The media and the individual: economic and psychological interrelations

Abstract

Having become an essential part of the modern economy in the postindustrial world, the media have inevitably also become one of the most profitable and powerful industries. Their political, social, and cultural nature is directly influenced by entrepreneurial activity and the market laws of supply and demand (Albarran, 2010). However, the media industry is affected not only by corporate logic, the dynamics of financial transactions, and managerial decisions but also by the growing demand of audiences for media content. Today, the demand for information is a complex set of people's needs, as determined by their social and psychological nature, including various requirements for political and social news, financial analysis, opinion leaders' points of view, public reactions from the representatives of reference groups, and entertainment and leisure activities in individualized forms of communication.In recent years, academic debates on the media and journalism have often been centered around the concept of commercialization, in reference to the growing dependence of the media on the logic of the market (De Bens, 2009; Mosco, 2009). Organized as market enterprises, media companies are increasingly guided by almost the same motives as those of other commercial firms: the search for profits, returns on investment, cost optimization, and effective management. Managers of media companies require that editors and journalists make their companies economically successful and that media content become a profitable product. These demands come especially, for instance, from the majority of CEOs (chief executive officers), who are answerable to shareholders, who in turn are interested mainly in earnings per share (Aris & Bughin, 2012).Before the beginning of the 21st century, the mass media and journalism, as an essential part of the market economy, had already taken on many of the features of industrial and even postindustrial production; they were governed by economic feasibility and the consumption stimulated by the development of the global and national media industries. However, the media as a key institution of democracy and journalism as one of the core professions for institutionalizing political communication in the public sphere have, in many instances, become subject to public control; this control is implemented in their social mission, which is defined by some scholars as the legal, rational authority of the media (Hallin & Mancini, 2004). There is no doubt that the contemporary media, which function in market conditions with a number of public obligations that are placed on them by democratic societies, represent a multilayered and complex system that today requires an interdisciplinary and problem-oriented approach (Zinchenko, Veraksa, & Leonov, 2011, p. 58). From this angle it is important to place the audience's uses of the media and consequently individuals' behavior, beliefs, and values in the broader political and economic context of postindustrial society.Media as leisure: shaping consumerist psychologyTime has always been one of the most crucial resources for the media industry. It was already an important factor in determining the amount and modes of media consumption in early industrial society. It is true that along with the two major resources necessary to read books and newspapers, money and time, the readership of the first newspapers needed a certain level of education, which was in fact a derivative of the same budgets as money and time. The charge to the public for the media was high before the formation and expansion of industrial mass production, in which the need for mass marketing initiated the birth of a new media business model based on advertising sales. The intention to maximize the readership allowed newspapers to attract advertising investments, which were returned to advertisers through the purchase of their goods. The readership was required only to spend time reading advertisements and to buy the newspapers. …