control?

So to return back with questioning vengeance, who is in control of the media we consume?


The obvious answer is the media creators and distributors such as the BBC, ITV etc.
But as i have already mentioned in this blog, with the wide choice of media we can consume from many different places now the audience is more active. Media producers and distributors are constantly talking about the ways in which they have to keep up with modern audiences and come up with innovative ways to attract them.

But is this really the case? After all it was the BBC who introduced iPlayer not the audience. Is this just another way of us as an audience being told how to consume the media.

If you look at the progression of media technology you can see that new media technologies are being introduced faster than users can make use of them. I think if you really gave media consumers the choices over the amount of media they consume you would get a range of many different answers across different sectors of the social spectrum and also people of different ages. However when we have spoken  to people from the BBC's Research and Development department they have predicted that within the next few years we will no longer watch "telly" but rather watch the internet through a monitor instead. We will likely still call it TV but the distribution will be different.
Surely this will isolate people who are not as technically literate, but also increase spending as audience will now have to pay for new technology again to consume the media by purchasing SmartTV's, internet connections and their TV licence.

So are we really in control of what we watch? The answer is quite simply no. It could be argued that we have more control as there are more means of consuming that media and more channels but when you really look into it we are still being told how and what to watch, the only difference now is there is more variety in what we are told to do.