mass-communication-theory

AFTERWORD: THE FUTURE OF
MEDIA THEORY AND RESEARCH
CHAPTER12
As you read these words, two thousand communications satellites are circling the
globe. They provide instantaneous worldwide telephone service, direct home and
car reception of audio and video, and incredibly fast and expanded access to the
Internet and the World Wide Web. Back on earth, turn-of-the-twenty-first-century
media consumers are increasingly signing on for direct satellite or fiber optic–delivered
television, rushing to buy large-screen plasma HDTV sets, setting up elaborate
home theater systems, and growing more dependent on the services offered via an
expanding array of appliances accessing the Internet.
Considering only home media use, in 1980 Americans received seven hours of
information a day. Today they receive 11.8 hours, or more precisely, “3.6 zettabytes
[a zettabyte is a billion trillion bytes]. Imagine a stack of paperback novels
stacked seven feet high over the entire United States, including Alaska” (Young,
2009). Considering only video, by 2013, 90 percent of all the traffic carried on
the Internet will be video, and “the surface area of the world’s digital screens will
be nearly 11 billion square feet, or the equivalent of 2 billion large-screen TVs. Together,
this amount would be more than 15 times the surface area of Manhattan. If
laid end-to-end, these screens would circle the globe more than 48 times” (Cisco,
2009). America’s 205 million Internet users are exceeded by China’s 359 million,
but top Japan’s 93 million, India’s 60 million, and Germany’s 50 million (Penetration,
2010). Social networking site Facebook has 500 million members socializing
in 40 languages across the globe; its 124 million monthly visitors account for
44 percent of all Internet sharing of links, photos, and videos, five billion pieces of
content a week (Schonfeld, 2010).
Several government agencies, including the Federal Communications Commission
and the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information
Administration, are busy working out rules and regulations to keep pace
with and control this telecommunications revolution domestically, and other international
agencies are attempting to regulate it worldwide. As all this unfolds, the
population of the United States is becoming more multicultural and pluralistic,
Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
357