With the introduction in 1971 of 
microprocessors
, or miniature circuits that process and store electronic signals, thousands of transistors and related circuitry could be integrated with thin strands of silicon, along which binary codes traveled. Microprocessors signaled the Net’s marketability as manufacturers introduced the first personal computers (PCs), which were smaller, cheaper, and more powerful than the bulky computer systems of the 1960s. With personal computers now readily available, a second opportunity for marketing the Net came in 1986, when the National Science Foundation developed a high-speed communications network (NSFNET) designed to link university research supercomputer centers around the country and also encourage private investment in the Net. This innovation led to a dramatic increase in Internet use and further opened the door to the widespread commercial possibilities of the Internet.

NSFNET NETWORK

The National Science Foundation developed NSFNET in 1986 to promote research and education. As part of this effort, the NSF funded several university supercomputing centers and linked them with a high-speed network, which became the basis for the commercial Internet of the 1990s.

In the mid-1980s, 
fiber-optic cable
 had become the standard for transmitting communication data speedily. This development of thinner, faster cables made the commercial use of computers even more viable than before. With this increased speed, few limits existed with regard to the amount of information that digital technology could transport.

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, the ARPAnet military venture officially ended. By that time, a growing community of researchers, computer programmers, amateur hackers, and commercial interests had already tapped into the Net, creating tens of thousands of points on the network and the initial audience for its emergence as a mass medium.

The Commercialization of the Internet

The introduction of the World Wide Web and the first web browsers in the 1990s helped transform the Internet into a mass medium. Soon after these developments, the Internet quickly became commercialized, leading to battles between corporations vying to attract the most users and those who wished to preserve the original public, nonprofit nature of the Net.

The World Begins to Browse

Before the 1990s, most of the Internet’s traffic was for e-mail, file transfers, and remote access of computer databases. The 
World Wide Web
 (or the web) changed all that. Developed in the late 1980s by software engineer Tim Berners-Lee at Switzerland’s CERN particle physics lab to help scientists better collaborate, the web was initially a data-linking system that allowed computer-accessed information to associate with, or link to, other information no matter where it was on the Internet. Known as hypertext, this data-linking feature of the web was a breakthrough for those attempting to use the Internet. 
HTML (hypertext markup language)
, the written code that creates web pages and links, is a language that all computers can read; thus, computers with different operating systems, such as Windows or Mac OS, can communicate easily. The development of the web and HTML allowed information to be organized in an easy-to-use, nonlinear manner, making way for the next step in using the Internet.

WEB BROWSERS

The GUI (graphical user interface) of the World Wide Web changed overnight with the release of Mosaic in 1993. As the first popular web browser, Mosaic unleashed the multimedia potential of the Internet. Mosaic was the inspiration for the commercial browser Netscape, which was released a year later.

The release of web 
browsers
—the software packages that help users navigate the web—brought the web to mass audiences. In 1993, computer programmers led by Marc Andreessen at the National Center for

Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign released Mosaic, the first window-based browser to load text and graphics together in a magazine-like layout, with attractive (for its time) fonts and easy-to-use back, forward, home, and bookmark buttons at the top. A year later, Andreessen joined investors in California’s Silicon Valley to introduce a commercial browser, Netscape. These breakthroughs helped universities and businesses, and later home users, get connected.

As the web became the most popular part of the Internet, many thought that the key to commercial success on the Net would be through a web browser. In 1995, Microsoft released its own web browser, Internet Explorer, which overtook Netscape as the most popular web browser. Today, Microsoft has replaced Internet Explorer with its new browser, Edge, while Chrome, Safari, and Firefox remain leading browsers.

Users Link in through Telephone and Cable Wires

In the first decades of the Internet, most people connected to “cyberspace” through telephone wires. In 1985, AOL (formerly America Online) began connecting millions of home users to its proprietary web system via dial-up access, quickly becoming the United States’ top 
Internet service provider (ISP)
. AOL’s success was so great that by 2001, the Internet start-up bought the world’s largest media company, Time Warner—a deal that shocked the industry and signaled the Internet’s economic significance as a vehicle for media content. As connections through 
broadband
, which can quickly download multimedia content, became more available, users moved away from the slower telephone dial-up service and toward high-speed service from cable, telephone, or satellite companies.8 Today, the major ISPs in the United States are AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, Spectrum (owned by Charter Communications), and Cox. There are also hundreds of local services, many offered by regional telephone and cable companies that compete to provide consumers with access to the Internet.

People Embrace Digital Communication

In 
digital communication
, an image, a text, or a sound is converted into electronic signals (represented as a series of binary numbers—ones and zeros) that are then reassembled as a precise reproduction of the image, text, or sound. Digital signals operate as pieces, or bits (from BInary digiTS), of information representing two values, such as yes/no, on/off, or 0/1. Used in various combinations, these digital codes can duplicate, store, and play back the most complex kinds of media content.

E-mail was one of the earliest services of the Internet, and people typically used the e-mail services connected to their ISPs before major web corporations—such as Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft (Hotmail)—began to offer free web-based e-mail accounts to draw users to their sites. Today, all the top e-mail services—each of which now has millions of users—include advertisements in their users’ e-mail messages, one of the costs of the “free” e-mail accounts. Google’s Gmail goes one step further by scanning messages to dynamically match a relevant ad to the text each time an e-mail message is opened. Such targeted advertising has become a hallmark feature of the Internet.

Although e-mail remains a standard for business-related text communications in the digital era, it has been surpassed in popularity by social apps, which include Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter.

Search Engines Organize the Web

SNAPCHAT allows users to send one another photos, videos, and/or text that will disappear after a certain amount of time. Like a lot of popular apps, the program gained a large following from a young audience and expanded out from there. Hundreds of millions of photos are sent through the application every day.

As the number of websites on the Internet quickly expanded, companies seized the opportunity to provide ways to navigate this vast amount of information by providing directories and search engines. One of the more popular search engines, Yahoo!, began as a directory. In 1994, Stanford University graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo created a web page to organize their favorite websites, first into categories, then into more and more subcategories as the web grew. At that point, the entire World Wide Web was almost manageable, with only about twenty-two thousand websites.

Eventually, though, having employees catalog individual websites became impractical. 
Search engines
 offer a more automated route to finding content by allowing users to enter key words or queries to locate related web pages. Search engines are built on mathematical algorithms. Google, released in 1998, became a major success because it introduced a new algorithm that mathematically ranked a page’s popularity based on how many other pages linked to it. In 2016, Google announced it was aware of more than 130 trillion web pages (although it had indexed only a portion of them), up from one billion in 2000.9 By 2018, Google remained the dominant search engine, with a global market share across all platforms of approximately 91.8 percent of searches, with Microsoft’s Bing at 2.8 percent, Baidu (based in China) at 1.7%, Yahoo! at 1.6 percent, and Russia’s Yandex at 0.6 percent.10

SOCIAL MEDIA AND DEMOCRACY

In just a decade, social media have changed the way we consume, relate to, and even produce media, as well as the way we communicate with others. We can share our thoughts and opinions, write or update an encyclopedic entry, start a petition or fund-raising campaign, post a video, create or explore virtual worlds, and instantly reach an audience of thousands of people. As such, social media has proven to be an effective tool for democratic action, bringing to light repressive regimes that thrive on serving up propaganda and hiding their atrocities from view.

