Although the traditional media companies first steps into the digital sphere were fairly clumsy, they have quickly learned from their mistakes and continued to enlarge their Internet presence.
During the last years many of the smaller players in the field of digital media have been driven out of competition by the huge media conglomerates. This mainly is a result of the advantages that the commercial media giants have over their less powerful counterparts:
- As engagement in online activities mostly does not lead to quick profits, investors must be able to take losses, which only powerful companies are able to.
- Traditional media outlets usually have huge stocks of digital programming, which they can easily plug into the Internet at little extra cost.
- To generate audience, the big media conglomerates constantly promote their Websites and other digital media products on their traditional media holdings.
- As possessors of the hottest "brands" commercial media companies often get premier locations from browser software makers, Internet service providers, search engines and portals.
- Having the financial resources at their disposition the big media firms are aggressive investors in start-up Internet media companies.
Commercial media companies have close and long ties to advertisers, which enables them to seize most of these revenues.
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"Faced with this process of globalization, most governments appear to lack the tools required for facing up to the pressure from important media changes. The new global order is viewed as a daunting challenge, and it most often results in reactions of introversion, withdrawal and narrow assertions of national identity. At the same time, many developing countries seize the opportunity represented by globalization to assert themselves as serious players in the global communications market."
(UNESCO, World Communication Report)
The big hope of the South is that the Internet will close the education gap and economic gap, by making education easier to achieve. But in reality the gap is impossible to close, because the North is not keeping still, but developing itself further and further all the time; inventing new technologies that produce another gap each. The farmer's boy sitting in the dessert and using a cellular telephone and a computer at the same time is a sarcastic picture - nothing else.
Still, the so called developing countries regard modern communication technologies as a tremendous chance - and actually: which other choice is there left?
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-1994
Viacom multimedia and industrial corporation takes control of Paramount Communications for US$ 9.6 billion, as well as Blockbuster Entertainment, a huge video store chain, for US$ 8.4. billion.
1995
Entertainment giant Disney buys Capital Cities-ABC for US$ 19 billion.
The industrial and broadcasting company Westinghouse Corp. buys out CBS for US$ 5.4 billion.
In a US$ 7.2 billion deal, Time Warner acquires Turner Communications, owner of prime cable TV channels CNN, TBS and TNT and a major classic American film library.
1996
Westinghouse/CBS buys Infinity Broadcasting's large group of radio stations.
Murdoch and News Corp. acquire ten more TV stations and TV production studios with the US$ 2.5 billion purchase of New World Communications Group.
Viacom buys half of UPN-TV network, adding that to its other holdings, which include eleven TV stations, along with MTV, VH-1, and other cable TV channels and Paramount movie studios.
1997
Radio Groups Chancellor Media and Evergreen merge and are linked by ownership with Capstar Broadcasting; they also buy ten radio stations from Viacom. By mid-1997 Chancellor/Capstar controls no fewer than 325 radio stations around the United States.
Chancellor/Capstar's controlling ownership group, Hicks Muse Tate & Furst, buys the seventh largest radio group, SFX, adding another seventy-two radio stations, making a total of nearly four hundred stations controlled by this one source.
Westinghouse-CBS buys out American Radio Systems, the fourth largest radio chain in total audience, which gives Westinghouse-CBS over 170 radio stations with a total audience nearly equal to that of the Chancellor/Capstar group.
Giant European-based print and electronic publishing and data base corporations Reed Elsevier and Wolters Kluwer merge.
1998
Bertelsmann buys the Random House-Alfred A. Knopf-Crown Publishing group of book publishers from Newhouse/Advance Publications, adding to its Bantam-Doubleday-Dell publishing group and giving Bertelsmann by far the largest English-language publishing operations.
1999
AOL, the worlds leading Internet service provider and Time Warner, the worlds leading classical media company merge in a US$ 243.3 billion deal.
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"All nature is merely a cipher and a secret writing."
Blaise de Vigenère
In the (dis-)information age getting information but at the same time excluding others from it is part of a power-game (keeping the other uneducated). The reason for it eventually has found an argument called security.
Compared to the frequency of its presence in articles, the news and political speeches security seems to be one of the most popular words of the 90's. It must be a long time ago when that word was only used for and by the military and the police. Today one can find it as part of every political issue. Even development assistance and nutrition programs consider it part of its work.
The so-called but also real need for information security is widespread and concerning everybody, whether someone uses information technology or not. In any case information about individuals is moving globally; mostly sensitive information like about bank records, insurance and medical data, credit card transactions, and much much more. Any kind of personal or business communication, including telephone conversations, fax messages, and of course e-mail is concerned. Not to forget further financial transactions and business information. Almost every aspect of modern life is affected.
We want to communicate with everybody - but do not want anybody to know.
Whereas the market already depends on the electronic flow of information and the digital tools get faster and more sophisticated all the time, the rise of privacy and security concerns have to be stated as well.
With the increase of digital communication its vulnerability is increasing just as fast. And there exist two (or three) elements competing and giving the term digital security a rather drastic bitter taste: this is on the one hand the growing possibility for criminals to use modern technology not only to hide their source and work secretly but also to manipulate financial and other transfers. On the other hand there are the governments of many states telling the population that they need access to any kind of data to keep control against those criminals. And finally there are those people, living between enlightening security gaps and at the same time harming other private people's actions with their work: computer hackers.
While the potential of global information is regarded as endless, it is those elements that reduce it.
There is no definite solution, but at least some tools have been developed to improve the situation: cryptography, the freedom to encode those data that one does not want to be known by everybody, and give a possibility to decode them to those who shall know the data.
During the last 80 years cryptography has changed from a mere political into a private, economic but still political tool: at the same time it was necessary to improve the tools, eventually based on mathematics. Hence generally cryptography is regarded as something very complicated. And in many ways this is true as the modern ways of enciphering are all about mathematics.
"Crypto is not mathematics, but crypto can be highly mathematical, crypto can use mathematics, but good crypto can be done without a great reliance on complex mathematics." (W.T. Shaw)
For an introduction into cryptography and the mathematical tasks see:
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With the increased ease of the reproduction and transmission of unauthorized copies of digital works over electronic networks concerns among the copyright holder community have arisen. They fear a further growth of copyright piracy and demand adequate protection of their works. A development, which started in the mid 1990s and considers the copyright owner's apprehensions, is the creation of
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Leonard M. Adleman was one of three persons in a team to invent the
The economic rights (besides
As laid down in the proposed EU Directive on copyright and related