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Does ‘the Media’ Have a Future?

Goldsmiths University of London, UK, n.couldry{at}gold.ac.uk

Media-related practices have so long been configured in a particular one-to-many pattern that the mass communication paradigm has seemed automatic as both frame for research and fact of social life. The paradigm is summed up in the English term ‘ the media’. But what if the very idea of ‘the media’ is also imploding, as the interfaces we call media are transformed? Does the implosion of ‘the media’ generate a crisis of appearances for government and other institutions? Three dynamics are considered here — technological, social and political — that are potentially undermining our idea of ‘the media’ as a privileged site for accessing a common world. The article concludes that, instead of collapsing, the social construction of ‘the media’ will become a site of intensified struggle for competing forces: market-based fragmentation vs continued pressures of centralization that draw on new media-related myths and rituals.

Key Words: centralization • fragmentation • media economics • myth • ‘the media’

European Journal of Communication, Vol. 24, No. 4, 437-449 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0267323109345604


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