| Summary: |
We live in an era of continuous change to our communications environment.
The communications landscape has never been static but the scale
of contemporary change has been almost global due to the extensive use
of new technologies and the implementation of market-led, neo-liberal
policies.
Communication and media studies need to change when the media
change. This also helps explain the fact that communication studies are
often in ‘crisis’ and under constant scrutiny. Even if communication and
media studies are able to respond to what is happening in the communications
sector and with media audiences, there is no one-to-one correspondence
between the external conditions and the content of communication
and media studies. Studies are dependent on what actually happens in the
communications environment, yet communication (and in effect social)
phenomena are always open to interpretation and rival theorization.
A look back over the last three decades reveals an explosion in the
development of communication technology. In contrast to the past, the
new developments are shaping a communications landscape that differs
greatly from what we were familiar with (Wang and Servaes, 2000: 1). We
have seen a movement away from the dominance of print mass media to
the prevalence of audiovisual media and, most recently, a transformation
of the media towards the development of integrated and digitized
communication technologies which are creating a more complex multimedia
environment. This development has blurred the traditional frontiers
between reading and writing and between communications based
on audiovisual images and communications based on text. In effect, the
continuous developments of the new media (Internet, online communication
and mobile technology) have differed from the old media in
a number of ways, such as in the production, distribution and reception
of media content. The problem is that old media like newspapers
and magazines do not have an audience problem – newspaper websites
are a vital and growing source of news – but they do have a consumer
problem. Similarly, although nowadays some refer to audiences as users
or consumers (Pavlik, 1998), media studies cannot take the concept of
‘audience’ as a redundant academic device (Ruddock, 2008).
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