User:Ranahuwais/Old media

Old media institutions are centralized and communicate with one-way technologies to a generally anonymous mass audience. By definition, it is often dichotomized with New media, more often computer technologies that are interactive and comparatively decentralized; they enable people to telecommunicate with one another due to their mass use and availability, namely through internet.

Old Media companies have diminished in the last decade with the changing media landscape, namely the modern reliance on streaming and digitization of what was once analog, and the advent of simple worldwide connection and mass conversation. Old media, or "legacy media" conglomerates include Disney, Warner Media, ViacomCBS, Bertelsmann Publishers, and NewsCorp., owners of Fox news and entertainment, and span from books to audio to visual media. These conglomerates are often owned and inherited between families, such as the Murdochs of NewsCorp. Due to traditional media's heavy use in economics and political structures, it remains current regardless of New Media's emergence.

Old Media as Cultural Construct and Colloquialism
Old Media, opposed with its newer counterpart, has been found by theorists and historians like Chris Anderson (author of The Long Tail and the long tail phenomenon of mass communication), Marshall McLuhan, Wolfgang Ernst, and Carolyn Marvin to be inaccurate to the realities of mass communication's progression. McLuhan, specifically, argues that a medium's information is contingent upon the medium itself. In so doing, it never dies and always remains current. Therefore, the binary of old and new media, with new media making old become obsolete, is inaccurate. It would be far more accurate, according to theoretical argument of authors like Ernst, to view new and old media as a spectrum.

"Old media" as an idea only ever existed because "New Media" does. In the research of Simone Natale, the use of the term "Old Media" in a survey of books only began to become popular in the late twentieth century once the developments of New Media, such as the internet, became widely available. Natale writes of Old Media as a social construct because of this; because no media is old, one compares old to new in hindsight.