One of the earliest instances of democratic action were the wave of protests in more than a dozen Arab nations in North Africa and the Middle East that began in late 2010 and resulted in four rulers’ being forced from power by mid-2012. The period, dubbed “Arab Spring,” began in Tunisia. Young activists, using mobile phones and social media, organized marches and protests across Tunisia. As satellite news networks spread the story and protesters’ videos to the rest of the world, Tunisia’s dictator of nearly twenty-four years fled the country. In the following spring, pro-democracy protests spread to other countries, including Egypt, Bahrain, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, and Oman. In Libya and Yemen, it resulted in civil war, and in Syria, an ongoing civil war with multiple warring factions has thus far left at least 500,000 dead and more than five million displaced, causing the greatest global humanitarian crisis in decades.11

Soon, however, the effectiveness of social media for evil purposes also became clear. One of the warring parties in Syria and Iraq was the terrorist organization ISIS, which turned out to be successful in using the Internet and social media to recruit naïve young men and women from other countries to Syria and Iraq, and to inspire others to commit terrorism in their home countries.12

The events of the Arab Spring in 2011 inspired the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States later that year, in which hundreds of people occupied a park in New York’s financial district and made encampments in hundreds of other cities to protest economic inequality. The physical occupations didn’t last, but the movement changed the language of economic inequality with the chant, “We are the 99 percent.”13 #OccupyWallStreet was the model for another social movement in 2013, Black Lives Matter. After the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting of unarmed African American teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida, Alicia Garza wrote, “Black people, I love you. I love us. Our lives matter” in a Facebook post describing her anger and heartbreak. When Garza’s friend Patrisse Cullors saw the post and shared it along with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, these same words inspired a new chapter in civil rights activism. Garza and Cullors brought in friend Opal Tometi, and the three women, all in their late twenties or early thirties, cofounded the Black Lives Matter movement. #BlackLivesMatter helped change the conversation about race in America, and was a leading group in protests following the 2014 shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. By 2018, the group had twenty-one chapters in North America. In 2017, another movement emerged in light of the sexual misconduct allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein. The hashtag #metoo became a rallying point in social media for women to reveal stories of sexual harassment and assault in the workplace. The hashtag was first used by Tarana Burke in 2006 for women of color to share stories of sexual abuse.14 In 2017, actor Alyssa Milano used the term to encourage women to acknowledge if they had been sexually harassed or assaulted. Millions of women responded, and the hashtag set off a national and international discussion, as powerful men in Hollywood and other communities were publicly accused of sexual abuse, which, in many cases, resulted in the accused abuser’s downfall.

Hashtag activism—so called because of the use of the symbol # before a word or phrase that quickly communicates a larger idea, event, or cause—offers a compelling illustration of just how powerful social media can be when it is channeled toward a cause.

The flexible and decentralized nature of the Internet and social media is in large part what makes them such powerful tools for subverting control. In China, the Communist Party has tightly controlled mass communication for decades. As an increasing number of Chinese citizens take to the Internet, an estimated thirty thousand government censors monitor or even block web pages, blogs, chat rooms, and e-mails. The Chinese government frequently blocks social media sites. Repeated censoring of Google’s Chinese search engine (Google.cn) caused Google to move it to Hong Kong. And for those who persist in practicing “subversive” free speech, there can be severe penalties: Paris-based Reporters without Borders reports that fifteen Chinese journalists and thirty-nine netizens were in prison in 2018 for writing articles and blogs that criticized the government.15 Still, Chinese dissenters bravely play cat-and-mouse with Chinese censors, using free services like Hushmail, Freegate, and Ultrasurf (the latter two produced by Chinese immigrants in the United States) to break through the Chinese government’s blockade. (For more on how the Internet can interact with politics, see “Examining Ethics: Social Media Fraud and Elections”.)

THE BLACK LIVES MATTER MOVEMENT, which began as a response to George Zimmerman’s acquittal after he shot and killed Trayvon Martin, has grown to include dozens of chapters across the United States. Per the organization, “[o]ur intention from the very beginning was to connect Black people from all over the world who have a shared desire for justice to act together in their communities. The impetus for that commitment was, and still is, the rampant and deliberate violence inflicted on us by the state.”

EXAMINING ETHICS

Social Media Fraud and Elections

In the early years of social media, it seemed as if democracy had a new friend. Ideally, social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube would open up political conversation, enabling democratic discourse to flourish. In 2010, the London newspaper the Guardian optimistically called Facebook “the election’s town square” and hoped “that people [were] prepared to let their politics show online.”1 The Guardian was right: People did let their politics show online, and many of them posted relevant news stories, offered thoughtful discussion, and organized friends to become more politically involved. It turned out, however, that there were a lot of jerks hanging out in the election’s town square: people posting nasty political memes, heated arguments, and insults. It all came to a head with the 2016 presidential election. “What had been simmering all year suddenly boiled over as [the] presidential election cycle made online friends hostile and prompted many to mute or unfriend those whose political rantings were creating stress,” the Dayton Daily News wrote.2

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the worst of it. There were also criminals in the election’s town square, as foreign countries infiltrated social media to spread political disinformation and disrupt America’s 2016 presidential election. The assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division testified before a U.S. Senate committee in June 2017 regarding a report, “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent Elections.” He said, in part:

Russia’s 2016 presidential election influence effort was its boldest to date in the United States. Moscow employed a multi-faceted approach intended to undermine confidence in our democratic process. . . . This Russian effort included the weaponization of stolen cyber information, the use of Russia’s English-language state media as a strategic messaging platform, and the mobilization of social media bots and trolls to spread disinformation and amplify Russian messaging.3

The extent of disinformation has been shocking. On Facebook, an estimated 126 million users might have been exposed to the fake ads and event posts produced by a Russian troll farm between 2015 and 2017. According to a Facebook official, “Many of the ads and posts we’ve seen so far are deeply disturbing—seemingly intended to amplify societal divisions and pit groups of people against each other.”4 By 2018, Twitter had identified more than 3,100 Russian-linked troll accounts spreading divisive information during the 2016 election, and said it had notified more than 677,000 people exposed to the fake messages.5 Google also found at least two phony Russian accounts and eighteen fake YouTube channels with forty-three hours of content.6

That’s what is known so far, as the U.S. Department of Justice continues its investigation. Russian trolls have also attempted to disrupt elections in the United Kingdom (where it tried to spread discord during the Brexit campaign), in France, and in several other European countries.

Because Europe has been dealing with Russian propaganda for decades, most of its nations have a head start on strategies to combat such disinformation. For example, in Sweden, there is a school literacy program to teach young people to identify Russian propaganda. Lithuania has citizen volunteers in the “Elves vs. Trolls” battle, with the good citizen investigators (elves) researching and revealing Russian trolls. Britain and France monitor Facebook closely and pressure the social media company to close down fake accounts. In Germany, political candidates all agreed not to use bots—fake accounts (mostly on Twitter) that make automated posts in an effort to boost a topic’s profile—in their political social media campaigns. In Slovakia, fourteen hundred advertisers have pulled their business from websites identified by researchers as the work of trolls. In Brussels, a European Union task force has published thousands of phony stories to reveal their deception. In nearly all European countries affected, fact-checking and investigative journalism are additional countermeasures to the Russian troll offensive.7

What ideas do you think would work best in America to combat political social media fraud?

CONVERGENCE AND MOBILE MEDIA

The innovation of digital communication enables all media content to be created in the same basic way, which makes media convergence, the technological merging of content in different mass media, possible.

In recent years, the Internet has become the hub for convergence, a place where music, television shows, radio stations, newspapers, magazines, books, games, and movies are created, distributed, and presented. Although convergence initially happened on desktop computers, the popularity of notebook computers and then the introduction of smartphones and tablets have hastened the pace of media convergence and made the idea of accessing any media content anywhere a reality.

Media Converges on Our PCs and TVs

First there was the telephone, invented in the 1870s. Then came radio in the 1920s, TV in the 1950s, and eventually the personal computer in the 1970s. Each device had its own unique and distinct function. Aside from a few exceptions, such as the clock radio, that was how electronic devices worked.

The rise of the personal computer industry in the mid-1970s first opened the possibility for unprecedented technological convergence. However, PC-based convergence didn’t truly materialize until a few decades later, when broadband Internet connections improved the multimedia capabilities of computers.

