NEW MEDIA POWER


 


 


 


 


INTRODUCTION


 


Media history began with the invention of the printing press which resulted to the emergence of newspapers. The domination of newspapers was transferred to the electronic forms of media in the nineteenth century. The electronic media includes television, radio and film; which exert their influence by offering both image and sound to the audience at the same time. Together with newspaper, they are recognized as ‘mass media’. The ‘mass media age’ then transformed to ‘new media age’ in the twentieth century, marked by the rapid development of the Internet and other digital media technologies.


As  (2002) says, ‘there was old media and new media; we use it to mark a break in history.’ There have been numerous attempts to understand the shift of media power since the emergence of new media. Media power can be defined as ‘power to dominate markets, power to set agenda and power to shape opinions and values.’ (2004).  (2000) suggests that media power is ‘the particular symbolic power that the media represent – reproduced as legitimate.’ (p. 3). Media power is explicit and in soft forms which involve conflicts of different media players (2003). Thus, media power should not only be defined as the control of certain media forms (media control), but should also include the symbols and discourse of the media content (media effect).


Much of the literature focuses on how media power shifts to the consumers in the age of new media.  (2003) points out that the new media puts the one-way mass communication at the end.  (1999) also suggest that the shift of media form from analog to digital systems creates a new scenario where information and communication can be transmitted in a more flexible way. The decentralized Internet breaks the barrier of time and space, as  (1998) says that, ‘Everywhere is both centre and periphery, placeless and boundless.’(p. 5). Consumers thus can communicate immediately and globally.


The flexibility and adaptability of new media, as  (2001) suggests, changes communication from ‘one to many’ to ‘many to many’, ‘in a chosen time and on a global scale ().’ Moreover, consumers also gain the power of media production.  (2001) argues that the openness of the Internet as well as the software has given increasing power to the consumers to become producers.  (2003) also points out that ‘the Internet users can send, receive or participate in the production of information in ways that are not available through other communication media’ (). The two-way communication has turned the passive audience to ‘the most active kind of audience ever’ (2003).


However, others argue that the new media only increases consumer power in a limited extent. As the state and the media conglomerates extend their control on the production and consumption of new media, consumers’ power is lowered.  (2000) argues that ‘the access to the Internet is restricted by global and class-based inequalities of computer ownership. The Internet is also dominated by business use’(2002).


‘Media power’, in this essay, will be argued as ‘whose media power?’ The state (or the government), the corporations and the consumers will be considered as major players. The essay will take the position that media power, to a large extent, is lean to the states and the producers; though the consumers are increasingly utilized by the new media to increase their power. Three aspects, including political, economic and cultural are going to be evaluated. The arguments involved in considering that the new media is complex and varied and consequently only the Internet will be discussed.


 


 


 


 


MEDIA POWER IN THE AGE OF MASS MEDIA


During the last decades, mass media production was largely controlled by the state and the media producers.  (1977) points out that in the capitalist society, media is an ideological tool for the dominant class. The production of the press is recognized as one of the ideological apparatus, as  (2002) argues that ‘much of the press functions as an extension of the party system.’ He points out that ‘many leading proprietors and editors are ardent party supporters and have committed their papers to promoting a party cause’ (). China is an obvious example; Xinhua Agency funded and controlled by the Chinese government, is the only information provider of all the Chinese news. The presses in China, which serve as the subordinates of XinHua, have the responsible to report the information fed by XinHua. The news reports are highly self-censored to ensure that they are favored by the Chinese government.


 (2002) points out that ‘mass media can be characterized by the standardization of content, distribution and production process.’ The one-way flow of television, he argues, has made the television ‘an agent for transmission of centralized messages to mass audiences.’ The concentration of television services also limited the diversity of the news.  (2004) points out that mass media in the United States (US) is dominated by the ‘big five’ (AOL Time Warner, Bertelsmann, News Corporation, Viacom, and Disney) which have interlocked with each other to ‘offer only limited spectrum of political news and commentaries’() The domination in mass media by the American conglomerates not only limits the diversity of media products (1994, 2004), but also exerts American ‘soft power’ to other countries. CNN, which is based in the US, attracts about fifty million viewers in the US and Western Europe, and thirty million viewers in the rest of the world. (1999) The news reports are found to be ‘too US-oriented’ ( 2005). , owner of News Corporation (one of the ‘big five’ mentioned above), sets up Phoenix TV in China and makes a number of compromises with the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) (2005). The control of media production and content by the state and its conglomerates, as Flew and McElhinney argue, has created both media imperialism and cultural imperialism. ( 2006).


