Have digital communication technologies democratized the media industries?

Over the last century and more, since the rise of commercial media industries inthe late nineteenth and early twentieth century, there have been many hopes thatvarious new communication technologies would change information, knowledge and communication for the better.In the period following the Second world war, computers became a new basis forsuch utopian hopes, because of the possibility that their potentially vast storageand processing capacities would make it much easier for large numbers of peopleto access massive bodies of information, cheaply and conveniently, therebydemocratizing knowledge – in the sense of broadening its availability. The rapid development of computers in the post-war era was fuelled bygovernment expenditure on research in an era where the uSA-led world of ‘liberaldemocracies’ and the Soviet union-led bloc of Communist countries competed forsupremacy. As early as the 1950s and 1960s, it seemed clear that computers wouldtransform societies and economies, and this generated a flurry of theories andpredictions concerning transitions towards ‘the information society’ or ‘theknowledge economy’