MEDIA

MEDIA [Coined in the 1920s, as a shortening of mass media]. A collective term for newspapers, broadcasting, and other vehicles of widespread communication and entertainment, often used attributively in such phrases as Media Studies and media education. In the later 20c, the usage has been increasingly detached from its singular form medium, and often therefore takes a singular verb (as in ‘someone the media is interested in these days’). In this, the term resembles data, whose sense and intent are now collective rather than plural. The traditional information media are speech, writing, and print (‘Cogitations [are] expressed by the Medium of Words’, Francis Bacon, Advancement of Learning, volume 2, 1605), but since the later 19c systems of electrical and electronic communication have increasingly done more than simply convey information from person to person: they inform and entertain huge audiences, now often in their hundreds of millions worldwide. Although the televisual media have now in ‘mass’ terms superseded the print media, such electronic media as the INTERNET are vastly extending and adapting print and blending it with visual and vocal material. Following the spread of television as a news medium, the Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan expressed in the 1960s a radical view of society as shaped more by the style and nature than the content of the media (hence his comment ‘the medium is the message’). It is currently widely agreed that the media are not neutral, impassive agencies that transmit news and views, but are themselves influential selectors, shapers, manufacturers, and even on occasion fabricators of news and views.