Scholarly record

RB MEDIA AS AN OUTCOME OF THE AUDIENCE AND MEDIA METAMORPHOSIS IN THE POST-MILLENNIAL AGE

Slavomir Magal, Jozef Tinka

Abstract

This paper deals with regional media and their status in the media field. The fundamental problems of media regionality are being analyzed from the point of view of a specialized social discourse related to the status, importance and the further perspectives of local and regional media in the international context. We are trying to answer the question of how to explicitly define the concepts of local and regional in mass media communication. Our study resulted in the trichotomic stratification of the mass audience: apart from mass media we recognize the audience above the mass borderline - the so-called global, or rather hyper mass audience, and the audience beneath the mass borderline – the so-called cellular, or rather sub mass audience. On this basis a new typology of regional media was framed. We worked on the assumption that comparing to mass media, regional media represent a much more structural and forthright type of mediated communication. Therefore, it is necessary to differentiate between them and explicitly configure the respective media types. On the basis of our research findings, we have rationalized why the concepts of local and regional media are anachronistic. At the same time, a new term – the relationship based (RB) media - has been introduced. We recognize three types of RB media – community, municipal and domesticated. Media typology is essential for the understanding of particular media, and if we want to understand them well, we have to take the audience into consideration. The idea that media only spread symbolic contents is a misleading one because each media type has its own target audience to which all connotation of mediated communication must comply.

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