Introduction
How can the increasing power and the global span of media be understood? On one side, it is only since the late nineteenth century that the technological infrastructures have existed whereby media – newspapers, radio, television, and more recently the internet – could reach mass audiences. On the other side, the main effect of these media infrastructures is their reach into people’s everyday lives. These two sides come together in the creation of ‘publics’ or ‘audiences’. What has so far been largely overlooked, however, is that there are in fact three types of ‘publics’ or ‘audiences’, which correspond to the classic tripartite division of power in society: publics for news and civic engagement (politics), audiences for consumption or advertising (economics), and audiences for entertainment and leisure (culture). Some historians and social thinkers would include military power as a fourth source of power, and media have been important in this domain.Footnote 1 Yet, while the military uses of media have been important in the past, they can be bracketed for our purposes since they fall outside the scope of contemporary everyday media uses (except, of course, during times of war), although the origins of the internet are often associated with the military.Footnote 2
The reason for beginning with the distinction between these three publics is to highlight that only the first of these – media as a means for news and political participation – has commonly been considered to be the main function of the media. This article will agree with this prioritization, though it will also argue that the economic and cultural functions must be elaborated simultaneously – if only to situate them alongside the political role of the media. The distinction between the three publics also makes it possible to highlight the boundedness of media, which is quite different for each of the three publics, as we shall see: as a straightforward initial example, we can take the current reach of an English-language newspaper or television news programme, which is quite different from, say, the reach of a Hollywood blockbuster movie. Media have been a globalizing force, but they have not brought about the ‘death of distance’ or the ‘global village’ that have often been heralded.Footnote 3 As Czitrom points out, the idea of a global village was first mooted in 1838, by Samuel Morse, a year after the introduction of the first telegraph.Footnote 4 Yet, almost two centuries later, the reach of media is still bounded, in practice, by languages and regions.
This article will focus on the reach of media infrastructures among the three publics. It will begin by discussing how different academic disciplines have dealt with the questions of media, disciplinarity, and globalization. Then it will examine how media research has addressed global processes, arguing that this has been shaped by debates about globalization from other social science disciplines, by political developments such as the Cold War, decolonization, and the rise of populist leaders, and by the development of the internet and other new media technologies. Next, the article will develop a conceptualization of media infrastructures, which tie together what lies at the intersection between these topics. The development of media infrastructures has transformed how media reach different publics – in politics as citizens, and in everyday culture as consumers. Some illustrations will then be used to chart the changes in the reach of media in different periods, beginning with the Middle Ages and then fast-forwarding to the emergence of the first mass publics during the nineteenth century. The aim is to show that there are stepwise and uneven transformations in the extent to which media reach into everyday life. Finally, we will turn to the most recent era in the history of media, when digital media have become dominant. This era is often regarded as a period of radical rupture, rapidly accelerating the globalization of media and promoting democratization. Yet these ideas can be set in a longer-term perspective which shows greater continuities, but also puts the age of mass print and broadcast media which dominated the twentieth century into its historical place. The article concludes by arguing that, while media are embedded ever more deeply in our lives, a historical view provides much-needed insights into the limits of their reach.
In order to gauge the reach of media, it is necessary to combine, above all, three concepts or perspectives from different disciplines. The first is the concept of ‘large technological systems’ or ‘infrastructures’, from the history of technology and the sociology of science and technology; these infrastructures constitute the carriers which make media available to large numbers of users. The second is the concept of ‘media systems’, from media and communication studies, which categorizes media by how they are shaped by national politics and economies, but also how they have established autonomy from these. The third is a turn to forces from below, which, translated into the realm of media, entails focusing on audiences or how people ‘domesticate’ media in their everyday lives – in contrast with the large systems which enable them to do so and with the messages that elites promote via media.
Before embarking on the analysis, it is necessary briefly to elaborate the distinction already made between publics in terms of the political, economic, and cultural roles of the media. These do of course often overlap, but there is one feature which crucially sets the political uses of media apart from the other two: namely, that only the political uses of media are zero-sum in the sense that there is competition to dominate the attention of the public and so to set the agenda, with winners and losers. It is true that advertisers and entertainment also compete for attention, but it is difficult in these two cases to speak of zero-sum competition: after all, consumers can add more entertainment and advertising to their media diet, and there is no necessary loss when audiences choose to devote their attention to one type of entertainment content over another. The exception is loss of revenue, but there can also be an overall increase in revenue in media markets, and certainly an increase in the amount of media consumed (though it can be noted that, even in this regard, there is a limit: namely, the total amount of time that people spend with media). In the arena of politics, in contrast, a number of actors – politicians, parties, social movements, and politically relevant elites – seek legitimacy via media from within civil society, at least in modern democracies. They compete for this legitimacy, and the content that dominates has consequences for society. At a minimum therefore, in a functionalist perspective on media represented, for example, by Luhmann, this dominant political content is a means whereby society is able to steer itself via information and communication.Footnote 5 From a conflict perspective, on the other hand, there is a continual contest within the public arena for the most prominent or dominant ideas – again, a contest to dominate the attention space – about the direction of social development.Footnote 6 From either perspective, certain mediated content shapes the direction of politics and hence of societal development, though this does not, of course, exhaust how media shape social life.
