How Has The Role Of The Media Been Changing In Society?

How has the role of the media been changing in society? 

One of the most common roles of the media is to provide audiences with information about different happenings around the world, and it plays a major role in society. However, many don't realise that the concept of media has been around for more than one millenia. In this oped we examine the role of the media and how it has been changing throughout history. 

The term media is used to describe different channels of communication which spread out news, promotional messages and along with many other information. (What is the media? Definition and meaning - Market Business News, 2021).  By looking at the following different thinker’s views of media, I believe that media has shifted dramatically its role from the classic public sphere and onwards to the more pessimistic technology centered media. 

Free speech is one of the oldest mediums of communication that began in the fifth century in Athens, Ancient Greece. Athens was a direct democracy where every man could speak up and participate in discussions in a place for gatherings - The Agora. The Agora can be seen as a public sphere because that's where citizens went to discuss ideas and debate each other through free speech, it was a part of the public life (agora | Definition, History, & Facts, 2021). This role of free speech contributed greatly to the development of rhetorics as a part of the education system: Athenians believed that this could provide them with great knowledge of orator persuasion and encourage the public to participate in political and social decisions (The development of ideas about communication in European thought, 2021). Therefore, this type of media was very viable at that time and inspired citizens to communicate and challenge ideas. Consequently, we can notice that man has always needed to communicate and it has been present for a long period of time and became an irreplaceable part of social life in Ancient Greece. This influenced the transformation of the public sphere to further stages. 

This led to the next emergence of media in Western Europe in the eighteenth century in cities such as London, Paris, Amsterdam and along with many others. As a consequence of the printing press and especially due to the development of many different daily newspapers by the late eighteenth century, people were able to read out ideas regarding issues related to religion, philosophy but especially politics and openly debate about them (English Coffeehouses, French Salons, and the Age of Enlightenment, 2021). This occurred in places such as English coffeehouses and French salons: as described in the book ‘the structural transformation of the public sphere’- these are institutions for social interactions outside of the private sphere,  such as homes. People created an environment where they were able to express their opinions about those topics that circulated in there, and according to Habermas - newspapers were an indispensable source of information for coffeehouses, thanks to the printing techniques. Therefore, we can notice that people could go to coffeehouses as they once did in ancient Greece to Agora, but instead they were able to criticise more topics related to nature of politics, economics, religion and many more. Hence there is a visible change that happens in the role of the media, since in the age of Enlightenment citizens used the printing press as a source of information for discussions and the reverse also occurred: public opinion from coffeehouses became fresh topics for ongoing newspapers. 

Unfortunately, the media has changed gradually its role in the 1800s and according to Habermas’s ideas of public sphere - it was more of a negative and dramatic shift. This occurred due to the greater innovations in printing techniques and financial incentives where businesses started to function mainly for profits. Newspapers were no longer a source of information for debates and discussions of important and controversial subjects, instead people became passive readers. Large scale businesses such as the New York World had to keep people entertained, therefore included more scandalous and yellow journalism topics: this can be referred to the concept of ‘culture industry’ as the printing press became commercialised and newspapers turned into entertainment, where the audience were no longer citizens as in the Rainessaunt and Enlightenment, they became just recipients of information. That being the case, the original process of citizens gathering in a public sphere to debate and challenge each others’ opinion which was considered as a hot media got replaced by commercial media and people became unengaged with topics such as politics, economics or culture, which is known as the cool media type.  

The rapid development of communication channels and technologies such as mass media occurred everywhere, which changed and had an impact on culture and how people behave in society. This was explained by an American philosopher - Noam Chomsky who suggested that the days where people were engaged into discussions and discourses are gone. Instead he proposed the idea that the population now lives in manipulated conditions, and called this ‘10 strategies of manipulation by the media’. For example, mass media that reaches a large audience can minimise citizens involvement into areas such as economics, politics or even science: this is done through distraction strategy where media keeps people busy with meaningless news about the society and keeps their minds away from real world’s issues.Therefore, he warned that the collective power of press corporations will eventually question the role of media in modern times.  I believe that that is true to a certain extent because according to Chosmky, media propaganda takes control over the audience and shifts the role of media to manipulation of their beliefs and behaviour, instead of actually giving them the chance to intervene into discourses. 

In addition to the change of media’s role we can consider the movement from the Fourth Estate to the Fifth Estate. Briefly, the fifth estate is the concept of sharing the information by using online networks, such as social media, Telegram and so on. This point about the media can be explained by Marshall McLuhan. In one of his books which is called “The media is the message” he suggests that it is more important to look at the medium itself instead of the content in order to understand how it shapes further society. McLuhan believes that it is the widespread use of media technology such as television, radio and so on that impact us. For instance, the media is the extension of man because TV allows us to see and hear, computers extend our brain activity, telephones can spread our speeches - this supports the idea that content of the message is not the crucial element, it is the technology that closely relates to society. Therefore, we can say that McLuhan believes that the media has a role of shaping and further re-shaping how societies understand the world but not through the message itself but through the medium technologies, which completely changes the existence of the classic public sphere. 

On top of that, Jean Baudrillard agrees with McLuhan and was inspired to believe that people live in a postmodern condition which he calls “hyperreality”: this is the concept where the difference between the reality and what is unreal becomes blurred. He outlines that hyperreality is the simulacra, which is a virtual object that represents reality, and in fact it is tightly connected to nowadays society. For example, Jean Baudrillard represents this in one of his works which is called “Gulf War did not take place” that even though there were disputes, the event cannot be considered as a war as it was presented by the media. He believed that the event was so masquareded by the fake news, propaganda and TV news that people started to misinterpret the simulacra and the actual happenings there. By analysing the war from the hyperreality perspective, we can conclude that the reality of the war is less real than the hyperreality. Therefore, he explains his pessimistic perspective with the idea that hyperreality starts to colonise the society and people have less control over media and advanced technologies because it shapes reality, especially social media. I believe that it is correct to a certain degree, however in my opinion this can be seen from an optimistic perspective as well: the role of new media has revolutionised to breaking barriers and nowadays people are able to communicate and debate through online platforms, which creates a new public sphere over the internet. 

Overall, I believe that the role of the media has been changing drastically throughout history and it has been fulfilling various roles in the society. It is definitely challenging to fully understand the role of the media but we can notice how it has been transforming: starting from the classic public sphere and moving onwards to the commercialisation and dominance of the mass media. The latest media technologies have shifted the society, time and space collapses and with the regards to the changes that already have happened with the role of media, it will continue to change the public.