Until the 1980s most media were domestically owned and regulated. Then, following the increased emphasis on free trade, national deregulation and privatization, pushed for by institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, drastic changes within the world of media occurred.
While throughout the 1990s media were still primarily organized on a national or local level, with the further rise of neoliberalism and the implementation of free movement of labor, goods, services and capital between countries the importance of national boundaries has diminished. Today the whole world participates in one global market system. Just as many other industries also commercial media have followed the trend towards globalization, resulting in an increasing number of transnational corporations (TNCs), which maintain subsidies in several countries and operate and invest on the basis of a multi-country perspective.
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Born in Germany in 1913, Günther Anders spent the Nazi period exiled in the USA where he stayed until 1950. His chief work Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen is an extensive analysis of human existence in a technised world. Among the most outstanding theses of Anders is the concept a permanent gap between the potential of technical artefacts and the human mind's power to imagine the consequences of technology. Men think of themselves as "antiquated" in comparison to their artefacts, and feel "promethean embarrassment". Anders was among the first thinkers to react to the Holocaust and the dropping of the Atomic bomb. The ethical quandaries resulting from the latter are documented in an exchange of letters between Anders and Claude Eatherly, the pilot of the Hiroshima plane, in Burning Conscience.