Blog Post 1- Janelle Hudson

In the article ‘US Media at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century,’ McChesney states “it was in this period that the United States was transforming its media system. In McChesney’s eyes the US media system was a fundamental part of the capitalist political economy, hence, the beginning of the twenty-first century introduced “concentration and conglomeration”(McChesney). The media conglomerations and concentrations that McChesney speaks of have been misusing their audiences for support and political advancement. The markets in this industry are controlled by a small group of corporations, which affects democracy, and would cause anyone to question it. With a minscule industry that controls what we see and hear in news, sports, movies, and music, politicians “whore out” themselves to these companies for monetary profit and power.                      

      However, from the dawn of the twenty-first century until now the norms of the television industry has significantly changed. In the article, “Don’t Mean To Be Alamarist, But The TV Business May Be Starting To Collapse,” Henry Blodget states that as a result of the advancement of media technology, user behavior has changed. A few centuries ago, the mass population depended on newspapers for everything, from the weather to commerce. We lived in an era where a newspaper pile had a fixed position on our breakfast table, and hours were dedicated to flipping through the pages in search of information. However, a few centuries after, the television was introduced, and this was the beginning of the digital era. The introduction of the television changed almost everyone’s perspective on the dissemination of information, and what we were told; but it didn’t stop there. A few years later, the Internet was introduced, which resulted in an upward surge of the digital age. Newspaper companies went bankrput, television consumption was almost a thing of the past, and the world seemingly revolved around the internet.

             User behavior has shifted from the traditional TV and newspaper era, now to what is known as an era controlled by networks. Not to say television will disappear like newspapers did, but truth is: “We almost never watch television shows when they are broadcast anymore  (with the very notable exception of live sports); we rarely watch shows with ads, even on a DVR; we watch a lot of TV and movie content, but always on demand and almost never with ads (We're now so used to watching shows via Netflix or iTunes or HBO that ads now seem like bizarre intrusions); we get our news from the Internet, article by article, clip by clip. The only time we watch TV news live is when there's a crisis or huge event happening somewhere. (You still can't beat TV for that, but soon, news networks will also be streamed); and we watch TV and movie content on 4 different screens, depending on which is convenient (TV, laptops, phones, iPads)” (Blodget). Although many may say, the era that we live in is significantly different from that of a few years ago, Lotz sums it up well in his article saying, “television is no longer organized in this way and has not been since the mid-1990s. By then it was already apperent that we needed to reassess television and see it as a medium that primariliy reached niche audiences.”

Works Cited

Blodget, Henry. "Don't Mean To Be Alarmist, But The TV Business May Be Starting To Collapse." Http://www.businessinsider.com/tv-business-collapse-2012-6. N.p., 3 June 2012. Web