GLOBAL MEDIA

Guglielmo Marconi was the British son of an Italian diplomat, and

among his earliest successes was the 1901 transmission of a wireless
signal from England to Newfoundland. American inventors, in the
persons of Philo Farnsworth and Russian immigrant Vladimir Zworykin,
met and eventually overcame the challenge posed by Scotsman John
Logie Baird, among whose greatest achievements was the successful
transmission of a television picture from London to New York in 1928.
But both the Marconi and Baird transmissions were experimental, designed to attract attention and
money to their infant technologies.

However, it was not much later in the development of television that these media did
indeed become, if not truly global, at least international.

Today, we have more choices about where to

get our news, be it radio, TV, print or digital editions
of newspapers and magazines, online journals,
podcasts, or even blogs. Our options for informing
ourselves of current affairs are seemingly limitless and
certainly of varying quality. The media landscape has
changed exponentially in the last 100 years,
challenging media leaders and journalists who seek to put important issues into the common
discourse.
 The mass media are seen today as playing a key role in enhancing globalization, facilitating
culture exchange and multiple flows of information and image between countries through
international news broadcasts, television programming, new technologies, film and music.

Around the world, billions of us use social media every day, and that number just keeps
growing. In fact, it’s estimated that by 2018, 2.44 billion people will be using social networks, up
from 970,000 in 2010.

We use it for every part of our lives – in our

personal relationships, for entertainment, at work
and in our studies. To put it into some context, every
minute we collectively send more than 30 million
messages on Facebook and almost 350,000 tweets.

There are few physical borders between

countries in a globally mediated world.
Governments that could once physically prohibit the
introduction and distribution of unwanted
newspapers, magazines, and books had to work harder at jamming unwanted radio and television
broadcasts. But they could do it, until satellite came along. Governments cannot disrupt satellite
signals. Only lack of the necessary receiving technology can limit their reach. Now, with the Internet,
a new receiving technology is cheap, easy to use, and on the desks of more and more millions of
people in every corner of the world.