A Personal Revolution?

In perspective, each semester for the last dozen years, I have tried to introduce several hundred college students to modern media theory, research, effects, and professional practices by teaching the 101 Intro course in my field. One lesson I learned from my charges is that novel technologies grow old fast. It would puzzle university freshmen if I called e-mail and Web pages “new media.” Satellite reception, Wi-Fi, laptops, cell phones, PDAs, digital photography, and the Internet are as familiar to eighteen-year-olds as pencils and paper; they know what it is to snope out a fact, wiki a term paper, and twitter a class session, even if their parents (or their teachers) don’t.

A staple of my classroom instruction, however, which I did not foresee having to revise for the length of my career, was that mass media products are created by industries. Print press stories and editorials, icons of photojournalism, Hollywood movies, and HBO television series alike are produced by large, impersonal, megareturn-seeking corporations that crave “mass” audiences. Certainly, the intended consumers may be selected for their demographics and psychographics. A magazine’s target population segment, for example, might be “career oriented cosmopolitan Hispanic women under thirty.” Political media consultants may design a television ad for “soccer moms.” Still, if Disney, Merck, the Sierra Club, or the Republican National Committee seek niche audiences for some of their messages, we are nevertheless talking about larg e organizations trying to persuade via mass media signifi cant numbers of people. In contrast, in the early days of the American republic, the founders considered a “press” to be a handcranked machine.