16.1 Changes in Media Over the Last Century
Life has undergone dramatic changes over the past century, primarily due to the relentless advancement of media technology. Consider a typical day for a modern student—let’s call her Katie—and compare it with the experiences of someone from her great-grandparents’ generation. When Katie wakes up, her hand instinctively reaches for her smartphone, not just for text messages, but to scroll through Instagram stories, check notifications from her university’s learning management system, and perhaps glance at a breaking news alert from an app. The convenience of this instant, multi-faceted digital connection stands in stark contrast to the slower methods of the past. While eating breakfast, Katie might stream a news podcast or a short video clip on her tablet to catch up on current events and the weather forecast. Before leaving her apartment, she uses a transit app to confirm train schedules and real-time delays. On her commute, she listens to a personalized playlist on a music streaming service, seamlessly transitioning to watching a lecture capture or a trending TikTok video on her phone. After a busy day of classes, Katie heads home, finishes her assignments, perhaps collaborating on a document in a cloud-based platform, and then settles down to stream a show on a subscription service like Netflix or Max. While watching, she might engage in a group chat with friends on WhatsApp or Discord to make weekend plans, before finally unwinding by reading an e-book on her Kindle or a news article on her tablet. The pervasiveness, convenience, and speed of these modern technologies have profoundly reshaped daily life.
Katie’s life today differs vastly from the life her great-grandmother, Elizabeth, would have led at the beginning of the 20th century. Elizabeth would have woken up to the rustle of a daily newspaper, perhaps one characterized by “yellow journalism” with its sensational headlines about government corruption or the plight of factory workers. She might have enjoyed the relatively new Sunday comics, which by the 1890s featured full-color printing. Her primary source of external information would have been print media, including magazines like Good Housekeeping. Occasionally, Elizabeth and her husband might have visited a local nickelodeon theater to watch short silent films accompanied by live music. Owning a phonograph would have been a luxury, so evenings might have involved gathering around a piano to sing songs from popular sheet music. Before sleep, Elizabeth might have read a few pages from a printed novel. Separated by nearly a century of technological evolution, Elizabeth’s and Katie’s lives encompass both fundamentally similar human experiences and vastly different technological realities.
The Evolution of Media: From Traditional to Digital
Traditional media encompasses all the means of communication that largely predated the widespread adoption of the internet and advanced digital technologies, including printed materials such as books, magazines, and newspapers; broadcast communications like television and radio; film; and recorded music. New media, on the other hand, refers to digital-first content, interactive platforms, user-generated content, streaming services, electronic games, virtual and augmented reality, and increasingly, AI-driven content. While different forms of mass media rise and fall in prominence, it is notable that despite significant cultural and technological shifts, no media form has completely vanished; instead, they often adapt, converge, or find new niches.
Electronic Games and Entertainment
First popularized in the 1970s with Atari’s simple table-tennis simulator Pong, video games have undergone a monumental transformation over the past five decades. Early home game consoles could play only one game, a limitation soon overcome by interchangeable game cartridges. The rise of the personal computer in the 1980s enabled developers to create games with more complex storylines and, crucially, to allow players to interact with each other. The mid-1980s saw the emergence of online role-playing games, enabling multiple users to play simultaneously. A dramatic increase in internet use during the 1990s and 2000s further popularized online gaming, both on personal computers and via internet-enabled home console systems like the Microsoft Xbox and the Sony PlayStation.
Today, gaming is a global phenomenon encompassing diverse platforms and experiences. Mobile gaming, accessible on nearly every smartphone, dominates in terms of player count and revenue. Esports has evolved into a professional industry with massive tournaments, sponsorships, and dedicated streaming platforms like Twitch and YouTube Gaming, where millions watch competitive gameplay. Cloud gaming services, such as Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and NVIDIA GeForce Now, allow players to stream high-fidelity games without powerful local hardware. Virtual and augmented reality gaming continues to push immersive boundaries. The internet has profoundly expanded the social aspect of video gaming, bridging generations and opening up vast new audiences. Online communities thrive around shared gaming experiences, fostering connections and competitive play across geographic boundaries.