One objection to this point could be that devoting attention to others and to information may also ultimately be zero-sum: people only have a limited amount of time to devote to media. But consider how people can be part of several digital networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more. The network ties via these digital media are overlapping and multiple, but they are not zero-sum. Or we can think here of screen time: the fact that people now send messages to each other or watch videos in places they never used to before, such as in restaurants or on trains. Again, these are not zero-sum, though ultimately there may be limits. Now compare these with governments, where parties or leaders compete for media attention during elections and during periods of rule; at the margins, there may also be an overall increase in how they reach us via media, but, to dominate, this is a zero-sum game played out in a limited attention space.
Media, disciplines, and globalization
Media have been studied as part of a number of academic disciplines, but they have also gained their own academic specialism: media studies or communication research. Departments focusing on media first emerged during the middle of the last century, mainly in response to the use of radio, film, and television for propaganda purposes.Footnote 7 But other disciplines have also analysed media: historians of media, for example, often focused on the main media institutions, though, as in other areas of history, there has been a gradual shift to popular culture and everyday life.Footnote 8 Indeed, Drayton and Motadel have argued that ‘history from below’, plus decolonization, were the two main impulses for the emergence of global history, and this turn to everyday popular uses has also characterized media research.Footnote 9 Anthropology added to this ‘from below’ or everyday-life perspective in the 1980s and 1990s with a focus on audiences in different contexts, and also helped to globalize research on media. Political science is the other major discipline, though in this case the study of media has remained isolated within the subdiscipline of political communication. The contribution of the sociology of science and technology is quite recent, and has mainly concentrated on digital technologies. Yet, outside the sociology of science and technology, general sociology and mass communication research have developed independently and without much overlap, though this is changing with digital technologies.Footnote 10 Nevertheless, even though several disciplines have media in their purview, there is little dialogue between them. Furthermore, outside the discipline of history, historically informed analyses of media are rare, despite the fact that traditional broadcast and print (or pre-internet) media still constitute the vast bulk of media uses around the globe.
As far as the geographical scope of the study of media is concerned, as already mentioned, anthropology was highly influential in shifting media research beyond a Western-centric perspective. The point was to move away from seeing the effects of media as homogenizing, even in the case of television programmes that reached a global audience. The iconic example was the 1980s soap opera Dallas.Footnote 11 Yet, despite attempts to de-Westernize studies of the media, the vast bulk of media research is still concentrated on North America and Europe. Ginsberg, Abu-Lughod, and Larkin point out that ‘the dominant frameworks for thinking about media’s transnational reach have been either globalization or imperialism, which tend to privilege media from or dominant in the West’.Footnote 12 With digital media, this is slowly changing, and there are, for example, detailed ethnographic accounts of how social media are used in various contexts around the world, which step outside the framework of a homogenizing globalization or of imperialism.Footnote 13 What these ethnographic studies lack, however, are means whereby comparisons can be made, both between the countries in which these local ethnographies are set, and also between longer-term historical trajectories that have shaped media development.
Research about the reach of media has in the past tended to be national or related to events such as elections, or has only covered the time-span of certain types of media such as print or broadcast or the internet. Comparisons across different periods and parts of the world, which is the strength of comparative historical methods, could provide a much needed wider horizon.Footnote 14 Such methods will increasingly come onto the research agenda with digital media, which are less nationally bounded, though again, how they reach beyond national boundaries has been much exaggerated. These long-term trajectories are particularly important if we consider how infrastructures have shaped media development. A brief indication of this can be given by reference to the contrast between the two Eastern rising giants, India and China. In these two countries, how the technology of media infrastructures has shaped everyday life reveals enormous differences: China has pursued infrastructure projects on a large scale throughout its recorded history, whereas India has always made do with ‘small technology’.Footnote 15 These two traditions have left a lasting legacy on contemporary infrastructures. In India, even today, the mobile phone infrastructure has remained quite weak, despite the rapid adoption of mobile phones.Footnote 16 In China, in contrast, the government is spearheading the promotion of mobile and smartphone technology as part of an all-encompassing policy that fosters infrastructure building to accelerate social development. These two infrastructure trajectories will continue to shape the penetration of media into everyday life for decades to come.
These implications of media infrastructures can also be spelled out more narrowly for politics. The contrast that stands out most strongly in global comparisons in this case is China’s authoritarian control over its media, as compared with democracies where media have gained autonomy from state control. To understand how this autonomy emerged, or failed to do so, it is useful to draw on the media systems theory of Hallin and Mancini. These two authors have developed the most elaborate comparative historical model of how media systems developed in Western democracies in the course of the twentieth century, and they distinguish between three regional types: the liberal (or north Atlantic) model, dominated by the private sector; the democratic corporatist model (in north and central Europe), with a mix of public service and private sector media; and the polarized pluralist model (in Mediterranean countries), where the state intervenes strongly in media.Footnote 17 This model has since been extended to other media systems around the world, which reveals considerable variation beyond Hallin and Mancini’s tripartite model, particularly in terms of lack of the autonomy of media under many political regimes.Footnote 18
Hallin and Mancini acknowledge that the distinctiveness of their model has been eroded somewhat in recent decades: on the one hand by technological forces such as satellite television and the internet, and on the other by the increasing dominance of market forces. This growing commercialization holds even for media in China, the biggest single media system outside the West.Footnote 19 Thus instead of global convergence, again, there is a persistence of both national and regional variation against the background that this variation is being reconfigured by the spread of market forces and by technological changes. Digital media, rather than broadcast and print, are now spearheading the transnationalization of media infrastructures. At the same time, it should not be forgotten that some countries, like North Korea with its centralized media controls, and other areas of the world, like certain parts of sub-Saharan Africa, are still largely outside the reach of any openly available media infrastructures that are accessible to the bulk of the population.
