New Media Culture

As the media gains ever more access to our homes it becomes ever more used a tool of 'the powers that be'. It is used to beam 'real life' events directly into our homes, such as the Iraq and Afganistan conflicts. Governments rely on the institutions of the media which we trust so implicitly to convey a message about the state of the world, and our place as law abiding, 'anti-terrorist' westerners in it.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton summed up the way in which media control has always, and continues to work when he said;

"We may say broadly that free thought is the best of all safe-guards against freedom. Managed in a modern style, the emancipation of the slave's mind is the best way of preventing the emancipation of the slave. Teach him about whether he wants to be free and he will not free himself"

It can be seen that if we are presented with the notion that our freedom and safety are under threat, we will be so fearful that we will support anything, even if the cause is a wrong and unjust one. This ability the media has to control us is more prevalent now than it ever has been in western society.

In the modern mass media, as with most public sectors, the emphasis in 2008 will be to streamline both companies and products by means of convergence. As companies globalise, they form mergers and takeovers and rather than there be, for example, 200 small companies within a particular sector, there will only be 10 companies, each controlling a massive share of their sector. It is this tipe of convergence and domination that is the primary concern of anti-capitalist groups.
And it is not just the companies which are being streamlined, as they cash in on the market craze for gagdets. Rather than have a mobile phone AND an mp3 player, you can now have both contained within one device. You can also have a camera, and the internet, and a fax machine, and a diary, all rolled into one 'uber' piece of technology. It appears though that although convergence is a natural progression for media technology, the money making idea behind it is not to create revenue, but to remove competitors revenue by offering all products in one device. Once a customer has bought a particular companies device, they have no reason to go out and buy competitors products.