The Internet and Social Media
It is almost impossible to overstate the internet’s transformative influence on media over the past three decades. Initially conceived as a resilient military network in the 1960s, the internet has since become an indispensable part of daily life for billions. With the development of the World Wide Web in the 1990s and the introduction of commercial browsers, users gained the ability to transmit pictures, sound, and video over the internet. Companies quickly capitalized on this new technology, launching web browsers, offering free web-based email accounts, and providing web directories and search engines. Internet usage grew exponentially; by 2023, approximately 66% of the global population, or over 5.3 billion people, had internet access, with penetration rates in industrialized nations often exceeding 90%. This widespread connectivity has fundamentally reshaped how people receive news, conduct business, research, communicate, apply for jobs, and consume entertainment. The COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, dramatically demonstrated that many jobs could be performed entirely from home, highlighting the internet’s role in enabling remote work and online education on an unprecedented scale.
The internet has not only accelerated the speed and volume of information access but has also profoundly democratized communication. Becoming the author of a printed book may take years of effort, but becoming a publisher of online material often requires little more than the click of a button. Thanks to a vast array of social media platforms—including blogs, social networking sites like Facebook and X (formerly Twitter), visual platforms like Instagram and TikTok, professional networks like LinkedIn, and community forums like Reddit—anyone can contribute ideas, share content, and engage in public discourse. Social media offers instantaneous news distribution, diverse perspectives on events, and the ability to communicate with people worldwide.
Crucially, the internet has fostered the rise of the “creator economy,” enabling content creators to monetize their work through platforms like Patreon directly. Patreon allows fans to provide recurring financial support to artists, musicians, podcasters, YouTubers, and independent journalists, bypassing traditional intermediaries. This crowdfunding model empowers creators to produce content independently, fostering a wider range of voices and niche interests that might not be viable through conventional media channels. Other platforms like Kickstarter and GoFundMe also facilitate project-based or cause-based crowdfunding, further democratizing funding for creative and journalistic endeavors. While some industry analysts once predicted the internet would render print media obsolete, mass-media executives have instead seen newspapers evolve, rethinking their methods of content delivery in the digital age.
New Media versus Traditional Media
The rapid development of new technologies has presented significant challenges for executives in traditional media companies striving to maintain control over their content and business models. For example, the early 2000s saw the music-sharing website Napster enable users to exchange free music files, costing the music industry substantial revenue in lost CD sales. Rather than immediately embracing the digital shift, music industry executives initially pursued legal action, ultimately shutting down Napster but failing to eradicate online music piracy. The industry eventually adapted by embracing legal digital music sales and, more significantly, subscription-based streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music, shifting the revenue model from ownership to access.
The publishing industry has also faced immense disruption. While newspaper readership had already experienced a decline with the advent of television and radio, the internet introduced new forms of competition. When newspapers began developing online versions, they found themselves contending with amateur blogging and news aggregators. Initially dismissed as unreliable, blogs and online-only publications like The Huffington Post (now HuffPost) and Politico gained credibility and large readerships, compelling traditional journalists to engage with digital platforms, including blogging and tweeting. This shift sometimes necessitates faster reporting, potentially impacting the time available for in-depth analysis or extensive source verification. Furthermore, news aggregators like Google News, which link to journalists’ stories without directly compensating the content creators, posed a financial challenge.
In response to falling circulation figures and advertising sales, many newspapers have adapted by implementing robust digital subscription models, such as the successful metered paywall introduced by The New York Times in 2011, demonstrating that audiences are willing to pay for quality online journalism. They have also diversified their offerings to include websites, blogs, podcasts, and video news stories. Those that foresaw and embraced this digital transformation are better positioned today, as the internet has become a primary news source for a large segment of the population, often surpassing traditional newspapers and radio in reach.
Pay-for-Content: Do you think it will work?