Digital media add a further layer to existing media infrastructures with the internet and mobile phones, yet this layer represents an extension and deepening of media in everyday life rather than a departure, reshaping its geographical reach but not erasing political and other boundaries. And even with digital media, Norris and Inglehart, for example, found that, despite denser media connections, there are ‘firewalls’ which entail that cultural values are only partially converging and national cultures persist.Footnote 20 Apart from politics and news, this point has also been documented for digital content generally. For example, the websites that are accessed around the world have formed persistent regional and linguistic clusters of websites that dominate the attention of users.Footnote 21 In other words, although websites are in principle (apart from censorship) accessible from around the world, in practice, audiences still largely access content that fits with their linguistic preferences and with regional and national boundaries. Furthermore, this pattern holds just as much for Anglo-American or English-speaking audiences as it does, say, for Chinese-language audiences or audiences from the Chinese mainland and in other parts of the world. The main shift in regard to the geographies of the most popular websites is a slow migration towards more content from parts of the Global South and outside the hegemony of the English language.
It is worth dwelling for a moment on the data source for the study of the geography of web content (by Wu and Taneja) that has just been discussed: the way that these authors identify the most important clusters of attention among the websites that people visit is by drawing on large representative samples of users of websites from around the world whose clicks on particular websites are recorded. This cutting-edge method, known as webtracking, provides a comprehensive picture of what people read and view online: it can be likened to a global macroscope which shows what online content people are interested in on a large scale and in great detail. In the future, techniques like these will play a major role in our historical understanding of what people are interested in.Footnote 22 This source can be compared to sources of media uses in earlier periods: how much is known, for example, about the reading habits of people in medieval Europe or China? There are some sources for the extent to which printed materials were available in everyday life, and the kind of content that people were interested in, as we shall see in a moment. These records have improved over the course of time. But it is safe to say that future historians will have an abundance of data both to undertake fine-grained analyses of particular aspects of people’s media habits, and to engage in new ways with global or ‘big history’.Footnote 23
Historicizing the global in media research
Research on media has taken an ever more global purview during the post-war period, but there has not been a consolidated global ‘turn’ as with, say, the emergence of ‘global history’ as a field of study. To trace the globalizing process of the media research agenda, the post-war period can be divided crudely, first, into the era dominated by decolonization and the Cold War, when criticism of media imperialism was prominent, as was the antagonism between a world of free media and one in which there was tight control over censored media. This was followed by a post-Cold War interlude, when the internet in particular became an agent of democratization and research increasingly turned to information and communication technologies as a tool for promoting economic development in the Global South. More recently still, attention has focused on a rising China, where there are still traces of the Cold War with the concentration on how the media are censored. But the most important shake-up in media research, as we shall see, is very recent and still ongoing, and can be dated to the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump as president in the United States. This double shock in 2016 has resurrected longer-standing concerns with how social media spread disinformation and contribute to the corrosion of democracy.Footnote 24 Some have gone so far as to label this a ‘post-truth’ era, a term popularized by journalists but with already more than a dozen books published that have ‘post-truth’ in the title.Footnote 25 ‘Post-truth’ is a problematic term, as we shall see, but it crucially revolves around attempts by some countries, and Russia above all, to influence politics in another. The long arm of the Cold War may be with us still.
The idea of ‘media imperialism’ was prominent during the phase of post-war decolonization and reached its culmination in the idea of a ‘New World Information Order’ during the mid 1970s in the work of UNESCO.Footnote 26 This work influenced media scholarship into the 1980s, and drew attention to how the domination of large-scale corporations, mostly based in the United States, excluded much of what has since come to be known as the Global South. During the 1980s, the era of Reagan and Thatcher, these ideas slowly gave way to the concept of ‘neoliberalism’. While this concept has mainly been deployed in conjunction with the political economy of Anglo-American capitalism,Footnote 27 it has also been used by scholars of the non-Western world to indicate the imposition of a globalizing capitalist economy increasingly unconstrained by the regulation of states. In relation to media, the result is a shift whereby media systems have moved away from public service broadcasting, and been subject to the ever greater unbridled competitive pressures of capitalist media corporations. A number of contributions to the Hallin and Mancini volume discussed earlier, which takes their ‘media systems’ approach beyond the context of Western democracies, have charted this imposition of neoliberalism in swathes of the Global South and beyond, even if different media systems persist.Footnote 28 Others have discussed a similar shift, but have used the term ‘postcolonial’ to account for the move away from a ‘modernist’ and paternalist broadcast model, in order to highlight how local or indigenous voices ‘from below’ militate against a Western modernizing project.Footnote 29 Along these lines, Athique argues in a postcolonial vein that, in post-independence India, ‘the old, bourgeois culture of the neo-colonial class, and its autocratic socialism, has been supplanted by a more emotive, populist and middlebrow culture’.Footnote 30 This move away from the paternalism of Indian public broadcasting has steadily strengthened since the 1990s.
