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This chapter describes the role of information technology in two electronic media industries over time: radio and TV. It describes their applications in business practices, recording and transmission of programs, role over the Internet, and the effects on firms in these industries, beginning with transistor radios to the Internet.

This chapter examines how the landscape of American broadcasting in the second half of the twentieth century evolved from a situation in which values of liberal independence acted as a front for the sway of network corporations to one in which the incremental fragmentation of the increasingly global media market posed a challenge to the rhetoric of national space. It considers how the spatial dynamics inherent within American culture have been represented in American writers such as Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, and Don DeLillo, and contrasts this with the perspectives of a younger generation, in particular those of David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers. It explains how the “Voice of America” (VOA), the official radio and television service of the U.S. federal government, became “the nation's ideological arm of anti-communism,” while the minds of supposedly free-thinking citizens at home were also shaped surreptitiously by the new power of electronic media.

This chapter examines the electronic mass media of retail distribution—radio, television, cable, and direct broadcast satellites. These media consist of two major segments; there are local retail media and national wholesale networks. Retail media distribute content directly to audiences. Examples are local radio and television stations and cable distribution systems. In contrast, wholesale networks bundle programs created by content producers and distribute them to retailers. Examples are radio and television networks, cable channels, and program syndicators. Radio has become the poster boy for media concentration. Most public discussions of media trends refer to the developments in radio and its lessons for public policy. No media industry in the United States has changed more in ownership than local radio stations. The level of local television station concentration is the lowest among all of the eight local mass media analyzed.

The large number of mergers in information industries raises the question of whether the information sector as a whole, and which of its constituent industries, has become more concentrated and by how much. This chapter examines these issues and investigates horizontal concentration on a national level. To determine whether horizontal concentration has increased, Herfindahl-Hirschmann Index figures for specific industries and sectors are analyzed. The industries of electronic mass media distribution encompass radio stations, television stations, direct broadcasting satellites, and cable television. As can be seen in the chapter, all industries involved have increased in concentration after 1996, and basically have increased in concentration since 1984. This chapter also analyzes ownership concentration trends in the film industry, music industry, print and publishing, consumer electronics industry, computer and software industry, telecommunications industry, information technology, and Internet sector.

Electronic commerce refers to all forms of commercial transactions that involve both organisations and individuals, and that are based on the processing and transmission of data through electronic media. It also refers to the effects of the electronic exchange of commercial information on activities such as organisational management, contracts, and legal and regulatory activities, among others. The development of electronic commerce was found to have caused favourable changes in society, in the economy, and in business, especially in some specific industries. Although the insurance industry already had the characteristics of a ‘new economy’, electronic commerce in the London Insurance Market Network (LIMNET) showed slow growth. This chapter looks into the social and technical factors that interfered with the development of electronic commerce in LIMNET and addresses why brokers and underwriters still prefer face-to-face negotiations over electronic transactions.

This chapter uses the framework developed in earlier sections to suggest how one of the most exciting and controversial of modern industries – audio‐visual media – is likely to evolve. It is argued that the services of origination, of publishing, and of delivery and dissemination, which have historically been integrated in electronic, but not other media, will break down into their component parts in electronic media also.

This chapter suggests that two phenomena that usually get explained in terms of the rise of electronic media in the late twentieth century—the dematerialization of the text and the disembodiment of the reader—have more to do with two much earlier developments. One is legal: the 1861 repeal of the taxes previously imposed on all paper except that used for printing bibles. The other is technological: the rise first of wood-pulp paper in the late nineteenth century and then of plastics in the twentieth. The chapter then looks at Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1861–62), the loose, baggy ethnography of the urban underclass that swelled out of a messy series of media. Mayhew's “cyclopaedia of the industry, the want, and the vice of the great Metropolis” so encyclopedically catalogs the uses to which used paper can be turned.

This chapter dares to imagine an emerging future of literature by exploring how print media are being transformed through their interaction with electronic media. The dynamic media ecology within which the engagement of writings with digitality occurs is transformative. It argues that multiple data flows stimulate a new mode of cognitive engagement termed as hyperattention. The hyperattention has begun to transform the experience and possibilities of print.

The theater, as given by the definition in this chapter, is a place where certain significant events not limited to dramatic performances take place. These questions are then raised: how different is “theater” from “theatricality”? How does an event become “theatrical”? The word “media” is, more often than not, used to refer to the kind of media that requires electricity as an energy source: TVs, radios, and the like. Perhaps, what is specific to theater and to theatricality is that, in order to experience or take in whatever information or feeling the writer wants to convey, there has to be proximity between bodies. Through further exploring the notion of media, this chapter explains the similarities and differences between electronic media and traditional theater.

