Introduction
Big media has played the role of a serious gatekeeper over the decades within the interconnected information networks. That includes the big TV networks, most newspapers, and radio stations. Such great institutions held enormous powers vested on their side to determine the shaping of public discourse and its eventual influencing into a scope of social and political infinity. They could control the story: what information to access and how. This created an accuracy juggernaut where the big media acted as a one-way transmission of information to these powerhouses whose voice boxes they created with limited interference in communication (Lukes, 2012; Weber, 1978). These included the education systems, which are usually part of these setups and subtly influenced by the big media narratives (Richardson, 1986).
Of course, big media watched its heyday ebb over the past two decades. Big media had held sway over what people would or would not watch and listen to for ages. The turn to technology has opened a new vista in terms of the creation of content. It has opened access to information and communication in new ways. An audience that was largely passive and whose members previously had no means of communicating back to the producers had transformed into an audience that continuously generates and shares information. This is the dramatic and radical transformation of how big media’s power is being reworked in a new digital age.
Power of Traditional Big Media:
Most importantly, for the better part of the 20th century, the humongous powers of the big media ruled—the type of power that served as the gatekeeper controlling the information outflow, consequently creating the power structures of society. Harold Lasswell (2017) puts this notion of power relationship into perspective in his book “Power and Society.” He articulates that manipulating power includes three processes: setting the agenda, decision-making, and resource control. Traditional media excelled in all three. In so doing, the big media could effectively set the agenda for the public through their selection of stories and the framing of those stories. This potential for control leaves them with all the power over who gets to express views and who is left to falter in the margins.
In “Economy and Society,” Max Weber (1978) elaborates on how authority is founded and comes across legitimacy issues. It was evident that big media acted as legitimate grounds for all forms of authority, which he identified as rational-legal authority that depended on established rules and procedures. Often, towering media would, in such kind of notion, gain their legitimacy. For example, the respect of newspapers as being, by issues such as how the business was done, dropped enough to questions relating to journalistic practices and professional ethics. This perception of legitimacy granted them the power to influence public opinion and social norms.
However, it went even further to entrench the existing power elite paradoxically. For example, as Richardson (1986) details in his “Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education,” leading media stories determine education reforms and how they apply. Textbooks, for example, would shroud a sanitized version of the historical past, reverberating the view of those in power. The news associated with the political happenings in the state can also be biased in favor of the candidate or politics. The big media shape of information indirectly reproduces social stratification orting the status quo.
The power of big media emanated not from their competence in information handling but partly from the huge control of resources. They were also supported by huge financial resources, enabling them to undertake heavy infrastructure and acquire qualified personnel. This way, they developed financial clout, and their content could be more influential and far-reaching. Besides, big media had a privileged access position, allowing them to harangue monopolizing information practically. In many cases, they held a monopoly over much of the powerful office and decision-making positions, which consequently sat them in an authoritative and influential position concerning the public sphere.
Challenges to Big Media’s Power:
The last two decades are narrated as technological revolutions that seriously undermine the status quo for big media. While in the past, information was scarce, such scarcity is now considered a thing of the past due to the omnipresence of the Internet and its explosive entrance into our daily lives with the invention of social media, as Khanthachai (2020) goes ahead to quote the 2019 World Bank World Development Report. Besides, Khanthachai (2020) adds that large-scale technical advancements have also had an immense effect and greatly redefined the face of work and communication. This digital revolution has profoundly impacted how information is produced, distributed, and consumed.
The most formidable actual change introduced by the Internet is a shift in access to information from some to everybody. People have become less dependent on traditional media, which is their top news and information source. The Internet has a vast plethora of information and is accessible to every person with an Internet connection. This allows people to seek another perspective and question big media stories. Social media serves to echo this even more. The two new media types allow for a decentralized and participatory platform driven by user choice. It allows the public to bypass big media decision-making in moving information to and from the people. Information flows directly to and from an audience; this time, such a two-way flow completely contrasts the one-way information flow that big media dictated.
The idea of “three-dimensional power,” as Steven Lukes (2012) postulates, surely is an apropos thesis that fits in with the framing of how social media challenges big media dominance. As Lukes (1974) argues, just because power does not rest in visible acts of making decisions or overt exercises of control. The traditional big media operates within the first and second dimensions, deciding which stories to set and how to control opinion. Then, enter social media, and that model is increasingly shot through with alternatives. Controlling the flow of information or telling human beings what to think is ever more difficult. The volume and variety of information online are staggeringly large and increasing. Besides, social media wholly suits the nature of the online formation of communities to exchange views and generate dissent against the dominant ideologies of big media since this can subject users to an all-inclusive environment of thoughts able to check the subtle manipulation by big media and open ways to nurture critical citizenry.
