Mass Media Studies

Human beings are wired to connect – and we have the most complex and interesting social behavior out of all animals,” - Michael Platt

We live in a media-saturated world and rely on a variety of old and new media for information, entertainment, and connection. The face of communication media is changing at an accelerated rate. It is impossible to think of a life away from the internet and social media. To visualize the size of all this, imagine the volume of Internet connections in 1995 as the size of the Moon. The Internet of today would be the size of Earth. And the Internet in 15 years is the size of giant Jupiter!

Traditional media are being abandoned in favor of social networks. In just one generation the Internet changed the way we make and experience nearly all of the media. Today the very act of consuming media creates an entirely new form of it: the social data layer that tells the story of what we like, what we watch, who and what we pay attention to, and our location when doing so. The audience, once passive, is now cast in a more central and influential role than ever before. And like anyone suddenly thrust in the spotlight, we’ve been learning a lot, and fast.

This social data layer reveals so much about our behavior that it programs programmers as much as they program us. Writers for the blog websites watch real-time web consumption statistics on all of their posts—and they instantly learn how to craft content to best command an audience. One can get an in-depth analysis of audience behavior, interest, and sentiment. 

This real-time data—about who is watching television, where they are watching it from, and what they are saying about it—is of interest not just to television executives and advertisers, but the audience, too. There are several drivers for social television watching behavior, including not wanting to watch alone and the desire to connect with others 

Exponential change like this matters because it points out how unreliable it is to predict how media will be used tomorrow. Examining the spotty record of past predictions is humbling and helps open our minds to the future!

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