Media and the Audiences

Based on the several theories in the Effects Tradition, whether it is a limited-effects theory or a meta-effects one, the theories of media effects have undergone a dramatic change, as the book said---“a curious evolution”.
If you scrutinize the process of the development, you will find that the media change as the audiences become “smarter”. The era of “seeing is believing” ended up with the emergence of mass media. The media changed the way of people’s perception of the world, making their world bigger than they physically had access to. People dared to think more than they used to, and since they saw more of the other side of the world, they became capable of thinking wisely. Thus, they started questioning what they watched and listened from the television, other media as well.
While the audiences became critical and “hard to please”, the media adjusted to accommodate the needs of the audiences, which in return, provided a larger margin of profits to the media owners. People opened their minds, and they continued to rely on the media to keep informed of what happened every day. Therefore, the media were able to flourish into a “mass” one.
I found it interesting that the media catered to the demands of the mass audiences while at the same time the audiences reinforced their reliance on the media and promoted changes to the media. So, rather than referring the media effects to as an evolution, I would like to call it an “inter-evolution” between the media and the audiences since they developed together and interacted with each other to make things really happen.
Education occurred when the media contents were exposed to new audiences. Knowing how the media worked, the audiences became skillful in picking the undesirable contents out and utilized public opinion to block those from the media. In that case, both the media and the audiences “learned”. So did the culture.
Before the media came into existence, the culture was confined to territorial limitations. Culture was static and set. However, the media made the culture diverse. Thanks to the wide accessibility of the mass media, pop culture in China is largely copied from the American one. People from different parts of world communicate effectively without many obstacles. We all watched Sesame Street when we were young. The power of media is ubiquitous. The audiences and the media are going to work in the same way as they did in the previous hundred years. We will see more diverse segments of audience as well as a rising number of media created to satiate the overwhelming needs.