By the early 2000s, computers connected to the Internet allowed an array of digital media to converge in one space and be easily shared. Media are also converging on “smart” television sets that are manufactured to be Internet ready. Video game consoles like the Xbox One, Wii U, and PS4, and set-top devices like Apple TV, Google Chromecast, Roku, and Amazon Fire TV, offer additional entertainment-content access via their Internet connections. In the early years of the web, people would choose only one gateway to the Internet and media content, usually a computer or a television. Today, however, wireless networks and the recent technological developments in various media devices mean that consumers regularly use more than one avenue to access all types of media content.

Mobile Devices Propel Convergence

Mobile telephones have been around for decades (like the giant “brick” mobile phones of the 1970s and 1980s), but the smartphones of the twenty-first century are substantially different creatures. Introduced in 2002, the BlackBerry was the first popular Internet-capable smartphone in the United States. Mobile phones took another big leap in 2007 with Apple’s introduction of the iPhone, which combined qualities of its iPod digital music player with telephone and Internet service, all accessed through a sleek touchscreen. The next year, Apple opened its App Store, featuring free and low-cost software applications for the iPhone (and the iPod Touch and, later, the iPad) created by third-party developers, vastly increasing the utility of the iPhone.

DEVICES LIKE AMAZON’S ECHO smart speaker allow users to control many aspects of their lives, such as playing music, ordering items, controlling their lights or thermostat, with just the sound of their voices.

In 2008, the first smartphone to run on Google’s competing Android platform was released. By 2017, Android phones (sold by companies such as Samsung, HTC, LG, and Motorola, and supported by the Google Play app market and the Amazon Appstore) held 53.3 percent of the smartphone market share in the United States, while Apple’s iPhone had a 44.9 percent share; Microsoft and BlackBerry smartphones constituted the remainder of the market.16 The precipitous drop of the BlackBerry’s market standing (the company was late to add touchscreens and apps to its phones) illustrates the tumultuous competition among mobile devices.

In 2010, Apple introduced the iPad, a tablet computer suitable for reading magazines, newspapers, and books; watching video; and using visual applications. The tablets became Apple’s fastest-growing product line, selling at a rate of twenty-five million a year. Apple added cameras, faster graphics, and a thinner design to subsequent generations of the iPad, as companies like Samsung (Galaxy), Amazon (Kindle Fire), Microsoft (Surface), and Google (Nexus) rolled out competing tablets.

The Impact of Media Convergence and Mobile Media

Convergence of media content and technology has forever changed our relationship with media. Today, media consumption is mobile and flexible; we don’t have to miss out on media content just because we aren’t home in time to catch a show, didn’t find the book at the bookstore, or forgot to buy the newspaper. Increasingly, we demand and are able to get access to media when we want it, where we want it, and in multiple formats. In order to satisfy those demands and to stay relevant in such a converged world, traditional media companies have had to dramatically change their approach to media content and their business models.

Our Changing Relationship with the Media

The merging of all media onto one device, such as a tablet, smartphone, or smartwatch, blurs the distinctions of what used to be separate media. For example, USA Today newspaper and CBS network television news used to deliver the news in completely different formats; today, however, their web formats look quite similar, with listings of headlines, rankings of the most popular stories, local weather forecasts, photo galleries, and video. New forms of media are constantly challenging old categories. Is listening to an hour-long podcast of public radio’s This American Life on a smartphone more like experiencing a radio program or more like experiencing an audio book?

Not only are the formats morphing, but we can now also experience the media in more than one manner simultaneously. Fans of television shows like This Is Us, The Walking Dead, and Stranger Things, or viewers of live events like NFL football, often multitask, reading live blogs during broadcasts or sharing their own commentary with friends on Facebook and Twitter. For those who miss the initial broadcasts, converged media offer a second life for media content through deep archive access and repurposed content on other platforms. For example, cable shows like Game of Thrones and Ripper Street have found audiences beyond their initial broadcasts through their DVD collections and online video services like Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, and Hulu. This has also led to the resurrection and continuation of many TV shows that would have stayed canceled in the past—for example, Arrested Development’s revival on Netflix.

Our Changing Relationship with the Internet

Mobile devices and social media have altered our relationship with the Internet. Two trends are noteworthy: (1) Apple now makes more than eight times as much money selling iPhones, iPads, services, and accessories as it does selling computers, and (2) the number of Facebook users (more than two billion in 2018) keeps increasing. The significance of these two trends is that through Apple devices and Facebook, we now inhabit a different kind of Internet—what some call a closed Internet, or a walled garden.17

In a world where the small screens of smartphones are becoming the preferred medium for linking to the Internet, we typically don’t get the full, open Internet, one represented by the vast searches brought to us by Google. Instead, we get a more managed Internet, brought to us by apps or platforms that carry out specific functions via the Internet. Are you looking for a nearby restaurant? Don’t search on the Internet—use this app especially designed for that purpose. And the distributors of these apps often act as gatekeepers. Apple has more than 2.2 million apps in its App Store, and Apple approves every one of them. The competing Android app store on Google Play has 2.7 million apps, but Google exercises less control over approval of apps than Apple does.

Facebook offers a similar walled garden experience. Facebook began as a highly managed environment, only allowing those with .edu e-mail addresses. Although anyone can now join Facebook, the interface and the user experience on the site are still highly managed by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his staff. For example, Facebook has installed measures to stop search engines from indexing users’ photos, Wall posts, videos, and other data. The effect of both Apple’s devices and the Facebook interface is a clean, orderly, easy-to-use environment but one in which we are “tethered” to the Apple App Store or to Facebook.18

The Changing Economics of Media and the Internet

The digital turn in the mass media has profoundly changed the economics of the Internet. Since the advent of Napster in 1999, which brought (illegal) file-sharing to the music industry, each media industry has struggled to rethink how to distribute its content for the digital age. The content itself remains important—people still want quality news, television, movies, music, and games—but they want it in digital formats and for mobile devices.

Apple’s response to Napster established the new media economics. Late Apple CEO Steve Jobs struck a deal with the music industry: Apple would provide a new market for music on the iTunes store, selling digital music that customers could play on their iPods (and later on their iPhones and iPads). In return, Apple got a 30 percent cut of the revenue for all music sales on iTunes, simply for being the “pipes” that delivered the music. As music stores went out of business all across America, Apple sold billions of songs and hundreds of millions of iPods, all without requiring a large chain of retail stores.

Amazon started as a more traditional online retailer, taking orders online and delivering merchandise from its warehouses. As books took the turn into the digital era, Amazon created its own device, the Kindle, and followed Apple’s model. Amazon started selling e-books, taking its cut for delivering the content. Along the way, Amazon and Apple (plus Google, Facebook, and Microsoft) have become leading media companies. They are among the top digital distributors of books, newspapers, magazines, music, television, movies, and games, and are now making their own content, too, including television, movies, digital games, and books.

The Next Era: The Semantic Web

Many Internet visionaries talk about the next generation of the Internet as the Semantic Web, a term that gained prominence after hypertext inventor Tim Berners-Lee and two coauthors published an influential article in a 2001 issue of Scientific American.19 If semantics is the study of meanings, then the Semantic Web is about creating a more meaningful—or more organized and trustworthy—web. To do that, the future promises a layered, connected database of information that software agents will sift through and process automatically for us. Whereas the search engines of today generate relevant web pages for us to read, the software of the Semantic Web will make our lives even easier as it places the basic information of the web into meaningful categories—family, friends, calendars, mutual interests, location—and makes significant connections for us.

The best example of the Semantic Web is Apple’s voice recognition assistant, Siri, first shipped with its iPhone 4S in 2011. Siri uses conversational voice recognition to answer questions, find locations, and interact with various iPhone functionalities, such as the calendar, reminders, the weather app, the music player, the web browser, and the maps function. Other Siri searches draw on the databases of external services, such as Yelp for restaurant locations and reviews, and StubHub for ticket information. Another example of the Semantic Web is the Samsung refrigerator that takes a photo of the interior every time the door closes. The owner may be away at the supermarket but can call up a photo of the interior to be reminded of what should be on the shopping list. The refrigerator can also be used to order groceries, with its built-in touchscreen and Wi-Fi connection.20 Voice recognition apps like Genie, Google Assistant, Cortana, and Bixby have brought voice recognition to Android devices as well. Voice recognition has also recently been pushed into a flourishing new market of home assistant and entertainment devices, like Amazon’s Echo speakers (with Amazon’s Alexa), Apple’s HomePod (with Siri), and Google Home (with Google Assistant).

