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Article · January 2011

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Obiageli Pauline Ohiagu University of Port Harcourt

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Abstract If anything is dynamic in today’s world, it is the concept and process of . Every aspect of it including its channels keeps evolving by the year. Despite the controversies that range on whether the Internet is a mass medium or not, the number of its members that keeps increasing geometrically by the day makes it undeniably one. It is a new mass medium and a forceful one too, which has become an integral part of other mass media as well as the media supporting industries- and . This paper presents the Internet not just as a channel for like any other technological tool used by contemporary man to transmit public messages rapidly to a large, mixed and audience, but as a unique mass medium that even stands out as the medium of other mass medium. The Internet is not only a mass medium but is also a global medium with a potential to reach everyone on the globe. It is also a unique channel for mass communication which has challenged if not altered some of the fundamental and traditional concepts of a mass medium.

Introduction - Understanding the Internet The International Network commonly abridged to Internet simply means a global network of millions of networks. In other words, it is a network of all computer networks worldwide or plainly a network of networks. The Internet allows for instantaneous exchange of to and from any part of the globe. Through its electronic often referred to as for short, or chat facilities, the Internet makes it possible for people to communicate with others both at the interpersonal and mass levels of communication. It also allows its users’ access to volumes of information available on the . more voluminous than any known encyclopedia can be transferred from one part of the world to the farthest part of the globe at the speed of light. Thus users can download or information at a startling speed.

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A recent development of the Internet is its social networks such as , , Tagged, hi 5, and My Space that are excellent in enhancing the interactional and socialization dimensions of mass communication. , as they are now called, are networking people into indeed one global village where everyone gets to know of what is happening in everyone else’s life even as the events unfold. Many people keep daily of their life events and activities on the social media and their friends can partake or react to such posts instantaneously. For Arens (2006: 540) discussing the digital and the information highway, “the highway is the Internet and it is already the fastest growing medium in history.”

The Internet as a Medium of Mass Communication

If anything is dynamic in today’s world, it is the concept and process of communication. Every aspect of it including its channels keeps evolving by the year. Not too long ago many communication scholars had problem accepting the Internet as an emerging mass communication medium. But a critical scrutiny of the features of the classical mass communication media such as , , and shows the Internet exhibiting the same qualities. Such analysis puts the Internet on an equal platform with the old mass media if not on a higher position. A look at these attributes will drive home the point. i. Reach: A medium is said to have a good reach or coverage if it has the ability to expose a large number of people to a given mass media message within a given period. In the words of Rossiter (1997) reach is the “number of target audience individuals exposed to the advertising or in an advertising circle” (p. 447). Frequencies restrict the reach of radio and television media to a limited region or territory (except if they are enabled by the Internet boundless waves or satellite orbits). The circulation of print newspapers and magazines depend on manual distribution. This is a strong limitation as newspapers from , for example, cannot reach people in even the neighbouring countries through such –assisted distribution system. But when enhanced on the Internet, the online version has no boundaries. An electronic can be accessed from any part of the world where there is an Internet network.

The Internet, on the other hand, has the potential to reach everyone hooked up to an Internet- enabled system. Its services or network can be received anywhere without any restriction through

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any of the Internet Service Providers (ISP). That some people do not have or Internet connection is not a weakness of the medium, after all, some people too cannot afford TV sets and therefore cannot receive TV signals. So the Internet has the capacity to reach a large audience and even a larger audience than some conventional mass media especially print newspapers and magazines. In fact, the Internet is not only a mass medium but is also a global medium with a potential to reach everyone on the globe. Arens (2006) noted “that with an audience of some 800 million people worldwide, the Internet is also the only true global medium, providing information and commerce opportunities that are immediately accessible around the world” (p. 558). Hanson (2005) argued that “by inventing the WWW, Tim Berners Lee, the British physicist, created the that allows the Internet to work as a medium of mass communication” (p.274).

