Changing Communications Technology and the Nature of the Audience

Abstract

The patterns of public communication established with the institutionalization of television in the 1950's have become radically destabilized. The primary agents of this change are satellite broadcasting and computer technology in combination with cable transmission and interactive television. These developments have the potential for upsetting the established relations of power and profit within communications and reorganizing the content of communication and the distribution of audiences across media. These changes do not constitute a revolution in the nature of public communication, however. Rather, new technologies deepen and intensify basic patterns of communications that came into existence with the birth of the national magazine and the modern newspaper in the 1890's. These media simultaneously created both a mass, national audience and the differentiated audience for specialized, national publication. The new media offer opportunities for creating both a mass, international audience, and new and more finely graded audience segments. These developments in turn erode the public sphere, as historically understood, and the possibility of public discourse as a ground condition of political life.

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