The concept of charging for digital content, often termed “pay-for-content” or “paywalls,” faced considerable skepticism in its early days, with critics frequently pointing to initial failures as evidence of its unviability. A prominent example from the late 2000s was Newsday, a daily newspaper from Long Island, New York. In October 2009, Newsday implemented a paywall, charging readers $5 a week for unlimited online access. This early attempt proved largely unsuccessful, with reports indicating a minimal number of new paying subscribers in the initial months. The company’s strategy, which offered free access to print subscribers and Optimum Cable customers (covering a significant portion of its market), was seen by some as undermining the incentive to pay, leading to a substantial drop in overall website traffic (Koblin, 2010). This early experience fueled the belief that internet users, accustomed to free content, would not pay for news.
However, the landscape of digital media has undergone a profound transformation since then, largely disproving the early pessimistic forecasts. What was once seen as a doomed venture has become a cornerstone of financial sustainability for many news organizations. The turning point arrived with publications that successfully demonstrated the model’s viability by offering a compelling value proposition.
Perhaps the most influential success story is The New York Times. After years of offering most of its online content for free, the newspaper introduced a metered paywall in 2011, allowing readers to access a limited number of articles per month before requiring a subscription. This strategy was meticulously planned, leveraging The Times‘s reputation for high-quality, in-depth journalism and its global reach. Unlike Newsday‘s more restrictive early approach, the Times‘s metered model allowed casual readers to sample content while encouraging loyal readers to subscribe. This move proved to be a watershed moment, demonstrating that if the content were perceived as valuable and unique, audiences would indeed pay for it. The Times has since grown its digital subscriber base to millions, becoming a model for others.
Following The New York Times‘s success, various paywall models emerged and gained traction. The metered model, where users get a certain number of free articles before hitting a paywall, remains popular, adopted by outlets like The Washington Post and The Boston Globe. Another common approach is the freemium model, where basic content is free, but premium features, exclusive articles, or in-depth analysis are reserved for subscribers. The Guardian, for instance, operates on a voluntary contribution model, asking readers for support while keeping its content largely free. Still, many niche publications and investigative journalism sites utilize a more defined freemium structure. Less common for general news, but prevalent in specialized fields, is the hard paywall, which requires a subscription for any access, often seen in financial news (e.g., The Wall Street Journal) or academic journals.
The shift to pay-for-content has had a significant impact on journalism itself. It has provided news organizations with a crucial alternative revenue stream beyond advertising, which has been in steady decline in the digital age. This financial stability has allowed many outlets to invest more heavily in investigative journalism, hire specialized reporters, and produce high-quality content that might not be possible under an advertising-only model. For example, subscriber revenue has enabled newsrooms to undertake complex, long-form projects that require significant resources, fostering a renewed focus on unique, in-depth reporting that differentiates them from the vast sea of free online information.
However, challenges persist. The proliferation of subscriptions across various digital services—from streaming video and music to software and news—has led to concerns about “subscription fatigue,” where consumers become overwhelmed by the number of services they are asked to pay for. There are also ongoing debates about equitable access to information, as paywalls can create a digital divide, limiting access to high-quality journalism for lower-income individuals. Despite these challenges, the pay-for-content model has undeniably become a fundamental component of the modern media economy, demonstrating that value, when clearly articulated and consistently delivered, can compel audiences to open their wallets in the digital realm.
New media generally offers three significant advantages over traditional forms. First, it provides immediate coverage, enabling consumers to access the latest news, weather reports, or financial updates at a moment’s notice. Users can download digital music instantly, stream movies or television programming on demand, and read books on e-readers or smartphones. In an increasingly fast-paced world, the idea of waiting for content seems antiquated. The second advantage, though nuanced, is cost. While a vast amount of user-generated content and basic information remains free, the digital landscape has also seen a proliferation of subscription models for premium content, from streaming entertainment to in-depth journalism. The success of paywalls underscores a willingness among consumers to pay for quality and convenience. Finally, new media enables users to reach the most remote parts of the globe, fostering global communities and movements. For example, a student seeking information about daily life in a distant country can likely find personal blogs, social media accounts, or online communities dedicated to that experience. This widespread reach also makes the internet an ideal target for advertisers, who can communicate with particular niche audiences through sophisticated data tracking and profile information on social networking sites.
