Media Changes In America

While we see media every day in our own lives, media has been there since the first colonies of America but a lot has changed since then. Media can generally be defined as a means of communication that reaches or influences a large or wide audience. Although media is something that we experience every day and most likely something we do ourselves, it has been around for a much longer time than people think. One of the first forms of media in America was the Publik Occurrence newspaper in 1690. There was only one addition because of its illegality, but it was still the first attempt at spreading the news to a larger audience in an effective way. Another brief pursuit of a newspaper was the Boston Newsletter. While this was funded by the government back in 1704, it did not receive enough attention or circulation to keep it around for very long. After many arrests and …show more content…
John Owens the head of the Electronic Media department here at the University of Cincinnati, he spoke of one of the major problems facing media that related to these new media outlets. He called it the fragmentation of media. (Owens 2017) Because there are hundreds upon thousands of new ways to receive information now online, there is no aggregate way of sending out information anymore. In a study done by the American Press Institute done in 2014, it was said that 78% of Americans use their phone or tablet to receive news. ("How Americans get their news" 2014) There use to be several channels of news that would disseminate information but now the arm of new material must cast a wider net. On-demand media has been taken in favor over the traditional media outlets and he fears that there is no hope of that ever changing. Because of the new territory that is our current media spectrum, the essay "Media Literacy for the Global Village," by Barbara J. Walkosz, Tessa Jolls and Mary Ann Sund, brings a multitude of nuances that come with this new territory (Walkosz,, Jolls, & Sund