Employing of Media during Terrorism

Employing Media During Terrorism: Defining The Parameters

The emerging media sphere in its real and virtual expressions is a vast communication landscape buzzing with wide-ranging formats, messages, and users. Ever since the introduction of digital technologies in the late 1980s, the communication market has experienced its most dramatic transitions at national and global levels. Fueled by a convergence of media, telecommunications and computer industries, the communication landscape has come to define not our media exposure patterns and habits, but the form and substance of the content we consume. Conventional media institutions remain important forces bearing on our daily communication experiences; but the emerging online media as enabled by the World Wide Web and convergence trends seem to have the most enduring impact on us as individuals and groups. New media have superior interactivity, more convenient accessibility, greater reach, and wider multimedia features than their conventional counterparts. In significant ways, new media, including social media, have not only been empowering for private individuals and groups long marginalized by media institutions, but they have also come to re-define our view of mass communication as a unidirectional process of information.