THE FUTURE AND NEW TECHNOLOGIES

THE FUTURE AND NEW TECHNOLOGIES

The Reach of Media

Television. No place on earth is beyond the reach of mass communication. For political reasons South Africa was for a long time the last large nation without TV, until 1976 (Mutz, Roberts, & van Vuuren, 1993). Mountainous Himalayan kingdoms of Nepal (1985) and Bhutan (1999) and the remote island nations of Cook Islands (1989), Fiji (1995), and St. Helena (1995) were among the last nations to welcome TV (Wheeler, 2001). Even the isolated valley town unable to receive TV as late as the 1970s is nonexistent today Satellite dishes and VCRs running off generators

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now allow video experiences in places out of the normal reach of broadcast signals.

In the 1970s, a unique study was done in Canada to assess the effects of the introduction of television. Three towns in interior eastern British Columbia were very similar except for the fact that one (“Multitel”) received several Canadian and U.S. TV channels, another (“Unitel”) received only one channel, and the third, because of its particular valley location, received no television signals (“Notel”). This study compared children and adults in the three towns before and after television was finally introduced to Notel. For example, children’s creativity scores were higher before TV in Notel than in either (a) the other towns before TV or (b) any of the three towns after TV. See Macbeth (1996) for a summary of the findings and T.M. Williams (1986) for a collection of papers reporting results in more detail. For a similar though more recent study in a smaller place, see Charlton, Gunter, and Hannan (2002) for a study of the effects of the introduction of television to the remote South Atlantic island of St. Helena in 1995. This will probably be the last study of that sort which will ever be done because no such TV-less places still exist.

Some television markets have grown exponentially in recent years. For example, China is now by far the largest TV market, with over 350 million homes having access, thus reaching most of its 1.3 billion population, China moved from only 18 million people having access to TV in 1975 to one billion 20 years later. In contrast, the second-place U.S. had only 98 million homes with TV and third-place India 79 million (Thomas, 2003). The rapid growth of markets in developing countries will have far-reaching advertising implications in future decades.

Internet. Parallel changes are seen in other media. For example, in 1995 nearly 70% of Internet users lived in North America, but by 1999 the proportion had fallen below 50%, with a further drop to 33% by 2005 predicted. English was the language of about 80% of Internet users in 1996 but is projected to be the language of only about a third of users by 2005 (Lievrouw, 2000). Although Internet usage has grown exponentially in North America, it has grown even faster elsewhere, most spectacularly in China.

An important emphasis in future media research, as indeed in all social science research, will be on cross-cultural aspects. Virtually every society in the world is becoming increasingly multicultural, in part due to the communications revolution. We are all exposed to media communications from many different national and cultural sources, and it is necessary to understand how different cultures perceive the same message differently. For excellent collections of papers on comparative and cross-cultural media research, see Kamalipour (1999), Korzenny and Ting-Toomey (1992), Lull (1988), and Blumler, McLeod, and Rosengren (1992). In much of the world,

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watching television and film in another language dubbed or subtitled in your own is a common experience. For a discussion of how people process subtitles when they may not know the language of the media, see Box 12.1.

BOX 12.1