Mass media consumers are viewed as passive consumers. The high production costs block the way for ordinary citizens to join the production process. The one-way flow of communication also limits the ability of the consumers to speak out their feedbacks. The mediazation of social life (1990) is concealed in the process of encoding and decoding.  (1999) points out that, ‘when the viewer observes the news in his home, he knows that the same report is being experienced by tens of millions of people’ (). Thus, the hegemony of mass media power normalises and naturalises the globalization and homogenisation of media production and content.


 


POLTICAL ASPECT OF THE NEW MEDIA POWER


The open, interactive, and decentralized nature of the Internet enables the consumers to be the producers. Alternative press and online forum provide a platform for the consumers to participate actively.  (2003) suggest that, ‘the new way of consuming information may encourage people to participate in production.’ (). Many alternative presses started by journalists spring up without business experience (2003). The Internet, unlike the mass media, gives the consumers the power to produce.  (2002) points out that ‘subordinate groups can gain a media voice through owning their own media enterprises. They have met the greatest success in specialist markets where entry costs are low’().


Indymedia is a global network with over one hundred twenty local organizations participating in its operations. The site provides live information like the ‘Battle of Seattle’ in 1999 (2003) and ‘empowers individuals to become independent and civic journalists by providing a direct, unmoderated form of presenting media to public via the Internet’ (2002) The open publishing nature of the site can escape from the editor’s censorship and can counter the hegemonic messages of the state and the corporate media. (2003, 2005). The average posting has been increased from nineteen per day in 2002 to over one hundred fifty per day in 2003 (2005). The participation of the civil society challenges the existing political power, as (2002) points out that ‘new media also posed a threat to the status quo since they could potentially bypass existing structures of control, and make available new ideas and information’ ().


Indymedia, on one hand, presents the news of the activists and allows exchange of ideas. On the other hand, it also serves as an organising tool of worldwide movements (2005). Global activism networks rise by using new digital media to coordinate activities and plan protests against corporations and world development agencies (2003). The ideas and plans of the protest, they suggest, can be exchanged in a global scope without the dependence on mass media (2003). An activist relates from experience by saying that ‘Now, virtual campaigning means I send and receive dozens of emails a week. I also visit the Indymedia websites for up-to-minute reports of international struggles’ (2005).  state that the activists search for the suitable sites and encourage networking, participation and spending (2003). The ‘DIY movements’, as Purkis reports, is aimed to attract and influence the government, businesses and general public ( 2000, 2005). The GM food campaign on the Internet has succeeded as it aroused debates in the public, reports from the mass media, and made the producers respond to the concerns of the activists (2003). Other movements against corporations like Coca-Cola, Nike and Starbucks have also aroused public concern and changed the corporation policies to a certain extent.  (2001) suggests that these movements are to restructure the world from bottom-up ().


While the new media changes the one-way transmission to two-way interactive communication which stimulates the use of the Internet for social movements and empowers the consumers; their influences to politics are limited. Lack of resources is a main difficulty for the independent media to sustain. OneWorld, one of the non-government organizations to use the Internet to provide the latest news, actions, campaigns and organisations concerning human rights, have to sustain resources for themselves by connecting with the media conglomerates. The site is sponsored by British Telecom (BT), one of the largest telecommunications companies in the United Kingdom, and is also linked with Yahoo!, one of the largest global internet search engines, to increase audiences ( 2003). A survey reveals that not all the alternative media can be listed in the search engines as OneWorld. Only forty-two percent of alternative media websites are listed by the totality of major search engines and none of them is listed in the top ten or twenty of these search engines (2000,  2003) .


Some governments, like Europe and Japan, contribute to the development of community network or alternative media, and give rights to the consumers to publish and participate in new media. Examples like the Iperbole program and Amsterdam’s digital City open public sphere for institutions, organisations and citizens to communicate on the Internet (2001). However, there are some countries that limit citizens’ right to access to the Internet. The Chinese government imposes strict censorship on the production and distribution of media content by new media. Though the Internet users in China grow from eight million to nearly seventeen million between January and July of 2000 (2004), their freedom on the web is not guaranteed. The Chinese government uses different methods to limit the access and participation of the citizens. Since mid-2002, the Chinese government has blocked the access to most of the foreign websites, including search engines like Google (both in Chinese and in English), and has also limited the access to foreign news websites like BBC and CNN ( 2002 ; 2004).  also points out that the Chinese government has established national firewall to limit access (1999/2000 and  2002). Although the consumers can remove the blockage by using software which can be easily bought from the market, the online political debate or participation still remain very low, due to the fact that most of the consumers fear that any comments on the web would violate the regulations of the CCP. The Chinese government also employs ‘Internet police’ to check and censor any violations and detains Internet users for leaking ‘state secrets’ ( 2000,  2002).