THE SPIKE JONZE FILM HER (2013), set in the near future, explores the relationship between ahuman and an operating system. The voice-based operating system brings to mind Apple’s Siri, which moves users toward a deeper, more personally relevant web. Google Now and Microsoft Cortana are similar voice-activated personal digital assistants for mobile devices.

THE ECONOMICS AND ISSUES OF THE INTERNET

One of the unique things about the Internet is that no one owns it. But that hasn’t stopped some corporations from trying to control it. Since the 
Telecommunications Act of 1996
, which overhauled the nation’s communications regulations, most regional and long-distance phone companies and cable operators have competed against one another to provide connections to the Internet. However, there is more to controlling the Internet than being the service provider for it. Companies have realized the potential of dominating the Internet through search engines, software, social networking, and access to content, all in order to sell the essential devices that display the content or to amass users who become an audience for advertising.

Ownership and control of the Internet are connected to three Internet issues that command much public attention: the security of personal and private information, the appropriateness of online materials, and the accessibility and openness of the Internet. Important questions have been raised: Should personal or sensitive government information be private, or should the Internet be an enormous public record? Should the Internet be a completely open forum, or should certain types of communication be limited or prohibited? Should all people have equal access to the Internet, or should it be available only to those who can afford it? For each of these issues, there have been heated debates but no easy resolutions.

Ownership: Controlling the Internet

By the end of the 1990s, four companies—AOL, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google—had emerged as the leading forces on the Internet. In today’s converged world, in which mobile access to digital content prevails, Microsoft and Google still remain powerful. Those two, along with Apple, Amazon, and Facebook, constitute the leading companies of digital media’s rapidly changing world. Of the five, all but Facebook also operate proprietary cloud services and encourage their customers to store all their files in their “walled garden” for easy access across all devices. This ultimately builds brand loyalty and generates customer fees for file storage.21

Microsoft, est. 1975

Microsoft, the oldest of the dominant digital firms (established by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975), is an enormously wealthy software company that struggled for years to develop an Internet strategy. As its software business declined, its flourishing digital game business (Xbox) allowed it to continue to innovate and find a different path to a future in digital media. The company finally found moderate success on the Internet with its search engine Bing in 2009. With the 2012 release of the Windows Phone 8 mobile operating system and the Surface tablet and lightweight laptop, Microsoft made headway in the mobile media business. In 2014, Microsoft brought its venerable office software to mobile devices, with Office for iPad and Office Mobile for iPhones and Android phones, all of which work with OneDrive, Microsoft’s cloud service. Microsoft is also developing the HoloLens, a holographic computer operated via a headset.

Apple, est. 1976

Apple, Inc., was founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976 as a home computer company. Apple was only moderately successful until 2001, when Jobs, having been forced out of the company for a decade, returned. Apple introduced the iPod and iTunes in 2003, two innovations that led the company to become the number one music retailer in the United States. Then in 2007, Jobs introduced the iPhone, transforming the mobile phone industry. The company further redefined wireless computing with the iPad in 2010, the Apple Watch in 2015, and the Siri-controlled Apple HomePod in 2018.

With the iPhone and iPad now at the core of Apple’s business, the company expanded to include providing content—music, TV shows, movies, games, newspapers, magazines—to sell its media devices. The next wave of Apple’s innovations was the iCloud, a new storage and syncing service that enables users to access media content anywhere (with a wireless connection) on its mobile devices. The iCloud also helps ensure that customers purchase their media content through Apple’s iTunes store, further tethering users to its media systems. (For more on Apple devices and how they are made, see “Global Village: Designed in California, Assembled in China”.)

GLOBAL VILLAGE

Designed in California, Assembled in China

There is a now-famous story involving the release of the iPhone in 2007. The late Apple CEO Steve Jobs was carrying the prototype in his pocket about one month before its release and discovered that his keys, also in his pocket, were scratching the plastic screen. Known as a stickler for design perfection, Jobs reportedly gathered his fellow executives in a room and told them (angrily), “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”1 This demand would have implications for a factory complex in China, called Foxconn, where iPhones are assembled. When the order trickled down to a Foxconn supervisor, he woke up eight thousand workers in the middle of the night, gave them a biscuit and a cup of tea, then started them on twelve-hour shifts, fitting glass screens into the iPhone frames. Within four days, Foxconn workers were churning out ten thousand iPhones daily.

On its sleek packaging, Apple proudly proclaims that its products are “Designed by Apple in California”—a slogan that evokes beaches, sunshine, and Silicon Valley, where the best and brightest in American engineering ingenuity reside. The products also say, usually in a less visible location, “Assembled in China,” which suggests little except that the components of the iPhone, iPad, iPod, or Apple computer were put together in a factory in the world’s most populous country.

It wasn’t until 2012 that most Apple customers learned that China’s Foxconn was the company where their devices are assembled. Investigative reports by the New York Times revealed a company with ongoing problems in the areas of labor conditions and worker safety, including fatal explosions and a spate of worker suicides.2 (Foxconn responded in part by erecting nets around its buildings to prevent fatal jumps.)

Foxconn (also known as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd., with headquarters in Taiwan) is China’s largest and most prominent private employer, with 1.2 million employees—more than any American company except Walmart. Foxconn assembles an incredible 40 percent of the world’s electronics and earns more revenue than ten of its competitors combined.3 And Foxconn is not just Apple’s favorite place to outsource production; nearly every global electronics company is connected to the manufacturing giant: Amazon (Kindle), Microsoft (Xbox), Sony (PlayStation), Dell, HP, IBM, Motorola, and Toshiba all feed their products to the vast Foxconn factory network.

Behind this manufacturing might is a network of factories now legendary for its enormity. Foxconn’s largest factory compound is in Shenzhen. Dubbed “Factory City,” the one-square-mile complex employs roughly 300,000 people, many of whom live in the dormitories (dorms sleep seven to a room) on the Foxconn campus.4 The workers, many of whom come from rural areas in China, often begin their shift at 4:00 A.M. and work until late at night, performing monotonous, routinized tasks—for example, filing the aluminum shavings from iPad casings six thousand times a day. Thousands of these full-time workers are under the age of eighteen.

Conditions at Foxconn might, in some ways, be better than the conditions in the poverty-stricken small villages from which most of its workers come. But the low pay, long hours, dangerous work conditions, and suicide nets are likely not what the young workers had hoped for when they left their families behind.

In light of the news reports about the problems at Foxconn, Apple joined the Fair Labor Association (FLA), an international nonprofit that monitors labor conditions. The FLA inspected factories and surveyed more than thirty-five thousand Foxconn workers. Its 2012 study verified a range of serious issues. Workers regularly labored more than sixty hours per week, with some employees working more than seven days in a row. Other workers weren’t compensated for overtime. More than 43 percent of the workers reported they had witnessed or experienced an accident, and 64 percent of the workers surveyed said that the compensation does not meet their basic needs. In addition, the FLA found the labor union at Foxconn to be an unsatisfactory channel for addressing worker concerns, as representatives from management dominated the union’s membership.5

In 2014, Apple reported that its supplier responsibility program had resulted in improved labor conditions at supplier factories. But Apple might not have taken any steps had it not been for the New York Times investigative reports and the intense public scrutiny that followed.