However, the rating by other professionals in journalism today through social media is a minefield. At times, the spread of content termed “misinformation” and part of the “fake news” brings controversy, confusion, and mistrust between credible sources. Further, social media algorithms assist in creating echo chambers where the main content exposed will only confirm the already existing belief of the user. However, the contribution of the Internet and social media has called for a question of the status of big media as the gatekeepers and opened further avenues for access to information pluralism and democratizing.
The Shifting Power Landscape:
Social media has, therefore, only served to amplify voices that were, for long, forgotten, silenced, or ignored by big media. Most indispensable for the aims of this analysis is the work done by Kimberlé Crenshaw (2013) about intersectionality. Big media stories have been written mostly about those stories that the powerful usually fancy and, in many cases, those that would offend or comfort the base, leaving out or ignoring numerous silent small communities. Traditional journalists’ committees make communities live under intimidation. However, the Internet and social media afford these communities a public space to counter or resist the master narratives and independently produce their stories. Voices that have been marginalized or discriminated against by gatekeepers are now in the capacity to dish out information to a greater audience, hence circumventing gatekeeping while trying to share life-and-death issues that mainstream media usually find difficult to cover. Social media comes to produce such virtual online communities that enable its users’ solidarity and a framework of collective agency that is meant to challenge power arrangements through which the logic of oppression has historically silenced them.
New and emergent risks already materialized in the media landscape. Identify the present and can bring emerging risks because of the digital age. It added that the “fake news” phenomenon is just sickening and tops off all of this. The capability of the Internet, the sheer possibility of allowing almost anybody to create and disseminate information, would ruin public speech and deprive people of solid faith in other legitimate sources. More than that, the influence of social media algorithms has already given birth to the creation of “echo chambers.” Political polarization in most parts of the world mostly gets worse by being exposed to information their political orientation allows them to believe and, in essence, self-reinforce within the same political belief category. All this muddles up the power equation inside the media landscape, in which one has to swim through the rapids of garbage information flowing from every direction to find a credible source.
Another concern is the environmental and social cost. Nenad Miščević (2021) nails this home in his UN Development Report 2020 review. He notes that technological advancement, propelling the energy needed to fire the Internet and social media, comes with huge ecological footprints. One cannot miss the point of the environmental and social costs pegged on such maintenance of data centers and powering electronic gadgets that drain much energy, which is, at the very least, a source of worry on sustainability. It further develops an atmosphere where the users are in a state of constant bombardment with information and feels bound to keep up an online appearance, which could result in harm to their mental health. These are very important things to weigh in on how technology finally affects the packaging and delivery of news.
In essence, the coming and rise of the Internet and social media has engendered great change in the establishment of power relations that media had colossal traditional media effects. Although it retains some influence, the traditional media do not enjoy or experience its unchallenged dominance. The age of digital technologies introduces more decentralized and participatory media landscapes by empowering marginalized voices and making new information dissemination avenues available. However, this new era brings another perilous challenge involving misinformation and echo chambers. Reentry into this complex, dynamic media world has to mean critical information users in our society, thereby augmenting media literacy, not forgetting the broader environmental and social costs hanging over our online lives.
Conclusion
The digital revolution in media has irrevocably changed power. To some extent, the information iron grip by big media has been released, and a democratic, participatory model fired by the power of the Internet and social media is gradually replacing it. Moreover, that includes the marginalized voices now able to challenge the dominant narratives on these platforms and the fact that users do get access to the myriad voices. However, a small quantity of advantage comes with some not-so-desirable demerits. Misinformation cases and the development of echo chambers call for the emergence of critical media literacy in the face of the information explosion.
In other words, the future could be better for all these mammoth media and the so-information-hungry digital culture it churns out. Will tradition find a place within the emerging new media order? Will demands of mature information dispensation ever win over anti-establishment jingles in social media sites? These, among other nagging questions, have continued to shape our trailblazing efforts in this dynamic media space. However, it also has the potential to shape an even better, best, and most engaged citizenry amid all these challenges posed by this digital era.
References
Lasswell, H. D. (2017). Power and society: A framework for political inquiry. Routledge.
Odum, H. T. (2007). Environment, power, and society for the twenty-first century: the energy hierarchy. Columbia University Press.
Richardson, J. G. (1986). Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. (No Title).
Lukes, S. (2012). Power: A radical view [2005]. Contemporary sociological theory, 266(3), 1–22.
Weber, M. (1978). Economy and society: An outline of interpretive sociology. Chapters VIII to XVI. University of California Press.
Crenshaw, K. W. (2013). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. In The public nature of private violence (pp. 93-118). Routledge. Miščević, N. (2021). United Nations development program, human development report 2020. The next frontier is human development and the Anthropocene. Croatian Journal of Philosophy, 21(61), 231-235.
Khanthachai, N. (2020). World Bank.(2019). World Development Report 2019: The Changing Nature of Work. http://www. World Bank/en/publication/wdr2019. KASEM BUNDIT JOURNAL, 21(2), 211-214.
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