Edmund Lee (http://adage.com/article/mediaworks/charlie-sheen-verified-twitter-account- fast/149171/) on March 2, 2011 posted a shocking article retrieved March 25, 2011 on how Charlie Sheen signed up for a Twitter account and in less than 24hours more than 900,000 of his fans had connected to him. Well, it might be argued that this is not an everyday experience since Charlie Sheen is a Hollywood who cashed on his existing media popularity. Yet it is an indication of the potential of the Internet to reach a large audience almost simultaneously. President Obama of America has about... fans on his page, similarly, President Goodluck Jonathan has about…fans on his page. Even some individuals who have no previous popularity record have amassed huge contacts on their pages. The point being made here is that the Internet especially through the social networks can boast of a large reach or coverage like other mass medium, if not more.

ii. Simultaneity of Reception: Another feature of the traditional mass media is simultaneity, which is the ability of the medium to transmit the message to audience members at the same time or nearly the same time. Hanson (2005) underlined that “mass communication messages are transmitted rapidly to the receivers. Audience members can receive the message simultaneously, as they would in the case of a radio broadcast; at similar though not identical times, as in the case of a newspaper or ; and occasionally over an extended period, as in the case of CD, movie or ” (p.11).

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Perhaps, the greatest weakness of the Internet as a mass lies in its poor capacity to be accessed simultaneously by the mass audience. Yet, apart from radio and television that broadcast transient messages simultaneously to the receivers, all other mass media are to some degree equally have this deficiency. Newspapers, magazines, , and the Internet cannot be accessed at the same time. Nevertheless, their permanent nature as opposed to the transient nature of radio and TV messages counters this weakness since people can access them even moments after they are transmitted.

In itself, the Internet has the potential to reach everyone who is connected at the same second just as radio and TV signals can be received at once by all who tune in to the same channel. However, in reality, the possibility of many being hooked up online all at the same time, and surfing through the same is very slim. Nevertheless, not even radio, TV and much less newspapers and magazines can hope to achieve simultaneity of reception especially with our contemporary multi-channel phenomenon. The impossibility of this is compounded by the countless number of options. In our media saturated world, what chances are there that a mass audience will all tune in to the same radio or TV station simultaneously when there are pretty too many options? So the Internet gambles for a mass audience as the other media are also forced to do in our media-saturated- era. Just as no medium or any particular media can promise to command a mass patronage or reception of any of its messages in modern society because of the exploding media options, similarly the Internet may not easily communicate to a mass audience simultaneously. With the advent of the possibility of a national media is no more feasible; rather most media now engage in , niche or targeting. With a plethora of viewing options, the media audience has been fragmented. Audience fragmentation or segmentation and narrowcasting are features of our digital driven society.

Yet by a message in some popular such as Yahoo, , Facebook, AOL, Hotmail etc which are visited by many people world-wide, the possibility of simultaneous mass communication is enhanced. For example, during the inauguration of Barrack Obama – America’s 1st black president – countless number of peoples from around the globe watched the telecast simultaneously on some of these websites. Besides, if about a thousand

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surfers from every country visit the website at the same time, when that is added up worldwide, we have a number that is larger than what can just be described as a mass audience. iii. : A mass communication channel allows the to reach a large, heterogeneous and anonymous audience. Because of the number involved, the audience is a mixed group and the sender cannot personally know most of them. The producers of a , a webzine, an on-line newspaper or a popular corporate website cannot know the individual audience members who would visit their sites. The audience members on their part may also not know the sender of such online messages or information.

Besides, what can be more anonymous than the cyber experience where people exchange views and online with other people they have never seen or met outside the of the Internet? For example, when a producer of media content on Facebook (one of the popular Internet social networks) who has 2, 000 people in his network posts any information on his page or wall, he wouldn’t know who among these 2, 000 people would see his post and there is no way he can know all of them personally. So while the Internet has the potentials for interpersonal communication, it equally enables people to communicate with an anonymous audience or group. iv. Heterogeneity of Audience: If a medium of mass communication must reach a heterogeneous and spatially dispersed audience, then no other medium does it better than the Internet. The Internet audience are a thoroughly mixed group in sex, age, location, status, class, race and . They can be spatially dispersed both in reality and in the virtual world.

v. Dual Outreach: In fact, the Internet has an added advantage since it can be adapted for both a narrow and mass reach depending on the users need. It has the potential for both global marketing and narrowcasting to a specialized or segmented audience. What is more, in the same manner that radio and TV can switch from one language to the other, the Internet can be accessed in most popular languages spoken in different parts of the world. So not even language is a barrier here unlike for books, newspapers, magazines and billboards that are

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limited by language. Its barrier though is technological illiteracy barrier, because one must have some level of computer proficiency before he can access the Internet. Accessibility too can limit the Internet and this too will soon be in the past as Internet threatens to become cheaper and more easily accessible. Biagi (2005) confirmed that: “the Web is a new medium, but its growth to become a true mass medium for a majority of people seeking information and is limited only by digital technology and economics” (p. 191). It is a medium limited only by technology and economics.