Investigative journalism and other reports have revealed a few more interesting things about Apple and Foxconn. First, as Citizens for Tax Justice reported, at the end of 2015 (the most recent year data was available), more than three hundred top companies, including Apple, “collectively held $2.4 trillion offshore” to avoid paying taxes on it in the United States.6 These stockpiled profits deprived the United States of up to $695 billion in taxes—money that could be spent on schools, infrastructure, paying down the national debt, and so on. Apple led the list of corporations in 2015 with $200.1 billion in income held offshore, skipping out on nearly $60.9 billion in U.S. tax collections. (Microsoft was also on the list, with $108.3 billion in income stashed offshore.)

Second, even though Apple is one of the wealthiest companies in the world, it regularly extracts concessions from states and municipalities for its building projects. For example, to get Apple to locate a $1.3 billion data center in Iowa in 2017, the state and the city of Waukee offered a package of $213 million in tax breaks and incentives. With the project creating only about fifty permanent jobs, it averaged out to a $4.26 million public subsidy for each job. At that same time, the state of Iowa was administering budget cuts for hundreds of millions of dollars in state revenue shortfalls. A Los Angeles Times headline summarized the situation: “Apple breaks new ground in squeezing locals for huge tax breaks while offering almost no jobs.”7

Foxconn also made news in 2017 in the United States with a proposed flat-screen assembly plant near Kenosha, Wisconsin. To lure the manufacturer to Wisconsin, the state offered Foxconn $3 billion in cash incentives and tax breaks, and suspended environmental regulations for the project.The Village of Mount Pleasant and Racine County offered an additional $764 million in support for a plant expected to create up to thirteen thousand jobs. The state’s public subsidy for each job is at least $230,700, assuming Foxconn creates the number of jobs anticipated. According to the state’s nonpartisan legislative fiscal bureau, Wisconsin’s $3 billion investment in the factory will not break even until the year 2042.8

The cases of Apple, Foxconn, and other companies raises the question: What is our role as citizens and consumers to ensure that digital companies are ethical and transparent in the treatment of the workers who make our electronic devices and in their financial dealings with our country and communities?

Amazon, est. 1995

Amazon started its business in 1995 in Seattle, selling the world’s oldest mass medium (books) online. Amazon has since developed into the world’s largest e-commerce store, selling not only books but also electronics, garden tools, clothing, appliances, and toys. Still, with the introduction of its Kindle e-reader in 2007, Amazon was following Apple’s model of using content to sell devices. The Kindle became the first widely successful e-reader, and by 2010, e-books were outselling hardcovers and paperbacks at Amazon. In 2011, in response to Apple’s iPad, Amazon released its own color touchscreen tablet, the Kindle Fire, giving Amazon a device that can play all the media—including music, TV, movies, and games—it sells online and in its Appstore. Like Apple, Amazon has a Cloud Player for making media content portable. Amazon is now also competing with television, cable networks, and Netflix by producing Amazon Original television series for its streaming service and even breaking into feature films. In addition, Amazon’s Alexa-controlled Echo speakers have become the best-selling voice-assisted home digital assistant.

Google, est. 1998

Google, established in 1998, had instant success with its algorithmic search engine and now controls over 90 percent of the global search market, generating billions of dollars of revenue yearly through the pay-per-click advertisements that accompany key-word searches. Google has also branched out into a number of other Internet offerings, including Google Shopping, Google Maps, Gmail, Blogger, the Chrome browser, YouTube, the Chromecast television device, and Google Home. Google has also challenged Microsoft’s Office programs with Google Apps, a cloud-based bundle that includes word-processing, spreadsheet, calendar, messaging, and e-mail software. Google competes against Apple’s iTunes with Google Play, an online media store; challenges Facebook with the social networking tool Google+; and vies with Amazon’s voice-controlled Echo speakers with its own Google Home digital assistant.

AFTER YEARS IN THE RETAIL BUSINESS, Amazon has been experimenting with content creation, commissioning groups of series, making the pilots available on its Amazon Prime streaming service, and taking both viewer and critical feedback into account when deciding which pilot episodes to expand into series. Transparent, about a family adjusting to a parent’s coming out as transgendered, established Amazon as a streaming video contender in 2014. Its first season received eleven Emmy nominations. Amazon has developed other successful shows, including the award-winning series The Man in the High Castle and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (pictured). In addition, Amazon Studios was the first streaming service to receive an Academy Awards Best Picture nomination, for Manchester by the Sea in 2017.

Facebook, est. 2004

Established in 2004 by then-twenty-three-year-old Harvard psychology major and avid computer programmer Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s immense, socially dynamic audience (about two-thirds of the U.S. population and more than 2.1 billion users around the globe)22 is its biggest resource. Like Google, it has become a data processor as much as a social media service, collecting every tidbit of information about its users—what we “Like,” where we live, what we read, and what we want—and selling this information to advertisers. Because Facebook users reveal so much about themselves in their profiles and the messages they share with others, Facebook can offer advertisers exceptionally tailored ads: A user who recently got engaged gets ads like “Impress Your Valentine,” “Vacation in Hawaii,” and “Are You Pregnant?” while a teenage girl sees ads for prom dresses, sweet-sixteen party venues, and “Chat with Other Teens” websites.

As a young company, Facebook has suffered growing pains while trying to balance its corporate interests (capitalizing on its millions of users) with its users’ interest in controlling the privacy of their own information. Facebook has focused on becoming more mobile with its purchase of Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion and its 2014 purchase of WhatsApp, a global instant messaging service. Facebook made its first major investment in hardware with its purchase of Oculus VR, a virtual reality technology company, for $2 billion in 2014. The purchase set off a flurry of announcements and investments throughout the industry, as other digital companies aimed to compete with Facebook in the new virtual reality market.

Targeted Advertising and Data Mining

In the early years of the web, advertising took the form of traditional display ads placed on pages. The display ads were no more effective than newspaper or magazine advertisements, and because they reached small, general audiences, they weren’t very profitable. But in the late 1990s, web advertising began to shift to search engines. Paid links appeared as “sponsored links” at the top, bottom, and side of a search engine result list and even, depending on the search engine, within the “objective” result list itself. Every time a user clicks on a sponsored link, the advertiser pays the search engine for the click-through. For online retailers, having paid placement in searches can be a good thing.

Advertising has since spread to other parts of the Internet, including social networking sites, e-mail, and mobile apps. For advertisers—who for years struggled with how to measure people’s attention to ads—these activities make advertising easy to track, effective in reaching the desired niche audience, and relatively inexpensive, since ads get wasted less often on uninterested parties. For example, Google scans the contents of Gmail messages; Facebook uses profile information, status updates, and “Likes” to deliver individualized, real-time ads to users’ screens; and Apple targets users through in-app ads. The rise in smartphone use has contributed to extraordinary growth in mobile advertising, which jumped from $3.4 billion in 2012 to $40 billion in 2017, and is predicted to reach $65 billion by 2020.23

Gathering users’ location and purchasing habits has been a boon for advertising, but these data-collecting systems also function as consumer surveillance and 
data mining
 operations. The practice of data mining also raises issues of Internet security and privacy. Millions of people have embraced the ease of 
e-commerce
: the buying and selling of products and services on the Internet. What many people don’t know is that their personal information may be used without their knowledge. For example, in 2011, the Federal Trade Commission charged Facebook with a list of eight violations in which Facebook told consumers their information would be private but made it public to advertisers and third-party applications. Facebook settled with the FTC by fixing the problems and agreeing to submit to privacy audits through the year 2031.24 But, Facebook came under fire in 2018 after it revealed that a political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, gained access to 87 million Facebook user accounts, and after reports that Facebook also gave phone and device makers access to data on users and their friends.

One common method that commercial interests use to track the browsing habits of computer users is 
cookies
, or information profiles that are automatically collected and transferred between computer servers whenever users access websites.25 The legitimate purpose of a cookie is to verify that a user has been cleared for access to a particular website, such as a library database that is open only to university faculty and students. However, cookies can also be used to create marketing profiles of web users to target them for advertising. Most commercial websites require the user to accept cookies in order to gain access to the site.