Media research about India has moved higher up on the agenda of media research during the post-Cold War period, along with research about Chinese media, reflecting the two countries’ growing economic prowess.Footnote 31 But scholarship on Chinese media has far outstripped research about India, and the vast bulk of scholarship on this topic continues to focus, even after the end of the Cold War and especially in the United States, on internet censorship.Footnote 32 The preoccupation with censorship and the ‘Great Firewall’ is too simple, however. As a number of scholars have pointed out, digital media, in contrast with traditional media (which can be more tightly controlled), constitute a lively domain where there are in fact ‘multiple public spheres’, some of them concerned with discussion of censorship itself.Footnote 33 Moreover, among the strongest online publics are those that support the government, to the point where a major issue is how to prevent this support from curtailing the regime’s freedom of manoeuvre.Footnote 34
Another area of research that is still shaped by the preoccupations of the Cold War relates to how the great powers project their power via media, which has come to be known as ‘soft power’.Footnote 35 This type of research is mainly carried out under the aegis of political scientists and within the discipline of international relations, but it has also partly moved on: while during and shortly after the Cold War, it was mainly about the projection of American power, lately the focus has been on the threat of a rising China.Footnote 36 China is seen as a major new force that counterbalances the hegemony of Western media, and this has become a major new trope in media research. Interestingly, the main thrust, in terms of the resources involved that are devoted to media, has gone to the traditional medium of television, especially setting up foreign-language arms of the public broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV). As this effort is driven by the state, it can be seen both as representing the persistence of different media systems, and also as a result of the reconfiguration of the balance among the post-Cold War great powers. This reconfiguration is shaping not just news, but also the entertainment industry: as Kokas has shown, whereas once the media imperialism thesis was applied to the worldwide dominance of Hollywood films, the Chinese film industry has found ways to keep the popularity of Hollywood films within limits, while at the same time boosting collaborative projects that strengthen its own film industry, which thereby also keep revenue mainly within China.Footnote 37
There has been much more research on Chinese media than about India, with Doron and Jeffrey’s book about Indian mobile phone usage still representing the only study (that the author is aware of) that has integrated micro- and macro-perspectives or the local and the global.Footnote 38 It is a collaboration between a media historian and an anthropologist, and also draws on science and technology studies. Thus the book embeds mobile phones in the longer and deeper context of the history of Indian media, and the press in particular. But it also borrows from science and technology studies to trace the trajectory of the development of India’s technological infrastructure, which continues to shape mobile phone uses. At the same time, the study contextualizes everyday uses within various settings which often combine local and global forces. For example, the authors describe the early dominance of the Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia, and how the company adapted to local ways of selling and repairing phones. The rich ethnographic tracking of mobile phones from the point of sale into everyday uses counters simplistic narratives whereby globalizing forces sweep all before them. Yet the authors also remain attuned to the changes that mobiles have brought to India, as in their careful conclusion that ‘the cell phone drew India’s people into relations with the record-keeping capitalist state more comprehensively than any previous mechanism or technology’.Footnote 39 They can only arrive at this point, however, after cataloguing how these relations have emerged from the ground up, with people purchasing phones, registering their phone numbers, and using them in daily transactions.
The book thus overcomes the impasse which other studies in single disciplines have yet to manage successfully: it provides a longer view that reaches into India’s precolonial past, and yet embeds the contemporary uses of new technologies in local contexts. In doing this, Doron and Jeffrey also avoid the simplistic picture in parts of the ICT4D (information and communication technologies for development) discourse that is also widespread among the public, whereby mobile phones are seen as a source of economic and social development, a discourse which is still fuelled by the notion of a rising Asia.Footnote 40 This optimistic discourse has persisted throughout the post-Cold War period of the internet’s rise and the recent surge of mobile phone adoption. Yet one element that is missing in Doron and Jeffrey’s study is the reach of media, via infrastructures and in everyday lives, in terms of the content that is accessed and spread via social media. A single example is the mobile phone market in India, which was initially dominated by Western handset makers and telecoms providers, and is now dominated by Chinese handset makers and Indian service providers. At the same time, American companies such as Google and Facebook (owners of WhatsApp) are still dominant in the search engine market and for social media in India. Infrastructures thus remain critical for how digital media go beyond traditional media, which perhaps extends the period of ‘media imperialism’, and this is a topic to which we will turn in the next section.
Returning to the larger picture, however, during the post-Cold War interlude, the optimistic discourse of democratization and the internet reached a high point with Bill Clinton’s comment on 8 March 2000, when he said that China’s efforts to control the internet were like ‘nailing Jell-O to the wall’.Footnote 41 Yet, in the twenty-first century, the combination of the Brexit referendum and the election of president of Donald Trump in 2016 has marked the most important caesura, with the pendulum swinging rapidly from optimism to pessimism. Media research has not yet fully come to terms with the fallout from these two events, though it is clear that it has already shifted to address concerns with disinformation or misinformation, especially from foreign actors. While the debates have yet to settle, the very notion of what constitutes media, and whether to include non-traditional ways of disseminating news and information outside broadcast and print to include, say, sharing blog posts or online-only partisan websites such as Breitbart in the United States – not to speak of malicious or misleading social media posts – will be discussed for many years to come. This also makes the notions of disinformation and misinformation problematic: should channels outside professional journalism, lacking its norms and autonomy, be counted as news media?
