Media – not reducible to their technologies

When we have studied the media we usually, and fairly safely, have had in mind 'communication media' and the specialised and separate institutions and organisations in which people worked: print media and the press, photography, advertising, cinema, broadcasting (radio and television), publishing, and so on.
The term also referred to the cultural and material products of those institutions (the distinct forms and genres of news, road movies, soap operas which took the material forms of newspapers, paperback books, films, tapes, discs).

In an age of trans-mediality we now see the migration of content and intellectual property across media forms, forcing all media producers to be aware of and collaborate with others.
 

We are seeing the fragmentation of television, the blurring of boundaries (as in the rise of the 'citizen journalist'): we have seen a shift from 'audiences' to 'users', and from consumers to producers .
 

The screens that we watch have become both tiny and mobile, and vast and immersive. It is argued that we now have a media economics where networks of many small, minority and niche markets replace the old 'mass audience'

• Does the term 'audience' mean the same as it did in the twentieth century?
• Are media genres and media production skills as distinct as they used to be?
• Is the 'point of production' as squarely based in formal media institutions (large specialist corporations) as it used to be?
• Is the state as able to control and regulate media output as it once was?
• Is the photographic (lens based) image any longer distinct from (or usefully contrasted to) digital and computer generated imagery?

‘Media studies' understands media as fully social institutions which are not reducible to their technologies.

New Media: a critical introduction, Martin Lister / Jon Dovey / Seth Giddings / lain Grant / Kieran Kelly,  Routledge, This edition (2nd) published 2009 by Routledge