1. From mass media to personal media.

Research paper New Interactive environments

1. From mass media to personal media

Can You remember the time when You were a little kid and for asking Your friends out, You needed to go behind their doors or ring via home telephone that looked bigger than some of the wireless computers nowadays? And even when You got older You needed to write actual letters to keep in touch with people who were not living in the same region with You? Or it was actually unknown what Your co-students did during their summer breaks? 

In a growing technological society it is hard to remember that those times were not even 10 years ago. With uses of Facebook, Twitter, Skype, etc. one could easily be informed and have interactive communication while not even staying on the same continent. Also with these media tools an individual could reach the same amount of people as an audience for a smaller regional newspaper in 90s. In this way it becomes more indistinguishable the line between mass and personal media and their appearance on the same form. Is mass media dying and will be replaced with personal media? Or it is just highly personalized through increasing uses of personal media on its form? Or is it the other way around - personal media is dying as it becomes increasingly accessible for anyone and through that its content becomes depersonalized?

In order to answer these questions one should define mass media and personal media and how their definition has changed through the change of different media forms. Thompson in his book The Media and Modernity (1995) defines "mass" in mass media through the unimportance of the quantity of receivers but rather importance of  the accessibility of the product to plurality of recipients. He brings out five typical characterizations to mass media:

• technical and institutional means of production and diffusion;

• the commodification of symbolic forms;

• a structured break between the production and the reception of

symbolic forms;

• the extended availability of symbolic forms in space and time; and

• media products are available in principle to a plurality of recipients

As this theory is outdated and cannot apply to nowadays uses of mass media and personal media as their platforms and uses have changed in the last 16 years. For example in mid 90s the most common mediums for news were still television, radio and actual newspapers. Now all three could be easily accessible via internet. This accessibility has also changed mass media content and the relation between  the producer and the receiver. Many high profile mass media producers, such as CNN, BBS and many television programs, have included recipients to their content while making the production more interactive. Also as the increasing uses of social networks are applying the same characteristics of mass media to personal media. 

Certain personal media forms share characteristics that Luhmann and Thompson argue,  are typical for mass media: most significantly copying technologies are used and there are structured breaks between the production and reception of messages, which imply that expressions are detached from a shared temporal and spatial presence. Instead, the differences between mass media and personal media were discussed according to different interactional roles and network structures and users as active producers of mediated (and generally accessible) content.(Luders) A perfect case to illustrate this was a recent campaign Occupy Wall Street and the uses of social network Facebook. The beginning of the protest was not reflected in the common mass media platforms, but gained its popularity via personal media platform, making it hard to be unnoticed and creating a greater impact for the whole campaign, while reaching more people over the world than any national nor international media form could do. 

Although the border between personal media and mass media is getting thinner, the difference is still there. The article suggested a model that situates personal media and mass media differently according to two axes. On the horizontal axis,

personal media are more symmetrical, facilitating mediated interaction, whereas

mass media are more asymmetrical. On the vertical axis, personal media are

closer to the de-institutionalized or de-professionalized content pole, whereas

mass media are closer to the institutional or professional pole.(Luder) Mass media is meant to the recipients, but is not yet quite made by recipients.