While the answer to this question still eludes scholars in a shifting media environment, Brexit and Trump are also responsible for a second major shift, which concerns whether there is a unique media ‘style’ associated with populist leaders, parties, and their supporters. Moffitt, who has studied how populist leaders use media to address ‘the people’ in a direct and personalistic way and through employing the ‘common man’s’ language, notes that this ‘populist style’ of communication is being copied transnationally.Footnote 42 This burgeoning research area includes work on the transnational connections between, for example, far right movements and parties, a topic of much current concern, though there is as yet little evidence for these connections on such platforms as Twitter, apart from among a small core of supporters of an anti-immigrant and nativist agenda.Footnote 43 A larger debate is also emerging between those who would hold the media responsible for Brexit/Trump and related phenomena around the world, and those who see these phenomena as part of a longer-term economic downturn since the financial crisis of 2008. Yet this debate is far from settled and will require greater historical distance.
It is worth mentioning another recent major historical shift that is changing the global scope of research and that arises from new media technologies and their infrastructures themselves – a shift whereby these infrastructures have made more transnational collection of data possible. The data that comes from the users of new media infrastructures such as Twitter and Facebook and Google, for example, is no longer bounded by national contexts, as was much of the research that took place in the broadcast and print era. Instead, it is bounded by the reach of the infrastructure (or ‘platform’) combined with its dominance among certain transnational groups of users, with all the advantages and disadvantages that come with these features. We can think here of the abundance of photographs that will be available to historians, via Facebook and other social media.Footnote 44 This source will be invaluable, as photographs have previously been, in areas such as the study of changing patterns of consumption. Take, for example, Collins’ study of the growing informalization of clothing styles over the course of the twentieth century, painstakingly pieced together by collecting thousands of photographs.Footnote 45 In the future, this type of research can be done using the ready-made and accessible sources of Facebook, Instagram, and other infrastructures, though with new limitations, apart from obvious privacy concerns.
These new opportunities bring other new challenges, above all, again, that media users cannot be assumed to be national populations, as was the case during the broadcast and print era. Again, one example will suffice: Thelwall examined trending topics on Twitter within English-speaking countries, including India and Hong Kong in addition to Canada, the US, and the UK.Footnote 46 There are advantages to this novel approach, which allows cross-national patterns to emerge, for example in the attention paid to common or less common holidays such as Thanksgiving and Diwali (giving an albeit imperfect indication, among other things, of the size of transnational diasporas), but also to trending news topics like the death of Osama Bin Laden. Analysing these patterns will allow historians to gauge people’s interests over time. At the same time, English speakers are not necessarily representative of the countries being studied, and nor, of course, are Twitter users.
Despite these limitations, the significance of such new research agendas is bound to grow, with all that they offer by means of data from globe-spanning infrastructures. We are thus entering an era in which access to data from these infrastructures is shaping research. But historical forces will, in turn, shape this access, especially in view of growing privacy concerns, concerns about disinformation, and concerns about how tracking people’s online habits can be used to manipulate their political choices. Academics will rely to an ever greater extent on data from commercial digital media companies such as Facebook and Google for their research materials. This is a novel and still ill-understood phenomenon, but it is novel mainly because of these new infrastructures, rather than because of an increasing commercialization of research: as Porter has pointed out, the relation between academic social science research and the commercial sector has waxed and waned since the 1930s.Footnote 47
What can we preliminarily conclude from this broad historical survey of how media research has addressed global processes? The obvious point is that the geographical focus and conceptualization of changing power balances reflect the periods in which the research was carried out. Beyond this point, it can be stressed again (as was done in the previous section) that discussion of the ‘global’ in media research has not developed a separate conceptual toolkit, but has borrowed concepts from other social science disciplines. Media research has tracked broader theoretical debates in the social sciences and imported debates about globalization from anthropology, sociology, political science, and international relations. It is in this force field of historical changes and power shifts, of new technologies influencing research, and of concepts and theories that span across disciplines that media research has developed its apparatus for coming to terms with the global.
Media infrastructures
Against this background, it is possible to chart how media infrastructures have grown over time. One of the reasons why it is important to focus on infrastructures is that this concept captures publics across all media, both digital and non-digital. Unless infrastructures encompass both digital and non-digital media, it is difficult to gauge the role of media for different publics in everyday life in different parts of the world, especially since print and broadcast media still dominate large swathes of the globe. It is therefore essential to encompass all media in a single sweep so as not to exaggerate the shock of the new on the one hand, while on the other hand acknowledging that a displacement towards ever more digital media is taking place. This is particularly true in the political realm, where digital media have enabled elites to set the agenda more powerfully and capture the inputs from civil society more capaciously. It is obviously also true of how digital infrastructures have affected everyday personal connections and patterns of entertainment.
