With the rise of the internet as we know it in the 1990’s, we are observing more and more mass communication models become obsolete in comparison. With the help of the internet and its technology, getting in touch with people is faster, finding answers is simpler, and sharing things with the world is widely accessible. As an example, for most people things like E-mail have almost replaced the idea of sending letters through the mail because it is faster and more efficient.
The internet is built from a concept known as internetworking. To explain briefly, internetworking is the linking of computer networks together so that computers can send “packets” of information between one another. Though it gets much more complicated when things like encryption are introduced into the equation, this is fundamentally how the technology of the internet works. With the introduction of the World Wide Web, anybody who has a computer and an internet connection can communicate with other users all over the world. This is an incredibly powerful thing. So powerful in fact, that it is changing the way most of us consume mass media in our daily lives. For example, prior to internet news networks, if one wanted to read the news, they would have to wait for their newspaper, read all about the current events, and then wait what might be a whole week for their next installment. In contrast the internet allows users to read, watch, and listen to news stories as soon as they are published. No waiting is involved.
Another incredibly important way that the internet has effected the culture of mass communication, is its fundamental accessibility, and the capabilities it brings with it. With the creation of social media platforms, blogs, and video sharing websites, it has for the first time in history been this easy to voice your opinion to the whole world. Anybody can voice their opinions and ideas and there is a way and platform for everyone to do so. You can write 1000 words, or 20. You can film a short video, or an entire movie. This allows for people who use the internet to see and hear from the people in the world around them, not just the people in their immediate community, or through the eyes of big news networks. This rise of new technology does however create problems such as message distortion and the spread of misinformation. But as with any new technology, there are always kinks and problems to work out.
In many ways I believe that the internet is a revolutionary technology that we will see change the world forever, just as technology of the past such as Gutenberg’s printing press did. The power and accessibility of the internet is without a doubt going to make previous methods of many things obsolete, and just one of the “victims” of this, is methods of mass communication. Methods of mass communication such as the newspaper, flyers, public town hall meetings, though not completely killed off, have lost much of their ground in the mass communication space in favor of a new technology that has and will continue to create more efficient ways of spreading mass communication.
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