Even more unethical and intrusive is 
spyware
, information-gathering software that is often secretly bundled with free downloaded software. Spyware can be used to send pop-up ads to users’ computer screens, to enable unauthorized parties to collect personal or account information of users, or even to plant a malicious click-fraud program on a computer, which generates phony clicks on web ads that force an advertiser to pay for each click.

In 1998, the FTC developed fair information practice principles for online privacy to address the unauthorized collection of personal data, requiring disclosure, consumer control of data, and prohibiting unauthorized use. Unfortunately, the FTC has no power to enforce these principles, and most websites did not enforce them.26 As a result, consumer and privacy advocates called for stronger regulations, such as requiring websites to adopt 
opt-in or opt-out policies
. Opt-in policies, favored by consumer and privacy advocates, require websites to obtain explicit permission from consumers before the sites can collect browsing history data. Opt-out policies, favored by data-mining corporations, allow for the automatic collection of browsing history data unless the consumer requests to “opt out” of the practice. In 2012, the FTC approved a report recommending that Congress adopt “Do Not Track” legislation to limit tracking of user information on websites and mobile devices and to enable users to easily opt out of data collection. Several web browsers now offer “Do Not Track” options, while other web tools, like Ghostery, detect web tags, bugs, and other trackers, generating a list of all the sites following your moves. On May 25, 2018, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) became effective, requiring informed consent before data is collected on any user. The GDPR also has new, stronger penalties for violations. Although the GDPR only applies to EU citizens, the rules became the default standard for global Internet companies, and many companies operating in the U.S. sent out notices to customers about their updated privacy policies.

Security: The Challenge to Keep Personal Information Private

When you watch television, listen to the radio, read a book, or go to the movies, you do not need to provide personal information to others. However, when you use the Internet, whether you are signing up for an e-mail account, shopping online, or even just surfing the web, you give away personal information—voluntarily or not. As a result, government surveillance, online fraud, and unethical data-gathering methods have become common, making the Internet a potentially treacherous place.

MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS


Note to Self for Healthy Digital Consumption

Note to Self with Manoush Zomorodi is a popular podcast about digital culture from WNYC public radio. Zomorodi questions common assumptions about tech culture, and offers a set of media literacy challenges to help us use technology more mindfully. How can we make information overload disappear and enjoy healthier digital consumption?

To answer these questions, get ready for the five-day “Infomagical” challenge.
*
 Search “wnycinfomagical” for a project overview and links to instructions for each day of the challenge. Begin by clicking on “Why Infomagical” to access Note to Self ’s “The Case for Infomagical” podcast to understand how to participate. Then pick a concrete goal for the week from the following list.

· I want to be more creative.

· I want to be more up to date on current events.

· I want to be more connected to friends and family.

· I want to be more focused on one topic or skill (pick one).

· I want to be more in tune with myself.

You will want to stick with this goal the entire week.

Beginning on Monday, follow the basic instructions below. Every page on the Infomagical website contains helpful information and a worthwhile seven- to fourteen-minute podcast.

MONDAY, Day 1: “Magical Day”

The first challenge is about multitasking. Your instructions are to only do one thing at a time, because studies have shown us that our brain actually can’t process more than one task simultaneously. We are, in fact, far more productive when we singletask. And yet most of us are so prone to multitasking we don’t even think twice about it.

Here are the basic Monday instructions from Note to Self:

All day long, do just one thing at a time. If you catch yourself doing two things, switch your focus back to one. Don’t read an article and Tweet about it—read it, then Tweet. Write an e-mail until you’ve finished it and hit “send.” Perhaps even take a moment to just drink your coffee. Use your Infomagical week goal to prioritize which thing to do when.

TUESDAY, Day 2: “Magical Phone”

The second challenge is about de-cluttering. Many of the apps on our phones are no longer useful to us, or maybe they no longer spark joy when we use them. Organizing our apps by concentrating on what to keep (rather than what to throw away) is a mindful exercise toward making our devices more task oriented. Think about this: Will uncluttering our apps, as Zomorodi suggests we do, also unclutter our brain?

Here are the basic Tuesday instructions from Note to Self:

Today, you will rearrange the apps on your phone. You do not necessarily need to delete anything. You just need to weigh the value of each one, delete the ones that (a) you do not use or (b) do not bring you joy. Pull all your remaining apps into folders—ideally, just one folder. When you’ve finished, set your phone’s background wallpaper to an image that reminds you of your Infomagical week goal.

WEDNESDAY, Day 3: “Magical Brain”

The third challenge is about avoiding the emotional labor of keeping up with everything. Because information overload is both draining and stimulating, the goal here is to focus on only those things that actually matter to you. And in return for concentrating on your information choices, Zomorodi states, “You are going to reveal your brain’s hidden capabilities.”

Here are the basic Wednesday instructions from Note to Self:

Today, you will avoid clicking on something “everyone is talking about” unless it contributes to your information goal. This might be a trending topic or a “must read” or whichever article or video or .GIF everyone in your world is sharing. You’ve got a strict rule in place: “If this does not make me [insert your Infomagical week goal here], I won’t click.”

THURSDAY, Day 4: “Magical Connection”

The fourth challenge is about having meaningful conversations and trying out the seven-minute rule. According to social psychologist Sherry Turkle, we can only decide if a face-to-face conversation is “interesting” after we engage in it for seven minutes (or more). But today we are so impatient with—and afraid of—conversation lulls or any kind of awkwardness (inevitable with face-to-face talk, right?) that we avoid these discussions altogether. Students even avoid visiting their professors during office hours because it just seems easier to send an e-mail. But as a result, we are missing out on the meaningful bits. Today, your goal is to skip the texting and e-mail and make at least one magical face-to-face connection.

Here are the basic Thursday instructions from Note to Self:

Do something with all that wonderful goal-oriented information you’ve been consuming. Discuss something you’ve heard/read/watched with someone by phone or in person for at least seven minutes.

FRIDAY, Day 5: “Magical Life”

The fifth challenge is about making technology serve you, instead of the other way around.

Here are the basic Friday instructions from Note to Self:

Apply whatever you learned or observed about yourself, and think about how to apply this magical feeling going forward. How can you use the idea of creating a priority, a goal, to create a magical life?

How was it? What did you learn? As Note to Self ’s Zomorodi suggests, try to come up with a broader goal for tackling information overload (this can even be a sort of mantra). Put it on a sticky note, and affix it to your laptop. Here are two of her examples: Spend forty-five minutes of each hour online working or doing homework, and reserve the other fifteen minutes for fun; or think more about what you read. Perhaps you may want to give face-to-face conversations more of a try; or your mantra could be: “Read more [], text less,” and talk, face-to-face, about your newfound ideas with your friends. Whatever you decide to do personally, bring your collective experiences to the entire class and have a class-wide discussion about digital technology and making information overload a thing of the past.


*
NOTE: The project on the WNYC website is no longer interactive, so you don’t have to sign up and “Join Infomagical.”

THIS NEW YORKER CARTOON illustrates an increasingly rare phenomenon.

Government Surveillance

Since the inception of the Internet, government agencies worldwide have obtained communication logs, web browser histories, and the online records of individual users who thought their online activities were private. In the United States, for example, the USA PATRIOT Act (which became law about a month after the September 11 attacks in 2001, with most provisions renewed in 2006, 2011, and 2015) grants sweeping powers to law-enforcement agencies to intercept individuals’ online communications, including e-mail and browsing records. The act was intended to allow the government to more easily uncover and track potential terrorists, but many now argue that it is too vaguely worded, allowing the government to unconstitutionally probe the personal records of citizens without probable cause and for reasons other than preventing terrorism. Moreover, searches of the Internet permit law-enforcement agencies to gather huge amounts of data, including the communications of people who are not the targets of an investigation. Documents leaked to the news media in 2013 by former CIA employee and former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA has continued its domestic spying program, collecting bulk Internet and mobile phone data on millions of Americans for more than a decade.

