Introduction

It's hard now to picture a day without television, newspapers, radio, films, the internet or a mobile phone — the various forms that make up what we call 'mass' media, so named because they reach very large, dispersed audiences at once.

Consider how thoroughly media has worked its way into ordinary routines — households waking up to a radio or a morning paper, children checking a phone for missed calls before anything else, tradespeople relying on mobile phones to be reached for work, shopkeepers with a television running so customers can comment on a match or a film, migrant workers and families abroad staying in daily touch by phone or internet, exam results appearing online the moment they are released.

Sociologists studying this expansion care about several things at once. First, tracing how mass media has grown, both worldwide and within India, shows that, like any social institution, its shape has always tracked broader economic, political and cultural shifts: state-driven in the early independence decades, increasingly market-driven since the 1990s reforms. Second, that history reveals a two-way relationship — media shapes society, but the society it operates in shapes media right back, a dynamic this chapter traces through three periods: colonial India, the early independence decades, and the era of globalisation. Third, because mass communication needs large-scale capital, production and organisation in a way personal communication does not, the state and the market inevitably end up running it, through sizeable organisations with real workforces and real investment behind them. Fourth, access to all of this is deeply uneven — the digital divide already introduced in the previous chapter.