FROM MASS MEDIA TO PERSONAL MEDIA* Are mass media dying?

The world of communication has seen extremely relevant changes happening over the last century. The advent of the so called "mass media" has been reshaping our societies in a very deep way, and every each time a new medium appeared, many questioned the lifespan of the previously existing communication instruments.

While no medium has seen a definitive death till now, certainly their usage has been eroded by the advent of new ones.

Mass Media have historically been those systems that were able to deliver a message coming from a small number of individuals to a very large number of individuals (here called masses). “officially” born with the print, followed by the radio, the television... to continue till our days. In the last 30 years, television, radio channels and in general media supports started multiplying thanks to increased bandwidth in the channels and lowered costs of production. Media producers started supplying contents for distinct types of “publics” having different interests.

While the very idea of mass media seems to me strictly connected with the feeling that there is one and only public (this, the feeling that w

as very common in the 196

0s), we know our society is made by different social group (nowadays often referred by sociologists as "tribes") which differ in interests, media usage and media diets.

Masses don't exist anymore in the form which was conceived in those very first years of media studies. For this reason my immediate answer to the title of this paper is no: Mass media are already dead. And since at least 30 years! I will anyway still use the concept of "mass media" here, indicating what can be considered "traditional media", as opposed to new media social media and personal media.

Mass media characterised the

last century and inspired a great portion of the sociological and psychological literature of the last twenty years. If we want to understand better what are their main characteristics, we can use th

e model used by Marika Lüders in "Conceptualizing Mass Media"

In her paper, she helps understanding the differences between personal and traditional media with a scheme where she draws two axis. On one she orders “more institutional” versus “less institutional” contents and on the crossing one she uses symmetrical versus asymmetrical media. Marika Lüders helps us considering mass m

edia such as the television, radio and newspapers as a form of institutional and rather asymmetrical media, while personal media stays where peer to peer, generally non institutional communication lay.

In the last two decades, an apparent revolution has happened. The digitalization of media production and distribution and the subsequent fall of the prices connected with their existence has certainly changed many cards on the table of communication.

The most significant changes which are happening in the last years have been technological (smaller, cheaper and faster devices, more capable and mobile Internet connections, more usable software) and social (different interactions between people and media institutions and among people themselves). Hence, the fast advent of different types of communication, less centralised and more people centered, and as a immediate consequence, the rise of personal media.

Another relatively recent new revolution has seen a relevant portion of the young and adult population in the economically advanced countries started spending an increasing considerable part of their time interacting with other individuals on the Internet through digital systems. We can group these types of interactions under the umbrella of the so called social media. Virtual spaces on the internet where people post and share contents and generate discussions. Social Media are in fact a channel of distribution that goes beyond the logic of traditional media. By helping users to create small narrowcasting channels, they break the traditional dichotomy of publisher and public. People are now reached by an impressive quantity of information everyday, they filter it and often re-share, re-twit or re-blog, spreading news in a way that only 20 years ago was only possible for an information èlite.

If we consider the old broadcasting media, we can see that Tv on demand, Youtube and Podcasts are filling our digitalised world and bringing the old model of television closer to us, with the same production structures but different channels. The contents are the same, the channels are different. Computational systems are filling every device we own, televisions become closer to being advanced computers able to stream videos from the internet, play radio stations and display pictures from flickr accounts. If we think of media such as the television as channel independent, does it matter whether it is streamed over the air, over a cable or over the Internet?

Personal media will not kill mass media simply because there is no need to do so. People will increasingly consume a mix of professional and non-professional material streamed over different channels and devices, but hardly the so called user-generated content will replace high quality shows from broadcasting professionals.

Surely, we are spectators of a series of changes in the communication world that include every side of our life, (especially if we consider that even brands at every level are increasingly becoming producers of contents and narratives) and we are more than ever active in the digital communication sphere, consuming and producing contents, but in my opinion personal media are only reshaping the way mass media deal with their targets, by changing the old broadcasting model into a more viral distribution system.