The rise of Media Empires (Week 2)

There are many different aspects to the rise of Media empires, from the Internet to what is now consider the simple ability to fly to other countries.

The rise of the Murdoch's News Corporation is one great example of how New Media Empires have emerged in response to technology. Years ago we never would have thought that one singular person or empire's published titles could make up 59% of the daily Newspaper sales in Australia (the conversation.com, 2013), let alone their holdings in other countries. Rupert Murdoch is a born Australian but he lives in the United States (and he no longer even has the right to vote here), yet he has so much control over our Media output. This is evidence of a "rapid integration of the world's economy" (Hatchen & Scotton, p. 3, 2002) and would definately not be possible without the globalised technologies or the flows of Globalisation, in particular the Physical, Information and Media flow.

As well as New empires, we have also seen the rise of Social Media Empires...

Source: Business2Community.com

As Hatchen and Scotton point out, the popular culture of the West has increasingly flowed around the world (p. 4, 2002), and the use of new technologies by the Media has allowed this to happen. In my opinion, Hollywood could be seen as an 'old' Media empire. Once, it was the media that streamed out of Hollywood that was creating a cultural flow to all other areas of the globe. Now, through a different technology we see Social Media Empires like Facebook. I can imagine that nobody in the 1950's, or even the early 2000's would have predicted the type of "paradigm shift" (Pieterse, p. 1, 2004) that the Internet and Social Media has brought.

References

Nederveen Pieterse, J 2004, ‘Globalization: consensus and controversies’, Globalization and culture: global mélange, Rowan & Littlefield, Lanham, Md., pp. 7–21

theconversation.com, 2013, 'FactCheck: Does Murdoch own 70% of Australia's Newspapers?', Retrieved September, 12, 2013, from https://theconversation.com/factcheck-does-murdoch-own-70-of-newspapers-in-australia-16812

Hatchen, WA & Scotton, JF 2002, ‘News communication for a new global system’, The world news prism: global media in an era of terrorism, 6th edn, Iowa State Press, Ames, pp. 3–14.