The Seventh Mass Medium
Since the first ringing tone was sold on the mobile phone in Finland in 1998, the mobile has emerged as the seventh of the mass media. Today a wide range of paid media content is consumed on mobile phones ranging from 9.3 billion dollars of music and 5 billion dollars of videogaming to horoscopes, virtual gifts, jokes, news, adult entertainment, etc. Also, as on all other media, advertising appeared on mobile when a free news service launched in Finland was sponsored by ads in 2000.
In 2005, The Crazy Frog ringtone became the first mobile ringtone to cross over into the mainstream music charts, beating Coldplay for the Number 1 spot on the UK charts.
Read more about this topic: Mobile Web
Famous quotes containing the words seventh, mass and/or medium:
“Hearing the low sound
of a cloud scattering rain
at midnight
and thinking for an eternity
on his absent young wife,
a traveller heaved a sigh
and with a flood of tears
howled the whole night long.
Now, villagers won’t let him stay
in their place anymore.”
—Amaru (c. seventh century A.D.)
“What will happen once the authentic mass man takes over, we do not know yet, although it may be a fair guess that he will have more in common with the meticulous, calculated correctness of Himmler than with the hysterical fanaticism of Hitler, will more resemble the stubborn dullness of Molotov than the sensual vindictive cruelty of Stalin.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“Computer mediation seems to bathe action in a more conditional light: perhaps it happened; perhaps it didn’t. Without the layered richness of direct sensory engagement, the symbolic medium seems thin, flat, and fragile.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)