The media infrastructures of telephones, radio, and television emerged in the late nineteenth century and became solidified during the middle of the twentieth century in high-income countries. This process has been well documented for countries such as the United States and Sweden.Footnote 48 But in China and India, too, according to Duara and Perry, ‘indigenous modernizing groups’ were active in creating a new urban public sphere in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote 49 As has already been mentioned, the paths of infrastructure development have often diverged. An obvious contrast is between a system with public broadcasting, as in Sweden, and one with little or none, like the United States. One reason why the role of infrastructures is currently once again moving into the foreground is that countries like India, which is in the process of extending the reach of mobile telephony to the whole of its populations, face great challenges in a vast territory where infrastructures were in the past only weakly developed.Footnote 50 Another reason that this is important is that, although for some theorists such as Castells, media concentration leads to infrastructures of companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon and others becoming globally dominant, there are also limits to this dominance.Footnote 51 To give just one example, in China, the equivalents of these three American companies – Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent – are dominant.
A different way to highlight the value of the infrastructures and media systems approach taken here is to contrast it with a different perspective. Recently there has been much discussion that revives the idea of Eurasian linkages via the re-emergence of ‘silk roads’, renewing economic and geopolitical ties with deep historical roots.Footnote 52 But in terms of media, as opposed to trade and military and diplomatic relations, China’s aims are not so much to develop these linkages, but rather to project the country’s political and cultural strength beyond its borders by using its national media infrastructures to carry its messages to the world at large, as widely as it can reach.Footnote 53 Again, this is not so much a matter of reviving or building connections as it is of boosting the status of China globally, via media.
The prototypical emergence of infrastructures or large technological systems was charted for the case of electricity, but studies of other systems such as transportation and communication soon followed.Footnote 54 For media infrastructures, an additional complexity is that, while the various infrastructures of print, radio, and television were largely separate and divided between the public and private sectors, digital media, although they are similarly multi-layered, rely on an underlying infrastructure – the internet as well as wireless networks – that is shared. These infrastructures also have elements that are proprietary, as well as elements governed by public regulation, such as provisions for the common carriage of messages or data. This multi-layered media infrastructure, partly converging and partly remaining separate, is still in the process of transformation, but examining publics across media is essential, if we are to assess how digital media are becoming more prominent and reaching most of the world, but still only penetrating everyday life alongside traditional media.
The terminology of these large technological systems is worth dwelling on for a moment since ‘infrastructures’ could be limited to systems that are public or state-funded. Moreover, recently the term ‘platforms’ has come into use for digital media. Yet all of these are ‘large technological systems’, which includes systems that are public, private, or a mix of the two. Unlike print, however, other modern media are always large-scale and complex socio-technical systems. The mass use of such single interconnected systems for media only came into being during the nineteenth century. Since then, layers have been added to these systems, and their reach has become more extensive and deepened. At the same time, they have become ‘invisible’, like other routine aspects of social life, and only become visible when there are breakdowns in the system, or if there are controversies over how they should be governed or how new technologies should be integrated into everyday life.Footnote 55
One example of such breakdowns is that it was mistakenly expected that there would be a massive failure of digital networks during the transition to the new millennium because the software could not cope with the calendar change, the so-called ‘Millennium Bug’. The spectre of this failure highlighted what could happen if the infrastructure were to break down. Another example of how infrastructures are made visible by controversies is the currently ongoing ‘net neutrality’ debate, which concerns whether all data traffic over the internet should be treated equally or if different charges could be applied to different types of data. Yet another example of such controversies, and where new technologies have not yet been ‘domesticated’, concerns the alleged ill effects of media, as with debates about ‘addiction’ to digital devices.Footnote 56 Yet such controversies are not new: there was extensive discussion over the excessive use of telephones among American teenagers in the 1950s. These debates are echoed in current ones about the effects of social media everywhere (it seems that teenagers are a common target of these moral panics). Debates about the time spent with media are another perennial concern.Footnote 57 Otherwise, and once the habits around new technologies have settled, these systems or infrastructures will, like transport or electricity, become routine and invisible.
Pre-modern and modern media
This backdrop allows us to turn to the question of how media infrastructures were different in terms of their reach into everyday life during earlier periods. We can get a brief glimpse of pre-modern media from two classic accounts of everyday life in the Middle Ages. The first is Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou, set in the fourteenth century in what is today south-western France. In Montaillou, he says, the nobleman was ‘one of the few people in the village who was more or less educated, one of the rare owners of books’.Footnote 58 Le Roy Ladurie describes the villagers as living in an ‘“island time”’, knowing little about the past.Footnote 59 In spatial terms, it is likely that only one villager had been as far as the Paris region, so they lived in spatial isolation too, their social horizon bounded by the region.Footnote 60 Le Roy Ladurie chose Montaillou partly because it could be seen as emblematic of rural society at the time. Yet it was also close to some of the political and urban centres in Europe at the time, Burgundy and Paris.
Montaillou is a description of everyday life for a period for which we have another account on the other side of the globe, Jacques Gernet’s Hangchow (Hangzhou) in thirteenth-century north-eastern China, which was at the time ‘the largest and richest city in the world’.Footnote 61 The advent of print in Hangchow meant that literary entertainment went beyond the upper strata, although, ‘even when written’, it was ‘intended to be heard rather than read’.Footnote 62 Even in this case, the reach of written media was limited to a small urban stratum. Meanwhile, in the surrounding poor countryside at this time, the influence of the written word was mainly, as in medieval Europe, for administrative purposes, and above all for taxation.Footnote 63
Note that both Montaillou and Hangchow are examples of the role of ‘media’ (the written word) in everyday life. There were, of course, extensive communication networks during this period among an elite educated stratum, which were centred especially on religious institutions, foremost among them the Catholic Church in Europe and Buddhist monasteries in China, in both cases tied together via regular long-distance organizational links facilitated by written media.Footnote 64 Yet these uses of media were for elite purposes, especially in the role of communication for underpinning religious and political authority and long-distance trade, rather than everyday media uses among a broader population.