The increasing censorship from the state or the government has been more obvious in recent years. In 1996, the British police sent a letter to all Internet service providers in the United Kingdom and instructed them to ban over a hundred newsgroups. After the September 11 tragedy in 2001, the governments of the United States, United Kingdom, and other European countries imposed stricter regulations on the Internet for fear of abuse by terrorists (2002). Although the consumers still enjoy the freedom of surfing the Internet, their political organization and participation are restricted by the surveillance of the state or the government. The Chinese government’s use of ‘technological fix’ represents the strong interest of the government to propagate the goods of the state as well as to deskill and depoliticize the citizens by the Internet (1999).


The ‘many to many’ and open features of the Internet provide a ground for consumers to express their political concerns and to organize movements. However, the low rate of participation, the corporate influence, and the government censorship largely reduced the consumers’ political power on the Internet.  (2005) argue that the majority of Internet users still ‘remain observers of the world’, wherein ‘apparently, they do not have much to say about what should be done in the public sphere’ ().


 


ECONOMIC ASPECT OF THE NEW MEDIA POWER


With high production cost and scarcity of equipments, mass media, including newspaper, film and television production, are dominated by the producers. Lister (2002) claims that the traditional mass media are centralized and are characterized by standardization of content, distribution and production process (). The producers have expanded and have become transnational media conglomerates, including ‘the big five’ of the United States. These transnational corporations join together and dominate the production and distribution of mass media products. The one–way transmission or one-to-many transmission have kept the citizens out of the production process and stereotyped them as passive consumers.


Many argue that the emergence of the Internet changes the condition of consumer passivity and marks a new era of global communication. The use of the World Wide Web has been growing rapidly since 1995, while the number of users has grown from sixteen million to over four hundred million in 2001, and has been estimated to reach about one billion in 2005 (2001). The relatively cheap costs of computer devices and network connections not only have increased the number of ownership, but also have increased the consumers’ control of production.  (2001) says that it ‘allows cheap publication without mediation from any corporate publishing’ (2003). Clandler adds that ‘personal homepages can be seen as reflecting the construction of their makers’ (2000).


While many argue that the cheap internet devices and networks empowered the consumers as ‘users and creators of a space’ (1997; 2001), this view is limited. Though Internet ownership has been growing rapidly, there is a technological imbalance between developed and developing countries. In 2000, nearly sixty-six percent of Internet users were in North America and Western Europe, compared to only five percent in Africa and Latin America. ( 2001,  2003). Similar statistics are found in the NUA surveys; in 2000, North America had over one hundred sixty-one million Internets users and Europe had one hundred five million, while Africa only had three point eleven (3.11) million and the Middle East recorded only two point four (2.4) million. The combined statistics of Africa and the Middle East are sixty-seven times lesser than that of North America (2001). The exclusion of Internet networks in the developing countries is largely related to the economy of those countries in the real world.  find out that ‘the disconnected earn less than half the income of the fully connected’ (2006).  (2003) points out that the inequalities of underdevelopment are being reinforced in the network society ().


The use of language on the Internet also causes problems of exclusion. While there are only about ten percent of the world population who can speak English as their first language, nearly eighty-five percent of web content is in English (1990, 2003). While English is a language barrier to a large extent of Internet users globally,  (2001) posits that citizens with poor education, knowledge, and computer skills may also obstruct their ability to manage and use the Internet ( ).


The imbalance between developed and developing countries creates barriers for the Internet to develop globally and facilitates the mergers and dominations within the network society. Microsoft is the largest computer manufacturer in the world. In 2000, it owned ninety percent of the market in personal computer operating system software ( 2000). The domination of Microsoft provides opportunities for the company to control the production of the hardware and software and thus, limits the choice of the consumers. The occasional upgrading of ‘Windows’ software requires the consumers to spend money to buy a newer version. Between 1998 and 2000, Microsoft also invested ten million dollars in cable companies around the world, to pave the way for its control of the software technology in the future ( 2001).  and  (1999) assert that the domination of Microsoft situates and shapes the society, and  and (1999) argue that it is ‘logic of control and domination control over information flow and domination of the enemy’ (2004).


