Internet as a Mass Medium
Published by Emil Abraham,
Internet has revolutionized the communication world. It has fundamentally changed the way people learn, play, create and communicate. Today it has become a part of our life. It is not just a technology, but an engine of social change, one that has modified work habits, education, social relations and maybe most important, our hopes and dreams.
The Internet scenario has undergone a transformation in the past few years. In 2015 it has reached 46.4% of the world population and 30% of Indian population. In 2010, it had penetrated 28.7 percent of the global population and only 8.5 percent of the Indian population (internetworldstats, 2016) India is one of the fastest growing Internet markets in the word growing at 14% in 2014 (internetlivestats, 2016). The increasing popularity of internet has attracted the attention of communication scholars, to fathom its promising developments, uncertainties and lurking dangers in the horizon of our cyber society.
Mass media is considered to be one of the important tools of opinion formation. Newspapers, Radio and Television are considered as major ingredients of the Fourth Estate. Very soon, Internet and Online newspapers also became popular media. Comparing to other media, the growth of online newspapers is faster. When internet became a phenomenon beyond the government and universities, electronic publishing exploded in newspapers, e-zines and current information sites.
History of internet dates back to 1960s:
The net is considered to be a product of the cold war, it was built by the USA military to protect national security in the face of nuclear attack. The Advanced Research Project Agency(ARPA) was a new Department started within the US Department of Defence and the ARPANET succeeded in creating the first effective long distance computer network.
1962: The RAND Corporation, USA, begins research into robust, distributed communication networks for military command and control.
1969: ARPANET connects first four universities in the US.
1972: The Inter Networking Working Group becomes the first of several standard- setting entities to govern the growing network.
1973: The ARPANET goes International with connections to University College in London, England, and the Royal Radar Establishment in Norway.
1974: The first commercial version of ARPANET, The Telenet opened.
1983: TC/IP becomes the Universal language of the Internet.
1984: William Gibson coins the term "Cyberspace "in his novel "Neuromancer"
1985: The World Wide Web is born.
In the United States, delivery of news and other information to people with computers in their homes dates to the late 1970s and early 1980s, when a handful of media companies went public with their experiments in something called ‘videotex’. Videotex involved sending information from a central computer to an individual terminal over telephone lines, and the key advantages over print that its supporters suggested will sound familiar: speed, selectivity, the ability to personalise information and the extent of available data. Although similar systems in Europe were backed by national governments, notably departments providing mail and telephone services, those in the United States were developed by corporations. About a dozen US newspapers also explored electronic transmission through a service called CompuServe.
The available technology in the 1980s however was not quite up to the task that these pioneers envisioned. Although the Internet existed as a civilian technology, having split from its military origins in 1983, it was still a cumbersome text-based system used primarily by scientists and researchers and unknown to almost everyone else. Moreover, effective revenue models were elusive for videotext products’ commercial backers, whose proprietary stand-alone networks were not connected to the fledgling Internet. By the end of the decade, many of the early services had been abandoned and others had morphed into something quite different, generally with few if any ties to existing news organizations.
There was an invention of a logical system for connecting something that existed in one place on the network to a different thing in a different place. In the late 1980s, Tim Berners Lee, working in a particle physics lab in CERN, Switzerland, developed three technical keystones for sharing information in something he dubbed the World Wide Web. There was a language for encoding documents (HTML), a system for linking one document to another (http, a protocol for exchanging data among computers) and a document-naming system (URL, or Universal Resource Locator) stemming from the World Wide Web.
A few years later, a group of undergraduate programmers working in a computer lab at the University of Illinois, built Mosaic, a graphical user interface that let people simply click a mouse on a word or image to move from place to place. Mosaic was the first browser; its commercial incarnation Netscape Navigator opened the doors of the Web wide to the world in 1994. At the start of 1994, about twenty newspapers offered some sort of online product, mostly bulletin board services plus a handful of alliances with commercial online services such as Prodigy or America Online (AOL). By the end of that year, about a hundred online newspaper services was either operating or in development; the number climbed to about 300 by mid-1995-and kept going. Advertising quickly followed: the first banner ads appeared on hotwired.com, the site of Wired Magazine, in October 1994. Netscape was joined by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and then other Web Browsers, as well. The easier it became to use the Internet and the Web, the more people started getting information online; the more people went online, the greater the opportunity for media companies and marketers to reach them there.
Today, around the world, there are thousands of media outlets, countless numbers of bloggers and other Citizen Journalists. In addition to thousands of mainstream news sites, online journalism incorporates aggregator sites such as Yahoo! News; myriad sites about new media and the media in general, offering journalism; and an exploding number of "share and discussion sites" offering diverse opportunities for interpersonal connection.
In India, internet was introduced in 1991 by the Department of Electronics through the Educational and Research Network (ERNET). It was funded by United Nation Development Programme. On August 15, 1995, Internet was offered to private individuals and organizations by Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited and in 1999 it was liberalized. Since then it has grown, now even villages which have telephone accessibility are armed with internet. Until the early 1990s the internet was simply a network of computers used to transmit government data. With the advent of World Wide Web and Online Subscription Service Providers, internet traffic became an important medium of communication.