Measured against the above benchmarks for assessing a mass communication tool, it has been proved beyond logic with enough evidence that the Internet is a mass medium of communication and indeed an effective mass medium capable of reaching a very large, mixed and anonymous audience.

Joshua Gans (http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/03/facebook_is_the_largest_news_o.) in an article titled ‘Facebook is the largest ever’ posted on March 11, 2011 and retrieved on March 25, 2011 argued that ‘Facebook is a fully fledged news organization on a scale we have never seen. News do two major things, commercially speaking: they use news to grab attention and then sell that attention to advertisers.’ And this, of course is what Facebook and other social networks are doing subtly. The writer observes that Facebook not only provides a platform whereby individuals become reporters, editors, and publishers but the medium offers a compelling proposition to advertisers because a good number of people go there every day even if they are not likely to spend more than a few minutes there. He goes further to compare some features of Facebook to that of a typical newspaper such as news delivery, providing room for opinions and entertainment.

Facebook is delivering on the first task of the news organization. Some Facebook friends might express opinions, but more often they are reporting facts. What is more, because these facts are reported to social connections, they are actually accurate. Nothing binds one to the truth more than the accountability of an ongoing personal relationship. Do you ever hear it exclaimed, "I heard on Facebook that your train broke down and that turned out to be an exaggeration"? Facebook knows this. The company even calls it a "News Feed." And it is peppered with other news stories coming from outlets your friends have shared. You can read it like a newspaper (postpost.com) or a magazine (Flipboard for the iPad). Even the , jokes, surveys, and other attention- grabbing activities on Facebook have a long provenance in newspapers, which are full of games (crosswords and Sudoku), jokes (the comics), and polls. These are a long- standing part of the news experience.

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The Internet as a Unique Mass Medium The next task in this work which is the major contribution of this paper is to x-ray ways in which the Internet is distinct from other mass media in order to understand why this paper qualifies it as the medium of all mass media. The Internet’s uniqueness extends also to alter some old definitions of mass communication and demands a revisit of some old concepts of mass communication.

1. Ability to Enhance the Performance of Other Media: A major edge or distinctiveness of the Internet over the old or existing mass media lies in its ability to enhance the performance of the other media. In fact, it can be safely said that the Internet has become an indispensable part of radio, television, newspaper and magazine’s effective and successful existence. The old mass media have continued to enhance their relevance by hooking up to the Internet. In a very short time, it will be inconceivable to think of any media outfit that can survive without supporting itself with an online version of its productions. Therefore, the Internet can aptly be called not just a mass medium but also the medium of the mass media because it is also a channel through which the other media enhance their relevance or overcome their own limitations of frequencies, circulation or transiency. Through the Internet medium, the contents of the other media: radio, TV, books, magazines, and newspapers are relayed to a wider audience.

2. Flexibility of Usage: What is more, the Internet has the potential to function as radio, television, newspaper or magazine depending on the user’s need. No other known mass medium has this unique ability of functioning as a different medium in different circumstances. The user therefore decides what medium to make of the Internet. Radio can never be used as a television medium, neither can newspaper ever become radio or serve the purpose of a magazine. But the Internet can swap its nature by a single mouse click. Still related to this Internet flexibility, Hanson (2005) added that “the thing that makes computer based communication so powerful is that it includes virtually every level of communication, from the interpersonal communication of e-mail and instant messaging to the mass communication of the World Wide Web” (p. 272).

3. Ability to Combine Features of Other Media: As a result of this flexibility nature, it combines all the strengths of the old mass media such as visual ability of TV and the print media; motion picture

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potential of TV and , ability of radio, TV and film, retrieval and permanent nature of books and the print media. What a medium!

4. Ability to Empower Audience as Active Users: Before the advent of the Internet, receivers were merely seen as audience members whose contribution to the communication process was limited to passively absorbing whatever the had to offer. Their choice was very limited beyond tuning off from the channel or media content. With the of cable and its consequent many channels availability, the audience had greater choices to make concerning what media content to consume and when. The arrival of the remote control empowered them more since they would not even need to get up from their seats to change to any station. But the control was indeed a remote one.

However, when the Internet came on board, they ceased to be merely a passive audience on the consumption lane but they quickly transformed to active users who select not only what medium to use, but which of its many contents to consume. A television fan who wants to watch the news on a is kept hostage as a typical audience member from the beginning of the news cast to the end before he is satisfied. On the Internet he quickly goes to the sports link thus controlling the communication process and using the media as he wants.