Furthermore, the political economy of the media conglomerates has also undermined the free information flow on the Internet.  (2001) argues that the existing media corporations take advantage of establishing a ‘knowledge economy’, which results to ‘a rapid growth in the number of start ups and mergers of the companies involved specifically in digital content creation’                          (2002). AOL (America Online) has merged with Time Warner which ‘gives AOL access to thirteen million cable customers of Time Warner while Time Warner also gains access to AOL’s more than twenty million customers’ (Strate, Jacobson, and 2003).  (2000) states that most large multinational computer or telecommunication networks are dominating because they have many sub-corporations under their control. ().  and  claim that of the eighty largest corporations in the world in terms of market capitalization, sixteen are in the information and communication sectors (2000), which shows that the influence of the media conglomerates extend from mass media to new media.


Producers are also practicing ‘front-end information politics’ and ‘back-end information politics’ to oversee the consumers’ Internet usage for economic purposes.  argues that ‘the cyberspace population still ranks as the most attractive to advertisers and marketers’ (2003). While consumers are enjoying ‘personal’ times for web surfing and email exchange, pop-up advertisements and junk mails are distributed by producers without the consumers consent. This ‘front-end information politics’ enlarge the producers’ power to intrude consumers’ individualized usage of the Internet. According to  (2004) the Internet and network are alleged and promoted by corporate capitalism (p. 18), which Schiller describes as the phenomenon of ‘digital capitalism’ ( 2004). MSNBC is a convergence of Microsoft and NBC (2003) and anyone who subscribes to MSNBC can enjoy some NBC’s programs via the Internet. However, MSNBC is criticized as highly mediated and controlled, with news stories that are mostly concentrated on the United States’ local news and ignored vast parts of the world ( 2003).  argues that the multimedia conglomerates are using ‘infotainment’ package (homogenized news and entertainment) across multimedia platforms in order to sell consumers to advertisers ( 2005).


 (2000) suggests that personal computers are not really ‘personal’ as explained by the back-end information politics of the producers. The rankings on the search engines have the possibility to be filtered and managed by the webmasters according to their taste or the corporate decision. As (2003) points out, ‘Portals and directories, like web sites, are generally heavily edited by the webmaster organization’.


The so-called ‘cookies’, Turkle argues, allows the producers to track the personal data of the consumers (1999). The history of the websites visited shapes individual ‘taste’ of the consumers and is increasingly used by producers for marketing and promotion. Many websites request consumers to register with their personal data, which enables the producers to use the data for commodity exchange.  (2000) reports that a worldwide media research company   measures Internet audiences and then sell the data to Fortune 500 clients (). He also points out that DoubleClick, which links to the websites, monitors consumer usage and collects their data in order to deliver customized advertisements. The Internet, in this sense, increases the producers’ power to perform individual and transnational marketing and advertising (2000). The ‘cyberspace surveillance’ ( 2000), is argued to be ‘contributing to hypercontrol in societies infused with communication and information technologies’ (1996, 2000).  (2001) also points out that behind the global free communication, it is the networks that are owned and the users that are controlled (). In the 2000 elections in the United States, a company created a database called ‘Aristotle’ and  collected Internet users’ profiles for campaign offices and political candidates (2001).


While information on the Internet is recognized as free and open for all, producers are trying to put a price tag on them. Profit seeking companies are trying to commercialize the cyberspace for money (2003). The subscription fees of websites and web blogs increase the barriers for consumers to be producers. Intellectual properties are also targeted by producers.  (2004) points out that if academic contributors have no specific conditions of use for their academic journals, the material is open to the public and for ‘non-commercial use’ (). However, he observes that’ journal on polymer science has risen by more than eighty percent between 1997 and 2002.                                (2000) indicates that the vendors are selectivity marketing the educational products and services globally ().


