The Evolution of Media Forms
in the long history of human communication the era of mass media that began
with the early 19th-Century development of the steam-powered rotary press has
been relatively brief, and some believe that with the early 21st-century
proliferation of social media, the era is ending. The powered press led to a newspaper industry that shaped
the parameters of mass media industries: one-way communication from a limited
number of specialized organizations to the general public through a unique
channel. The addition of the electronic media industries of radio and television in
the 20th Century extended this paradigm. Globally, media industries evolved
Wider varying degrees of government control. Both public/government and private (individual and corporate) ownership models developed and media
operated both commercially and non-commercially. The business model relied
upon the creation of a supply of content by media firms for audience consumption
and subsidized through audience subscriptions and/or advertising. Of these
revenue streams, advertising generally contributed the largest share as marketers
rook advantage of the media's ability to control the delivery of messages to large
audiences.
In the final decades of the 20th Century, media industries and their audiences
were undergoing significant changes resulting from the combined forces of
economics, politics, globalization, and technology. The historic mass media of the
Industrial Age were increasingly characterized as "old media," or "legacy media"
m contrast to the "new media" forms enabled by the shift from analog to digital
technologies that led to the convergence of media, telecommunications, and
computing industries. The epicenter of these developments has been the Internet
and since the mid-1990s the World Wide Web. Today the Internet is accessed
from an expanding list of fixed and mobile devices by over two billion people. By
November 2011, the percentage of the world's online population stood at 34.7
(ITU, 2011). The Internet is a major component of an expanding mix of media
that together serve large and small audiences that are increasingly diverse,
fragmented, and active. And as noted above, social media are the fastest growing
segment of online media and their influence is profound.