Online Fraud

In addition to being an avenue for surveillance, the Internet is increasingly a conduit for online robbery and identity theft, the illegal obtaining of personal credit and identity information in order to fraudulently spend other people’s money. Computer hackers have the ability to infiltrate Internet databases (from banks to hospitals to even the Pentagon) to obtain personal information and to steal credit card numbers from online retailers. Identity theft victimizes hundreds of thousands of people a year, and clearing one’s name can take a very long time and cost a lot of money. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, about 6.15 percent of Americans were victims of identity theft in 2017, totaling about $16 billion in losses.27 One particularly costly form of Internet identity theft is known as 
phishing
. This scam involves phony e-mail messages that appear to be from official websites—such as eBay, PayPal, or the user’s university or bank—asking customers to update their credit card numbers, account passwords, and other personal information.

Appropriateness: What Should Be Online?

The question of what constitutes appropriate content has been part of the story of most mass media, from debates over the morality of lurid pulp-fiction books in the nineteenth century to arguments over the appropriateness of racist, sexist, and homophobic content in films and music. Although it is not the only material to come under intense scrutiny, most of the debate about appropriate media content, despite the medium, has centered on sexually explicit imagery.

As has always been the case, eliminating some forms of sexual content from books, films, television, and other media remains a top priority for many politicians and public interest groups. So it should not be surprising that public objection to indecent and obscene Internet content has led to various legislative efforts to tame the web. Although the Communications Decency Act of 1996 and the Child Online Protection Act of 1998 were both judged unconstitutional, the Children’s Internet Protection Act of 2000 was passed and upheld in 2003. This act requires schools and libraries that receive federal funding for Internet access to use software that filters out any visual content deemed obscene, pornographic, or harmful to minors unless disabled at the request of adult users. Regardless of new laws, pornography continues to flourish on commercial sites, individuals’ blogs, and social networking pages. As the American Library Association notes, there is “no filtering technology that will block out all illegal content, but allow access to constitutionally protected materials.”28

In addition to those sites featuring sexual content, Internet sites that carry potentially dangerous information (bomb-building instructions, hate speech) have also incited calls for Internet censorship, particularly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, several tragic school shootings, and the rise in hate speech in recent years. Nevertheless, many people—fearing that government regulation of speech would inhibit freedom of expression in a democratic society—want the web to be completely unregulated.

Access: The Fight to Prevent a Digital Divide

A key economic issue related to the Internet is whether the cost of purchasing a personal computer and paying for Internet services will undermine equal access. Coined to echo the term economic divide (the disparity of wealth between the rich and the poor), the term 
digital divide
 refers to the growing contrast between the “information haves”—those who can afford to purchase computers and pay for Internet services—and the “information have-nots”—those who may not be able to afford a computer or pay for Internet services.

About 89 percent of U.S. households are connected to the Internet, but there are big gaps in access to advanced broadband service. For example, about 73 percent of Americans have home broadband service, but there is a large gap according to income: 93 percent of adults with household incomes of $75,000 or more have home broadband, whereas only 53 percent of adults with household incomes less than $30,000 have it. There is also a difference when it comes to the type of community, with broadband in 76 percent of suburban households, 73 percent of urban households, and 63 percent of rural households.29 Although not a perfect substitute for a home broadband connection, smartphones are helping narrow the digital divide. The mobile phone industry forecasts that smartphone use in the United States will increase from 78 percent in 2016 to 81 percent by 2020, bringing more small-screen data connections to users.30 The industry will begin to roll out the next generation of mobile phone data speeds—5G connections—in 2019.

GOOGLE’S PROJECT LOON employs maneuverable high-altitude balloons that transmit wireless signals to Internet service providers across the globe. The project, which began in 2011, aims to provide Internet access to people in remote areas who would otherwise have no way of getting online. In its mission statement, Google cites the growing digital divide as its reason for launching the project: “Many of us think of the Internet as a global community. But two-thirds of the world’s population does not yet have Internet access.”

Globally, though, the have-nots face an even greater obstacle to crossing the digital divide. Although the web claims to be worldwide, the most economically powerful countries—the United States, Sweden, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the United Kingdom—account for most of its international flavor. In nations such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Myanmar (Burma), the government permits limited or no access to the web. In other countries, an inadequate telecommunications infrastructure hampers access to the Internet. And in underdeveloped countries, phone lines and computers are almost nonexistent. For example, in Eritrea—an East African nation of about 6.5 million people, with poor public utilities and intermittent electrical service—about 71,000 people, or about 1.3 percent of the population, are Internet users.31 However, as mobile phones become more popular in the developing world, they can provide one remedy for the global digital divide.

Even as the Internet matures and becomes more accessible, wealthy users are still able to buy higher levels of privacy and faster speeds of Internet access than are other users. Whereas traditional media made the same information available to everyone who owned a radio or a TV set, the Internet creates economic tiers and classes of service. Policy groups, media critics, and concerned citizens continue to debate the implications of the digital divide, valuing the equal opportunity to acquire knowledge.

Net Neutrality: Maintaining an Open Internet

For more than a decade, the debate over net neutrality has framed the shape of the Internet’s future. 
Net neutrality
 refers to the principle that every website and every user—whether a multinational corporation or you—has the right to the same Internet network speed and access. The idea of an open and neutral network has existed since the origins of the Internet, but there had never been a legal formal policy until 2015, when the Federal Communications Commission reclassified broadband Internet service and approved net neutrality rules.32 Still, the debate forges on.

The dispute is dominated by some of the biggest communications corporations. These major telephone and cable companies—including Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, Spectrum, and Cox—control 98 percent of broadband access in the United States through DSL and cable modem service. They want to offer faster connections and priority to clients willing to pay higher rates, and provide preferential service for their own content or for content providers who make special deals with them, effectively eliminating net neutrality. For example, tiered Internet access might mean that these companies would charge customers more for data-heavy services like Netflix, YouTube, and Hulu. These companies argue that the profits they could make from tiered Internet access would allow them to build expensive new networks, benefiting everyone.

But supporters of net neutrality—such as bloggers, video gamers, educators, religious groups, unions, and small businesses—argue that the cable and telephone giants have incentive to rig their services and cause net congestion in order to force customers to pay a premium for higher-speed connections. They claim that an Internet without net neutrality would hurt small businesses, nonprofits, and Internet innovators, who might be stuck in the “slow lane,” not being able to afford the same connection speeds that large corporations can afford. Large Internet corporations like Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay, Microsoft, Skype, and Facebook also support net neutrality because their businesses depend on their millions of customers’ having equal access to the web.

When Donald Trump became president in 2017, he appointed a new chairperson of the FCC, former Verizon lawyer Ajit Pai. On December 14, 2017, the FCC voted to repeal the 2015 FCC net neutrality policy on a three-to-two party-line vote. Yet after twelve years of debate about net neutrality, the battle continued. In January 2018, attorneys general from twenty-one states and the District of Columbia filed lawsuits to challenge the decision, stating that the FCC vote to repeal net neutrality was “arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion.” The governor of Montana went one step further and ordered ISPs that have contracts with the state to follow net neutrality principles.33

Alternative Voices

Independent programmers continue to invent new ways to use the Internet and communicate over it. While some of their innovations have remained free of corporate control, others have been taken over by commercial interests. Despite commercial buyouts, however, the pioneering spirit of the Internet’s independent early days endures; the Internet continues to be a participatory medium in which anyone can be involved. Two of the most prominent areas in which alternative voices continue to flourish relate to open-source software and digital archiving.

Open-Source Software

In the early days of computer code writing, amateur programmers were developing 
open-source software
 on the principle that it was a collective effort. They openly shared program source codes along with their ideas for upgrading and improving programs. Beginning in the 1970s, Microsoft put an end to much of this activity by transforming software development into a business in which programs were developed privately and users were required to pay for both the software and its periodic upgrades.

