The mass media are all those media technologies that are intended to reach a large audience by mass communication. Broadcast media (also known as electronic media) transmit their information electronically and comprise television, radio, film, movies, CDs, DVDs, and other devices such as cameras and video consoles. Alternatively, print media use a physical object as a means of sending their information, such as a newspaper, magazines, comics, books, brochures, newsletters, leaflets, and pamphlets. The organizations that control these technologies, such as television stations or publishing companies, are also known as the mass media. Internet media is able to achieve mass media status in its own right, due to the many mass media services it provides, such as email, websites, blogging, Internet and television. For this reason, many mass media outlets have a presence on the web, by such things as having TV ads that link to a website, or having games in their sites to entice gamers to visit their website. In this way, they can utilise the easy accessibility that the Internet has, and the outreach that Internet affords, as information can easily be broadcast to many different regions of the world simultaneously and cost-efficiently. Outdoor media is a form of mass media that comprises billboards, signs, placards placed inside and outside of commercial buildings and objects like shops and buses, flying billboards (signs in tow of airplanes), blimps, and skywriting. Public speaking and event organising can also be considered as forms of mass media.
Read more about Mass Media: Definitional Issues, Purposes, History, Influence and Effects, Ethical Issues and Criticisms, Future
Famous quotes containing the words mass and/or media:
“The most dangerous aspect of present-day life is the dissolution of the feeling of individual responsibility. Mass solitude has done away with any difference between the internal and the external, between the intellectual and the physical.”
—Eugenio Montale (1896–1981)
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)