A Brief History Of The Mass Media

By Author: Adela
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Some older Americans remember a time when there were no radios; many more of us remember a time before television. The brevity of film history was underlined when Lillian Gish, who as a young woman was a star of the earliest silent films, made a presentation at the 1981 Academy Award ceremonies. Only the print media date back be-yond living memory, and the forms in which they Tag Heuer Replica Watches currently appear are quite recent. Today's newspaper was born in the nineteenth century with the advent of the "penny press"; the pocket-sized paperback book, making all kinds of books accessible to nearly everyone, is a twentieth-century creation.

The development of the mass media coincides with U.S. growth into an industrial, mass, affluent society. This societal transformation means that nearly all of us now depend on a system called "the market" for producing, distributing, and selling goods to satisfy our needs. We do not produce what we consume; instead we sell our labor for wages and buy goods produced by others.

If such a marketing system ...
... is to work well, we need to get information about avail-able goods and services, their location, price, and comparative advantages. Making that information known is advertising's central function.

Even this brief description shows that an industrial society is highly organized. In addition to market dependence, such a society fosters and depends on a division of labor so that goods can be produced more cheaply and efficiently. Carried to its obvious conclusion, this division of labor created the assembly lines that transformed cars from rare, luxury items for the wealthy into Model T Fords most Americans could afford.

Such a society also depends on technology. As the cost of both labor and raw materials rises, items such as ready-to-wear clothes can be kept within the price ranges of most Americans only when machines speed up and simplify the processes of production, enabling industries to mass-produce the items. The elements of mass media systems reflect this division of labor and this reliance on technology.

Industrial societies are mass societies. If an industrial system is to work, there must be a large market for goods because the savings that come from machines and assembly lines can only be realized if many cars or dresses Tag Heuer Replica can be produced and sold to many people. Industrial societies also tend to be affluent societies. Industries require large amounts of capital, and successful industries must sell their goods to many individuals who must have the money to buy them. Like other industries, the media reach large audiences who must be able to afford newspapers, magazines, radios, and television sets, as well as the products they advertise.