 


SOCIAL AND CULTURAL ASPECTS OF THE NEW MEDIA POWER


John Thompson defines culture as ‘a pattern of meaning embodied in symbolic forms…by virtue of which individuals communicate with one another and share their experiences, conceptions and beliefs’ (2000). He argues that the one-way flow of mass communication has a fundamental break between production and reception, which enables the producers to involve ‘an institutional apparatus of transmission’ when encoding media texts. By mediated-quasi interaction, mass media communication is rather monological (2000) in which media power is concentrated on the senders’ side.  points out that the one-way flow of information from core to periphery represents the reality of power (2000) and  (2000) argues that the power is involved in the state, the corporate and the media institutions (). To sustain domination,  (2000) points out that the producers do not only control the material but also ‘the construction of meaning’ ().  (1997) argues that ‘owner and advertiser domination gives commercial media a dual bias in threatening the public sphere’, because they are concerned with the use of media for providing advertising goods (2003). The ideology is used to sustain the dominations from the producers to consumers (1990). The United States production in the last decades, has been considered as the spreading of American cultural imperialism and hegemony.


The Internet, in contrast, provides two-way flow of communication that remedies the break between production and reception. As  (2001) points out, the Internet is a medium of selective social interaction and symbolic belonging. The so-called ‘Internet-culture’ is ‘the culture of creators of the internet’ (). The Internet serves as a medium that allows the consumers to communicate with each other globally and interactively, and to become producers of the media content. Even people with physical handicaps, diseases and poor social skills can use the Internet to communicate with others ( 2006).  (2001) states that the speeches on the Internet are free ‘in an era dominated by media conglomerates and censoring government bureaucracies ().


Internet consumers are considered as active producers in the new media era. This view is supported by  (2002) by saying that a key shift from mass media to new media is the ‘reconceptualization of the audience as active producer’ (). He also suggests that the new media is ‘an open forum of debate’ ( 2002). The online chatrooms, forums and discussion boards provide spaces for ‘global village citizens’ to have social and cultural exchange. ‘Virtual communities’ or ‘symbolic communities’ appear when the consumers use CMC (computer-mediated communications) to form groups and to exchange ideas on a particular issue ( 2003). Information exchange no longer flows from top-down only (2002), but horizontally as well ( 2001). Crang asserts that the Internet ‘recreates this possibility of non-hieratical discussion and free association with new public arenas’ (2001). The social forums enable consumers to maintain contact with people who hold similar values or ideas through the window of the Internet, which enhances the intimacy of the citizens of the global village.  (2004) argues the web bloggers are ‘creators and contributors to thousand of personal websites that helped to connect people even more tightly’ (). While discussions and feedbacks are welcomed in the Internet websites, ‘a new autonomous global public sphere’ is built on the participation of the Internet consumers (2005). Open Democracy is an independent online magazine and their slogan which is ‘free to read, free to participate, free to the world’, has provided a forum of debate for the Internet consumers around the world ( 2003).


            The internet acts as a platform for social and cultural exchange, which also shapes a new form of global identity. The consumers hold an ultimate power to seek and to publish whatever they want; they become a so-called ‘do it yourself’ user on the Internet (1996). While they can join any communities, forums and discussions with topics that suit their interest, Crang argues that the Internet allows ‘fluidity of identity’, which leads the consumers to escape from single identity in the mass media and engage in multiple memberships on the Internet. (2001). Consumers can decide the identities they appear with in different platforms. Fred, for example, is a media activist in Hong Kong, a web blogger, a critical commentator in the online social policy forum ‘Independent media Hong Kong’, and a host of an online cultural radio program. Wallman (2001) points out that the communities of networks tie all the consumers on the web and construct a sense of belongingness and social identity as they exchange information, provide support, and enlarge sociability with each other (2001).


            The online multi-public spheres, to some extent, encourage deliberation and communication from global citizens, which enhance social and cultural exchange. However, it is arguable whether the online discussion platforms can be recognized as ‘online multi-public spheres’ (). ‘Publics’, according to Habermas and Dewey, exist as discursive interactional processes’(). However, it is also argued that ‘atomized individuals, consuming media in their homes, do not comprise a public.’ The exclusion and digital divine from using the Internet also bring a social hardship to those people who do not have Internet access. According to Slevin (2000) the exclusion ‘can result in marginalization and disappointment in all sectors of social life’ (). Rodman reports that in the year 2000, there were only forty percent of American citizens who had internet access while ninety-five percent of citizens in the world did not have access at all, as disclosed by Nua Internet Surveys. Thus, the Internet is a small and privileged sphere rather than a public sphere ( 2003). Moreover,  (2005) argue that the vast majority of messages found online are commercial messages, or being consumed within the boundaries of the state system, which would also have little relevance to the public sphere ().


