Does "The Media" Have a Future?

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Couldry, Nick. 2009. Does "The Media" Have a Future? European Journal of Communication, 24(4), pp. 437-449. ISSN 0267-3231 [Article]

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Official URL: http://ejc.sagepub.com/content/24/4/437.abstract

Abstract or Description

Media-related practices have so long been configured in a particular one-to-many pattern that the mass communication paradigm has seemed automatic as both frame for research and fact of social life. The paradigm is summed up in the English term ‘ the media’. But what if the very idea of ‘the media’ is also imploding, as the interfaces we call media are transformed? Does the implosion of ‘the media’ generate a crisis of appearances for government and other institutions? Three dynamics are considered here — technological, social and political — that are potentially undermining our idea of ‘the media’ as a privileged site for accessing a common world. The article concludes that, instead of collapsing, the social construction of ‘the media’ will become a site of intensified struggle for competing forces: market-based fragmentation vs continued pressures of centralization that draw on new media-related myths and rituals

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Article

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323109345604