There is much more that could be said about the role of the media in medieval society before we move closer to the present. The point here has simply been to provide concrete evidence for the argument that there was a period which was definitely pre-modern in the sense that, in everyday life, and in two locales from two quite different parts of the world, the reach of media was severely restricted in everyday life. Media did not, unlike in the modern period, expand the temporal and spatial horizons of anyone but a very small elite, and there was a decisive break with this situation in later periods.
Before the infrastructural transformations of the nineteenth century, it was mainly elites who were tied together by transnational media, and mainly for the purpose of exchanging scientific and practical knowledge, for promoting political ideologies, and for long-distance economic activity.Footnote 65 One of the roles of media, or of the printed word, was, of course, gradually to create a shared symbolic universe among a broader population within a politically bounded territory: the nation-state. This is not the place to revisit the extensive debate about the print revolution or about the role of media for the emergence of nationalism in the theories of Anderson and Gellner.Footnote 66 What is noteworthy in the context of discussing media is that Anderson’s ideas have been frequently used in media and communication research to refer, not to the role of print in the emergence of nationalism, but rather to the transnational ‘communities’ created by broadcast (and more recently digital) media.Footnote 67 Yet, while such transnational communities that are sustained by media undoubtedly exist, it is important not to exaggerate their significance; they are limited to certain communities such as diasporas. Otherwise, as we have seen, the most popular content among audiences remains bounded by nation-states, regions, and languages.
The emergence of a wider ‘public sphere’ in civil society to provide legitimacy within the polity came later.Footnote 68 ‘Public opinion’ first emerged in Europe in the eighteenth century with the spread of print, which also meant that elites henceforth had to appeal to people’s support via media.Footnote 69 Yet it took more than a hundred years for media to penetrate the everyday life of more than an educated elite stratum. Bayly says that, whereas in 1828 there were 3,168 newspaper titles in total around the world, by 1900 this ‘had reached 31,026, the print runs of many being in the hundreds of thousands’.Footnote 70 These newspapers were more up-to-date, covered worldwide topics, and reached a sizeable part of the population. This was new; only in the nineteenth century, according to Osterhammel, did regularly printed media become a force which penetrated the everyday life of more than a tiny educated stratum, but, by this stage, the major newspapers carried news from all around the world.Footnote 71 And, at least in Germany, by 1906, more than 95% of the printed news was not more than one day old.Footnote 72
The contours of how media subsequently became globalized should not be conflated with the dominance of American consumer culture, which had its heyday in the post-war period and spread to Europe and thence around the globe.Footnote 73 Broadcast media and print, in contrast, were primarily national for much of the twentieth century, as Rantanen has documented by means of tracing the histories of three households from around the world. She notes the slow shift away from local media early in the twentieth century towards ever more national ones and beyond in the early twenty-first. Her conclusion is that ‘it was the national that became the most homogeneous’ over the course of the twentieth century for the several countries that she examined.Footnote 74 A key turning point in this development were the uses of media for propaganda during the 1930s. According to Ward, this was when ‘the unified nation became the central element in many peoples’ [sic] lives’.Footnote 75 Transnationalism became more widespread in terms of the reach of media with the additional layer of satellite television during the 1980s and more recently with digital media. Nevertheless, as already mentioned, recent studies have shown how digital media, too, are being adapted and domesticated in various local contexts.Footnote 76
Political media publics are thus still primarily national and, whereas a few American digital media companies now dominate markets globally for advertising and entertainment, their reach is limited – in terms of ownership as well.Footnote 77 This point is worth elaborating, particularly for the United States, which is the best-documented case, and also the most important one because of the global reach of American companies. Yet, even if we focus on how reach is dominated by a few companies within the United States, the concentration of attention matters most for politics. The reason is that attention is concentrated among a few companies, as Hindman has shown, and above all Google and Facebook, which now together account for 73% of all advertising revenue in America, because they have been able to build up the strongest audiences.Footnote 78 The concentration of advertising revenue in turn means that local or regional news outlets have declined dramatically in the last five years, leaving only a few national outlets such as the New York Times and the Washington Post to set the agenda among news outlets, newspapers that continue to have strong online readerships and sustainable revenue from subscriptions and advertising. In terms of the overall reach of online sources, however, and how these are concentrated for politics, it is worth bearing in mind that news, or what constitutes the public sphere, only constitutes 3% of web traffic overall, and local news less than 0.25%. The remaining online attention, the vast bulk, is online entertainment and consumption, or cultural and economic activity. In other words, again, it is only for political publics that there is a strong zero-sum competition for the very limited amount of attention that is devoted to news and politics, and that shapes the political agenda.
If digital media have not greatly expanded the diversity and the geographical offerings for politics, they have also not greatly expanded the geographical range or the number of relationships in our interpersonal lives. Mediated relations have become more frequent, but they have not radically transformed people’s lives. Fischer, for example, in his detailed social history of the telephone in the United States, argued ‘that telephone calling solidified and deepened social relations’ rather than changing them.Footnote 79 The same is true for mobile phones. Ling, Bjelland, Sundsøy, and Campbell have shown that our regular and most frequent contact via mobile phones, both text and voice, is with a small number of people, and that the stronger the tie via mobiles, the closer those ties are geographically.Footnote 80 More recently still, social media have intensified interpersonal relations still further, but the ability to gain large audiences by means of YouTube and Twitter, for example, is constrained to a few celebrities, as in other media.
