The sixth mass media, or the Internet, came into play in the mid-1990s.
What is unique about the Internet as a mass media is that “it is capable of replicating all of the other five previous media,” according to Ahonen. You can read books, newspapers, and magazines online, you can watch broadcast TV and listen to radio online, view movies and listen to recordings (podcasts, anyone?), all on the Internet. All five other mass media are also available on the Internet.
Does this mean that all the other media will disappear? Of course not. Will people curl up with their laptops on the beach to read the latest novel? No. But printed newspapers are declining and will likely someday go the way of the newsreel. At some point, it will be inconceivable that we used to have 12-hour-old news printed and delivered to our doorstep just as it is to us now that people went to the movies to catch a newsreel. The content will still be there, but consumers will consume it differently, more quickly, and from a wider range of sources. Evidence of that can be seen when popular bloggers are now competing for readers head to head with newspapers and achieving comparable readership numbers. Amateur videographers are now able to produce and market their own shows that often get viewership figures rivaling some cable TV shows. Consumers have become their own media sources.
In addition to replicating the other five mass media, the Internet as a mass media brought a threefold functionality to the world: interactivity, search, and mass ability to contribute in a significant way. Never before had a mass media allowed for interactivity so quickly. Yes, viewers could write to a TV station to express their views, Letters to the editor have been printed for years, and radio stations have fielded callers for decades. But the Internet blew interactivity wide open. From consumer reviews to article comments to video ratings, anyone can interact with almost anything that is produced online immediately. The ability to search quickly and easily through an almost infinite amount of data has certainly shifted things. I can’t even remember the last time I used the printed Yellow Pages, in which I have to figure out what category I should use to look up a service instead of just typing what comes naturally to mind. My daughter can’t even fathom doing homework research without the Internet as a resource.
Without a doubt, the biggest change in mass media with the Internet is the ability for the masses to become contributors. When Gutenberg first fired up the presses and printed the Bible, it was one of the few texts available to be printed. Now so many bloggers are blogging, podcasters are recording, videographers are creating their own shows, and people are creating their own radio programs that Time magazine named user contributors collectively as Person of the Year in 2006. The masses are the media now. We are not just sitting around waiting for whatever is sent down the pipeline to us. Through the Internet, consumers have become the media. Clearly this change is what makes the Internet so powerful as a mass media and changes the face of mass media as a whole.
