Media Ecology Case Study

1. Cross-ownership Cross-ownership is a form that one individual or a company owns more than 2 types of communication industries. It is also called as a combining the management of the business, such as Newspaper Company also runs a television broadcasting center and etc. For instance, the Walt Disney Company has lots of holdings such as ABC Television Network, Marvel Entertainment, ESPN and etc. Although there are differences in each country, most countries regulate the concentration of the ownership by minor media companies to guarantee the publicness and variety of the press. Since the media outlets increases, in 1975, Federal Communications Commission ruled ‘newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership rules’ against cross-ownership, which bars

So, it considers media as an environment, which means it brought ecological views on the media research. The term, media ecology, first introduced by Neil Postman in 1968. He defined media ecology as the understanding of how communication technology and technique control the form, amount, speed, distribution and direction of information, and the understanding of how those information structures or biased structure affect human’s perception, value, and attitude. So, he looked media as a complex message system and tried to find out the influence of media ecology to

Robert Metcalfe, who is the founder of 3CON, which is network Equipment Company in United States, first stated this law. As an example of Metcalfe’s law, only one user in one social network service is useless, but as the number of users increases, its value increases rapidly. Thus the larger number of users in one service, the more valuable the service becomes to the society.

8. Gatekeeping theory (communication) Gatekeeping theory explains the phenomenon that monitoring by gatekeeper in information circulation on the process of the information delivers to the public. So, this theory can applied to media and communication by filtering the information and only broadcast monitored information. Gatekeeping in media was started from 1922 by The Immigrant Press, when it was not even defined as a theory. And in these days, as the number of media increased, gatekeeping also increased. For instance, there are sections in website that journalists provide information and users manipulate according to their needs and interest.

9. The message is the Medium. (Marshall