A number of examples show the growing corporate interests to the initially free and open online spaces. One is Wikipedia, which is widely recognized as a free space for online publishing. The free encyclopedia contributors are mostly the Internet consumers who publish on the Wikipedia in a voluntarily basis. After two years, Wikipedia has grown rapidly with more than one hundred fifty thousand entries in ten different languages (2004). However,  (2004) also claims that the open-publishing site is encountering corporate control of information, as well as other commercialized corporations are starting to own their ‘wiki’ sites       (). Yahoo! is operating its own ‘Yahoo!Answers” to provide a forum of open publishing and knowledge building like Wikipedia, under the domination of the company in more than ten countries in the world. The search engine Yahoo! is increasingly directing consumers to the searching result from Wikipedia to Yahoo!Answers. Another example is YouTube, which is a free space for the Internet consumers to post and to watch videos online. Since Google has bought YouTube in October 2006, the corporation has imposed tighter corporate control. A recent case is that some YouTube users posted a clip from a charity show in Hong Kong, with a female singer accidentally dropping her trousers during the show. After a ban request from a private television broadcasting company in Hong Kong, YouTube deleted all clips. The two cases show that, though consumers are having more power to produce in cyberspace, the state and the corporations are using different tactics to intrude in their freedom. As  (2000) points out, modernity brings standardizing effects which results to ‘commodity capitalism’().


The Internet, like the mass media, is a mechanism for the state and corporations to influence the consumers by mediation.  (1999) defines mediation as ‘the constant transformation of meanings, large and small, significant and insignificant’ ().  (2002) claims that the new media multiplies the process of mediation    (), which  (1999) termed as ‘remediation’, or the representation of one medium in another. They also argue that the new media is ‘a refashion of old media’ which  (1967) supported by stating that there is force for the new media to do the work of old (2002). Net TV is an example of remediation. The one-way transmission of television in the mass media era has transformed to two-way interactive television via the transmission of the internet ( 2002). The commercial advertisement and the ideologies have also been transferred from the mass medium to the new medium. As (1979) argues, the selection of preferred codes appears as natural explanation which most members of the world would accept (1985). The corporate control of web television (TV) production would repeat the domination of TV in the mass medium era. ‘Economic globalization and the information-communication technology (ICT) revolution have made the world an even more mediated and interconnected place. It is considered a ‘network society’ and at the same time, a ‘media society’ where dominant forms of culture are now shaped and produced’ (2004).


Since the United States is still dominating the most bandwidth capacity than the rest of the world (2001), and seventy-eight percent of websites are in English only (2001), the transnational electronic communications enable the remediation of the western domination in the Internet, mostly the media conglomerates. Among the top thousand most visited websites, the United States has produced almost two-thirds (2001 , 2003). The domination in both hardware and software of the West, like the western search engines and web TV, expands Western ideologies (including cultures, values and products) to the rest of the world (2000). It also makes the media conglomerates increase the concentration of the new media through the convergence of bandwidth and attempt to control the transnational multimedia channels or content. (). If the consumers only become recipients when they actively choose to visit enterprise-wide web pages, they would become ‘repertoires’ (2000) as the passive audience in the mass media.


The empirical focus of this article is the consideration of media power in the political, economic, social and cultural aspects. Though new media, especially the Internet, opens a new cyberspace for the consumers to interact without the alteration of time and space, media power is still controlled by the state (or the government) and the media corporations as in the mass media era. Politically, the regulations from the state have undermined the freedom of expressions from the consumers, and the organization of protests or movements are also banned from the censorship of the state. Economically, the concentration of media hardware and software results to the convergence of media conglomerates. The concentration of the Internet usage in the developed countries also results to exclusions from the centre to the periphery. The commodity of information by the media conglomerates further enlarges the digital capitalism and digital divine on the Internet. Culturally, the interactivity of the Internet encourages deliberation and communication among global citizens and helps to shape their global identity. However, the Internet can only help to establish the private spheres with growing interventions from the corporations. The remediation of the Internet also serves as a tool for spreading cultural imperialism from the West.


This essay has offered an evaluation in the diffusion of new media power among three major players. In sum, we may conclude that the consumers are increasingly utilized by the new media to increase their power and to control the production process. However, the ultimate power is still concentrated on the state and the corporations, who act as the owner and producers in the mass media. By regulations and concentrations, they limit the power of the consumers. It is a worthy undertaking to further discuss the ideologies and the usage of soft power embodied in the Internet by the state and the corporations in the future.


 


 


 


 


 


 



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