Social Impact of Digital Media and Advertising: A Look at Consumer Control

Abstract

Around the world today we have convenient, fingertip access to continual, informational content. At first the free flow of information seems convenient, empowering, and endlessly beneficial for those world citizens with access to it. This chapter takes a closer look at this relationship in terms of today’s consumer and the mediated information they are exposed to and asks the question of whether or not this is necessarily a good thing. The chapter looks at the historical relationship of power and information for guidance in this examination while considering active and inactive audience, corporate and independent media texts, and the possible relationships between Victor Frankl’s ‘existential void’ and mediated messages today.