However, programmers are still developing noncommercial, open-source software, if on a more limited scale. One open-source operating system, Linux, was established in 1991 by Linus Torvalds, a twenty-one-year-old student at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Since the establishment of Linux, professional computer programmers and hobbyists around the world have participated in improving it, creating a sophisticated software system that even Microsoft has acknowledged is a credible alternative to expensive commercial programs. Linux can operate across disparate platforms, and companies such as IBM, Dell, and Oracle, as well as other corporations and governmental organizations, have developed applications and systems that run on it. Still, the greatest impact of Linux is evident not on the desktop screens of everyday computer users but in the operation of behind-the-scenes computer servers.

Digital Archiving

Librarians have worked tirelessly to build nonprofit digital archives that exist outside of any commercial system in order to preserve libraries’ tradition of open access to information. One of the biggest and most impressive digital preservation initiatives is the Internet Archive, established in 1996. The Internet Archive aims to ensure that researchers, historians, scholars, and all citizens have universal access to human knowledge—that is, everything that’s digital: text, moving images, audio, software, and more than 466 billion archived web pages reaching back to the earliest days of the Internet. The archive is growing at a staggering rate, as the general public and partners such as the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress upload cultural artifacts. For example, the Internet Archive stores more than 186,000 live music concerts, including performances by Jack Johnson, the Grateful Dead, and the Smashing Pumpkins.

Media activist David Bollier has likened open-access initiatives to an information “commons,” underscoring the idea that the public collectively owns (or should own) certain public resources, like the airwaves, the Internet, and public spaces (such as parks). Says Bollier, “Libraries are one of the few, if not the key, public institutions defending popular access and sharing of information as a right of all citizens, not just those who can afford access.”34


THE INTERNET AND DEMOCRACY

Throughout the twentieth century, Americans closely examined emerging mass media for their potential contributions to democracy. Radio and television each developed with the promise of being able to reach everyone, even poor or illiterate citizens. Despite continuing concerns over the digital divide, many have praised the Internet for its democratic possibilities. Some advocates even tout the Internet as the most democratic social network ever conceived.

The biggest threat to the Internet’s democratic potential may well be its increasing commercialization. As happened with radio and television, the growth of commercial “channels” on the Internet has far outpaced the emergence of viable nonprofit channels, as fewer and fewer corporations have gained more and more control. The passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act cleared the way for cable TV systems, computer firms, and telephone companies to merge their interests and become even larger commercial powers. Although there was a great deal of buzz about lucrative Internet start-ups in the 1990s and 2000s, it has been large corporations—such as Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook—that have weathered the low points of the dot-com economy and maintained a controlling hand. If the histories of other media are any predictor, it seems realistic to expect that the Internet’s potential for widespread use by all could be partially preempted by narrower commercial interests.

However, defenders of the digital age argue that inexpensive digital production and social media distribution allow greater participation than does any traditional medium. In response to these new media forms, older media are using Internet technology to increase their access to and feedback from varied audiences. Skeptics raise doubts about the participatory nature of discussions on the Internet. For instance, they warn that Internet users may be communicating with people whose beliefs and values are similar to their own. Although it is important to be able to communicate across vast distances with people who have similar viewpoints, these kinds of discussions may not serve to extend the diversity and tolerance that are central to democratic ideals. There are also those who may not be interacting with anyone at all. In the wide world of the web, we are in a shared environment of billions of people. In the emerging ecosystem of apps, we live in an efficient but gated community, walled off from the rest of the Internet. However, we are still in the early years of the Internet. The democratic possibilities of the Internet’s future are endless.

Chapter 2 Review

COMMON THREADS


One of the Common Threads discussed in 


Chapter 1


 is the commercial nature of mass media. The Internet is no exception, as advertisers have capitalized on its ability to be customized. How might this affect other media industries?

People love the simplicity of Pinterest, the visual social media site where users “pin” images and videos to their “board,” creating a customized site that reflects their own personal style on topics like home décor, apparel, food, crafts, or travel. To sign up for an account, users provide their name, e-mail address, and gender (male or female). The final choice is prechecked by Pinterest and says, “Let Pinterest personalize your experience based on other sites you visit.”

Pinterest is just one example of the mass customization the Internet offers—something no other mass medium has been able to provide. (When is the last time a television set, radio, newspaper, or movie spoke directly to you or let you be the content producer?) This is one of the web’s greatest strengths—it can connect us to the world in a personally meaningful way. But a casualty of the Internet may be our shared common culture. A generation ago, students and coworkers across the country gathered on Friday mornings to discuss what happened the previous night on NBC’s “must-see” TV shows, like RoseanneSeinfeldFriends, and Will & Grace. Today, it’s more likely that they watched vastly different media the night before. And if they did view the same thing—say, a funny YouTube video—it’s likely they all laughed alone because they watched it individually, although they may have later shared it with their friends on a social media site.

We have become a society divided by the media, often split into our basic entity: the individual. One would think that advertisers dislike this, since it is easier to reach a mass audience by showing commercials during The Voice. But mass customization gives advertisers the kind of personal information they once only dreamed about: your e-mail address, hometown, zip code, and birthday, and a record of your interests—what web pages you visit and what you buy online. If you have a Facebook profile or a Gmail account, they may know even more about you—what you did last night or what you are doing right now. What will advertisers have the best chance of selling to you with all this information? With the mass-customized Internet, you may have already told them.

KEY TERMS

The definitions for the terms listed below can be found in the glossary at the end of the book. The page numbers listed with the terms indicate where the term is highlighted in the chapter.

· digital turn

· Internet

· ARPAnet

· microprocessors

· fiber-optic cable

· World Wide Web

· HTML (hypertext markup language)

· browsers

· Internet service provider (ISP)

· broadband

· digital communication

· search engines

· Telecommunications Act of 1996

· data mining

· e-commerce

· cookies

· spyware

· opt-in or opt-out policies

· phishing

· digital divide

· net neutrality

· open-source software

For review quizzes, chapter summaries, links to media-related websites, and more, go to 
launchpadworks.com
.

REVIEW QUESTIONS

The Development of the Internet and the Web

1. When did the Internet reach the novelty (emergence), entrepreneurial, and mass medium stages?

2. How did the Internet originate? What role did the government play?

3. How does the World Wide Web work? What is its significance in the development of the Internet?

4. Why did Google become such a force in web searching?

Social Media and Democracy

5. What are the democratic possibilities of social media? How can social media aid political repression?

Convergence and Mobile Media

6. What conditions enabled media convergence?

7. What role do mobile devices play in media convergence, and what significant mobile milestones can you think of?

8. How has convergence changed our relationship with media and with the Internet?

9. What elements of today’s digital world are part of the Semantic Web?

The Economics and Issues of the Internet

10. Which of the five major digital companies are most aligned with the “open Internet,” and which are most aligned with the “closed Internet”?

11. What is the role of data mining in the digital economy? What are the ethical concerns?

12. What is the digital divide, and what is being done to close the gap?

13. Why is net neutrality such an important issue?

14. What are the major alternative voices on the Internet?

The Internet and Democracy

15. How can the Internet make democracy work better?

16. What are the key challenges to making the Internet itself more democratic?

QUESTIONING THE MEDIA

1. What possibilities for the Internet’s future are you most excited about? Why? What possibilities are most troubling? Why?

2. What advantages of media convergence enable all types of media content to be accessed on a single device?

3. Google’s corporate motto is “Don’t be evil.” Which of the five major digital corporations (Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook) seems to have the greatest tendency for evil? Which seems to do the most good? Why?

4. In the move from a print-oriented Industrial Age to a digitally based Information Age, how do you think individuals, communities, and nations have been affected positively? How have they been affected negatively?

LAUNCHPAD FOR MEDIA & CULTURE

Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture at 
launchpadworks.com
 for additional learning tools:

· REVIEW WITH LEARNINGCURVE

· LearningCurve, available on LaunchPad for Media & Culture, uses gamelike quizzing to help you master the concepts you need to learn from this chapter.

· VIDEO: USER-GENERATED CONTENT

· Editors, producers, and advertisers discuss the varieties of user-generated content and how it can contribute to the democratization of media.

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