Internet as a Mass Medium
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 radio, television, newspapers and magazines 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. 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 Nigeria, for example, cannot reach people in even the neighbouring countries through such vehicle –assisted distribution system. But when enhanced on the Internet, the online version has no boundaries. An electronic newspaper 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 any of the Internet Service Providers (ISP). That some people do not have computers 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. 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. Scholars argue that "by inventing the WWW, Tim Berners Lee, the British physicist, created the software that allows the Internet to work as a medium of mass communication" .
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 magazine; and occasionally over an extended period, as in the case of CD, movie or video ".
Perhaps, the greatest weakness of the Internet as a mass communication channel 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, billboards, books 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 website 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.
iii. Anonymity: A mass communication channel allows the sender 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 webcast, 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.
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 culture. 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 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.
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. 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.
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 potential of TV and film, sound ability of radio, TV and film, retrieval and permanent nature of books and the print media.
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 senders had to offer. Their choice was very limited beyond tuning off from the channel or media content. With the invention 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 sports fan who wants to watch the news on a television channel 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. 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 letter 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.
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. 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 modem.
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.
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. The Internet has become a dominant infrastructure in the modern society. Like many communication technologies, Internet started rather upscale, and is now broadening to middle – and lower income consumers with the advent of more affordable computers. Wireless technology will spread the application even further and faster to poor countries that cannot afford the infrastructure needed for wired connections.
In conclusion, if we understand mass communication as put forward by Ralph E. Hanson (2007) as a society- wide communication process in which an individual or institution uses technology to send messages to a large mixed audience, most of whose members are not known to the sender, then the Internet is 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.
Internet Architecture
In the late 1960s, the US Department of Defense decides to make an extensive network from many small networks, all different, which begin to abound everywhere in North America. We had to find a way for these networks to coexist and give them outdoor visibility, the same for all users. Hence, InterNetwork (interline), abbreviated as the Internet, data this network of networks.
The Internet architecture is based on a simple idea: ask all networks to carry a single packet type, a specific format, the IP protocol. Besides, this IP packet must have an address defined with sufficient generality to identify each computer and terminals scattered throughout the world. This architecture is illustrated in Figure.
The user who wishes to make on this internetwork must store its data in IP packets delivered to the first network to cross. This first network encapsulates the IP packet in its packet structure, package A, which circulates in this form until an exit door, where it is decapsulated to retrieve the IP packet. The IP address is examined to locate, thanks to a routing algorithm, the following network to cross, and so on until arriving at the destination terminal.
To complete the IP, the US Defense added the TCP protocol; specify the nature of the interface with the user. This protocol further determines how to transform a stream of bytes in an IP packet while ensuring the quality of transport of this IP packet. Both protocols, assembled under the TCP / IP abbreviation, are in the form of a layered architecture. They correspond to the packet level and message-level reference model.
The Internet model completed with a third layer called the application level, which includes different protocols for building Internet services. Email (SMTP), file transfer (FTP), the transfer of hypermedia pages, transfer of distributed databases (World Wide Web), etc., are some of these services. The figure shows the three layers of Internet architecture.
IP packets are independent of each other and are individually routed in the network by interconnecting devices, subnets, routers. The quality of service offered by IP is minimal and provides no detection of lost or possibility of error recovery packages.
TCP combines the functionality of the message-level reference model. It is a fairly complex protocol with many options for solving all packet loss problems in the lower levels. In particular, a lost fragment can be recovered by retransmission on the stream of bytes. TCP uses a connection-oriented mode.
The flexibility of the Internet architecture can sometimes be a default. The extent that global optimization of the network is carried out by sub-network subnet, by a succession of local optimizations. It does not allow a homogeneous function in different subnets traversed. Another essential feature of this architecture is to place the entire control system, to say, intelligence and control of the network, in the terminal machine, leaving virtually nothing in the network, at least in the current version, IPv4, the IP protocol. The control intelligence is in the TCP software on the PC connected to the network.
It is the TCP protocol that takes care of sending more or fewer packets according to network load. Precise control window the maximum number of unacknowledged fragments that may be issued. The TCP window control increases or decreases the traffic following the time required to complete a round trip. Over this time increases, Considering the more congested network, the transmission rate must decrease to counter saturation. In return, the infrastructure cost is meagre; no intelligence is not in the network. The service provided by the network of networks corresponds to a quality called the best effort, which means that the network does its best to carry the traffic. In other words, the service quality is not assured.
The new generation of IP, IPv6, introduces new features that make the network nodes smarter. The new generation of routers comes with QoS management algorithms, which allow them to provide transportation that can meet time constraints or packet loss. We expect the arrival of IPv6 for ten years, but it’s still IPv4 IP that governs the world. Because every new need is achievable with IPv6, IPv4 has been able to find the algorithms needed to do as well.
In IPv4, each new customer is treated the same way as those already connected, with resources being distributed equitably among all users. The resource allocation policies of telecom operator’s networks are different since, on these networks, a customer who already has a certain quality of service does not suffer any penalty because of the arrival of a new customer. As discussed, the now advocated solution in the Internet environment is to encourage customers with real-time requirements, using appropriate protocols, using priority levels.
The IP protocol for thirty years but remained almost confidential for twenty years before taking off, unless its properties resulted from the failure of the protocols directly related to the reference model, too many and often incompatible. The IP world growth comes from the simplicity of its protocol, with very few options, and it’s free.