In terms of (non-work) everyday life, it is important to remember that the vast bulk of what has been added to people’s media routines consists of consuming entertainment. The main exception is that seeking information has become a more central part of everyday practices. The fact that information-seeking online has become a routine daily activity has not been sufficiently appreciated, even if it has many non-digital antecedents.Footnote 81 Nevertheless, even here, the sources of information that are sought and accessed online are mostly the websites of the commercial companies, though there is one exception among the top ten sites around most of the world: Wikipedia. This makes Wikipedia, with all its different language versions, into a genuinely novel mass phenomenon, with parallels to the Enlightenment’s Encyclopédie, except that it is now available on a massive scale and accessed on a daily basis by millions of users.Footnote 82
Conclusion
Since the broad-based adoption of digital media during the early 1990s, media research has become ever more focused on recent trends. Digital media have made available abundant data sources to analyse globalizing processes. Yet there are also dangers in an excessive concentration on the present. Michael Mann has referred to this as the ‘sociology of the last five minutes’.Footnote 83 In the case of media, the danger arises not just because print and broadcast will continue to co-exist alongside digital media. Mobile phones and other digital media are bound to become ubiquitous; yet, even if they become the most common ways to use media, other devices will play important roles. Another reason why a more historical perspective can guard against ‘presentism’ is that, in an era when the relatively simple media environment of the twentieth century has been displaced by greater complexity in the twenty-first, it is important not to exaggerate this complexity: after all, such shifts, when several old and new media technologies existed side by side, have taken place before. One way to nevertheless encompass the implications of these technologies within an overarching framework, as suggested here, is to show how the reach of media infrastructures among publics has slowly and unevenly been extended, and to contrast this with earlier periods. Even if the contours of media are still changing, there are also many continuities.
The answers in this article to the question ‘does the study of media have a truly global and interdisciplinary dimension?’ have been mixed. In terms of the global, there are infrastructures with a reach that goes beyond national media systems, but they do not reach the whole of the globe. China is the main example that stands in the way of the global reach of Amazon, Google, Facebook, and others. There are infrastructures that reach much of the globe, where societies are open, but there is also a bloc that keeps a measure of closed-ness, such as China, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and others. Thus, understanding globalizing processes must take heed of how far media reach in practice. In terms of the interdisciplinary, there is much scope for further integration, particularly between media and communications research and other disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, and history. At present, these disciplines are poor at drawing on each other. But a long-term comparative historical analysis can pave the way for overcoming these limited interactions.
This article has detailed how media infrastructures have shifted their reach – or how they penetrate more deeply – into everyday life. This reach is intensive both in depth, or in terms of the amount of time spent with media and how media connect us with others and with information, and also in breadth, or how much of the population, in terms of geographical reach, uses media routinely. One implication is that the breadth and depth of political input via media from civil society has slowly expanded. Yet, whereas digital media were initially heralded as a force for greater democratization and greater cosmopolitanism, they have also led to division and exclusion. Bayly has summed this up for recent decades, when he says that ‘global communication helped to transform local grievances and loyalties into broad alliances of the angry and those for whom individualistic consumption provided no moral compass’.Footnote 84 Indeed, it is now clear that, while digital media often held great promise for progressive politics, as during the Arab Spring, one reason that this movement, like others, was suppressed was precisely because of the lack of a well-established and broader and autonomous media infrastructure.Footnote 85 More recently still, perhaps the tide has turned further, whereby digital media have enabled populist anti-globalizing forces, whose prospects, as Bayly hints at, are as yet unclear.
Over the course of the last century, the increasing uses of media have meant that people across the globe have become more tethered: to each other, and to information. Some have therefore spoken of an increasing ‘mediatization’ of social life.Footnote 86 However, it is important not to exaggerate the effects of this ever denser web of connections. One way to do this, as indicated at the outset, is to separate the political uses of media from the uses for socializing, entertainment, and consumption. Political uses of media, which sit at the interface between political elites and the publics of civil society, play a limited role in most people’s everyday lives, but they have become the central mechanism whereby the political agenda is set. Political inputs are being translated, via public sentiment as expressed in media, into governance and legitimacy. This agenda is continually contested and shaped by various actors, but it also guides societal development. The reach of media infrastructures for politics has become more global, but the primary focus remains the nation-state, including the forces that challenge it.
Outside political publics, people spend a large part of their everyday lives with media, but their interpersonal ties via media are still confined to small circles of relations, and their consumption of media (or via media) is largely circumscribed by the confines of national or linguistic cultures. Even as the span of media infrastructures reaches ever further, and interpersonal and audience habits become saturated with media, or as people become more tethered to each other and to information, there has been no homogenization around the world, except insofar as the everyday habit of tetheredness itself has become more widespread. Although the turn of the century has brought with it a new set of digital infrastructures that are suffusing everyday life, they too, like the infrastructures before them, are becoming a routine part of the social fabric.
Ralph Schroeder is Professor at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford.