This essay accesses the role of traditional imagery in an age of electronic media through the example of the rising popularity of St. Expeditus among Catholic Charismatics in São Paulo, Brazil. Known for the expedient delivery of petitions, St. Expeditus, the “saint against procrastination” or “Fedex Saint”, occupies a dual position. On the one hand, it allows Catholic Charismatics in Brazil to balance a desire for liveliness and movement – in agreement with a theology of pneuma (as breath or spirit). On the other, it allows them to reestablish that principle of liveliness within a particular Catholic tradition of engagement with graven images. Having chosen to adopt electronic media technologies as devices that by virtue of their material properties would allow them to structure the image within a “regime of passage”, St. Expeditus, it is argued, embodies the paradox of stillness and motion upon which liveliness, ultimately, depends.

This chapter examines the impact of the informatics age on the publishing of books in Ireland, with emphasis on the range of possibilities for electronic publishing. More precisely, it considers the potential of computers, word processors, email, Internet, and other forms of electronic media to reconfigure the way literature and culture are produced or experienced. It also looks at the possibility for formal development of literary genres with the help of these technologies, particularly those associated with the hyperlink technology embedded in websites. Finally, it discusses the publishing conditions for electronic books and describes cyberspace as an archival medium for such books.

Although the members of the audience may be different, theater, of all the arts, is said to resemble politics the most. Theater involves artifice while politics is imbued with a certain naturalness of the people concerned. Politics addresses and controls conflicts directly while theater exaggerates them. One of the major functions of theater in the advent of electronic media is to explain how sights, sounds, and other sensations experienced by a body are in fact related to bodies. Plato addresses the politics-theater relation by comparing democracy with “theatrocracy” while Benjamin gives emphasis to the notion of interruption. This interruption or break is then compared with the “new media”, in which the audience is required to participate to some degree. This chapter emphasizes the earliest articulations on how and why one should “survive the break”.

This chapter discusses jazz in China in the second half of the twentieth century. During this period, jazz traveled to China in one of two ways (or both): (1) electronically by several means; and (2) by air, that is, by plane. All manner of electronic and filmic media—such as radio, television, movies, CDs, DVDs, satellites, teleconferencing, computers, and the Internet—and transcontinental modes of transportation such as the plane supplanted the steamship, the locomotive, the gramophone, and early movies as technologies influenced the growth of jazz in China. The characteristics of the above-mentioned technologies cannot be underestimated in terms of their cultural impact, not only on the spread of jazz globally, but also on the spread of information and knowledge generally around the world.

Children’s play is adaptive and the electronic age offers an exciting range of new possibilities. Along with radio television, and IPods, children now play on YouTube, Facebook, Smartphones, Xboxes, Video games, and much more. Children blog, create their own videos, and send instant photos of each other to friends. This chapter covers electronic play, computer play, YouTube and video creation play, interest in Anime, and “flash mobs.” Electronic media are now, for many young people, the closest thing to a mentor. Television viewing and YouTube dictate modes of dress, attitude, morals, and behavior. The electronic world has enfolded the young of South Louisiana, like the young worldwide, into its eerie, flickering light.

This chapter argues that Southerners often experienced old-time records in the moment as folksong performances, as familiar social occasions—or at least as close kin. It also suggests that perceptions of electronic media are culture-specific and cross-culturally variable—as much so as oral or written communication—and that any culture’s rules for understanding electronic media may rise to the level of its other means of expression, oral, written, or otherwise. In other words, just as people must learn to use speech or writing as part of their basic enculturation, they learn to communicate through records or radio as culturally defined media.

System X was an Australian-based dial up BBS, where users created a community of interest with both a variety of text-based conversations and a virtual gallery of images and sound that invited visual and sound artists and musicians to share work and collaborate. System X also sought to originate critical thought about information storage and control, data networks, and art practice in this media. Importantly, it provided a context for community members to upload their own content and to share that content not only with a Sydney-based community, but also with the growing international community. In an interview with Founding Sysop Scot McPhee, this chapter documents the roots of System X in the Sydney electronic music community; System X's role as an art project; the importance of uploading, downloading, manipulating and re-uploading music and images; the user community; the audience; and System X's legacy in the Australian digital arts community.

This chapter explores the relationship between face, mask, image, and mass media and also demonstrates the anachronic imagery principle of masking with illustrations from Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11. It argues that the representation modes of electronic media exist from prehistory. The concept of makeup in the field of TV and other media drives the rest of the important discussion in the chapter. The technological advancements of these modes of representation in the modern age, along with the prehistory, play the lead role in the chapter’s remaining discussion. Various important references and works are discussed to convey the theme of the chapter.

With the coming of electronic media, theater's role in society and aesthetics has evidently been minimized. “Home theater”, which is designed to emulate a theater space in the privacy of the home, provides a way for the audience to experience a world beyond the walls and limitations of the home without having to actually be outside, especially if accompanied by sound system technologies. This chapter generally addresses the resumption of “theatrical” motifs in contemporary cinema. It is established in this chapter that the notion of theater is not limited to aesthetics. Theater is considered as a medium where conflict comes about; it indicates the manner of the establishment of borders. This chapter discusses how film possesses some traits and elements that imitate that of theater and shows how Cronenberg's eXistenZ addresses several of the problems concerning narrative and medium that the book is concerned with.