5. A Medium for Two-Way Communication: The Internet users are equally engaged actively in the production aspect of the communication process. They respond to messages and also create their own messages. It is indeed a mass medium with a difference which offers both the sender and the receiver equal opportunities in the communication process; and both are simply referred to as users. Hanson (2005) observed that the Internet became a full-fledged mass communication network in the 1990s, although its beginnings dates back to 1969. Rather than simply making it easier for individuals and organizations to send messages to a mass audience, the new computer networks are designed for two-way communication. Audience members who were once passive receivers could now send messages back to the original senders thus becoming message providers themselves. Thus there is no fixed status of sender or receiver in this new communication setting. This interchangeability of sender – receiver roles is not a unique feature of the Internet. A newspaper reader who sends a to the editor may have become also a sender but the Internet’s potential for instantaneous feedback is perhaps what makes it stand out in this ability.

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6. The Internet Challenges Conventional Concepts of Mass Communication: The Internet has also challenged the conventional understanding of the mass communication sender as always an organized, complex and expensive system. Today mass communication on the Internet is not necessarily the product of a large, complex and sophisticated organization such as the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA). Even a single individual can use the Internet to generate and sustain communication with a very large and mixed (mass) group. Neither must mass communication be an expensive or capital-intensive- investment as that of setting a broadcast station or floating a newspaper. All one needs for Internet mass communication may be a computer and an Internet .

Dominick (2007) asserted that the WWW “brings the Internet into the realm of mass communication and reverses the traditional pattern of one-to-many communication. Web sites offer everybody the chance to become mass communicators, mass communication is never guaranteed, but the potential is there….The affordability of this channel can make anybody an electronic publisher with access to a potential audience of millions, thus creating a whole new type of mass communicator” (p.17).

7. The Internet has a Worldwide Audience: With development and time, the Internet might even dare to become the primary mass medium as ubiquitous as every man’s radio. Oyewole (2007) concurred that the Internet has become a “dominant infrastructure in the modern society.” Similarly, O’ Guinn, Allen and Semenik (2006) documented that in 2006 it was estimated that there are about 1.3 billion Internet users worldwide which represents only about 20 percent of the world’s population. Yet, though the Internet, like many communication technologies started rather upscale, it is now broadening to middle – and lower income with the advent of more affordable computers. technology will spread the application even further and faster to poor countries that cannot afford the infrastructure needed for wired connections. Citing Cha (2005) in an article published in Providence Journal, Baran (2009) similarly estimated that there are at least 1 billion users worldwide. Any current study on the Internet audience will definitely reveal a further geometric multiplication of the figures quoted in 2005 and 2006 above.

In conclusion, if we understand mass communication as put forward by Hanson (2007) as a society- wide communication process in which an individual or uses technology to send messages to a large mixed audience, most of whose members are not known to the sender, then the Internet is

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undeniably a mass medium. Against the yardstick of the features of a mass medium its position as a mass medium is not negotiable. But more importantly, it is a global medium reaching the entire universe; it is the medium of the other media enhancing their relevance and keep them from extinction; it has challenged and altered many traditional concepts of mass communication.

References Arens, W. F. (2006). Contemporary advertising. Boston: McGraw Hill Irwin. Baran, S. J. (2009). Introduction to mass communication: media literacy and culture. Boston: McGraw Hill Irwin. Biagi, S. (2005). Media impact: an introduction to mass media. Belmont: Thompsom Wadsworth. Dominick, J. (2007). The dynamics of mass : media in the digital age ( 9th ed.) Boston: McGraw Hill. Hanson, R. E. (2005). Mass communication: living in a media world. Boston: McGraw Hill Irwin. O’Guinn, T. C., Allen C. T., & Semenik R. J. (2006). advertising and integrated promotion. Ohio: Thomson South-Western. Rossiter J.R (1997). Advertising communications & promotions management. Boston: McGraw Hill Irwin. Oyewole, J. (2007) Internet and the possibilities for DevCom. In Understanding development communication, J. Scrampical, and A. Aram (Eds.), Delhi: Media House, 380-398.

Internet Resources

Gans, J. (2011) http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/03/facebook_is_the_largest_news_o.html) Lee, E. (2011) (http://adage.com/article/mediaworks/charlie-sheen-verified-twitter-account- fast/149171/)

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