MEDIA IN THE SWIRL

At no other point in human history has technology played so vital and all pervasive a role in every day private and public life as now. Though the limitations imposed by nature were overcome right from the time when the project of modernity got introduced, yet the birth of new technologies have busted even the limits of industrial’ technologies. The industrial age technologies suffered from the basic defect of ‘producerbias’. Consequently, they were cast in the topdown mould with little regard for individual customer preferences. The new information and communication technologies broke the reliance on massbased production systems and resurrected the model of individualized production. This marked a paradigm shift in the production, distribution and consumption patterns of products being delivered by the ’smart` technologies. In the world of media, it meant the end of mass media monopolization of the global and local public spheres. The alternative voices became more strident and eyecatching with the arrival of the new media. A large number of media users migrated from the older mass mediated public sphere to the cyberspace, the new public sphere created by the new media. This migration was accompanied by the drift of the advertisers and the marketers to the new public sphere, granting it the legitimacy that it required in the attention economy of the new millennium. Regulatory regimes followed which raised their own controversies.