Mass Media
The impact of the mass media is very strong. They change our language, stimulate our emotions, inform our intellect, and influence our ideas, values and attitudes. When people make a fuss about the media being a bad influence, they usually are talking about television, the most powerful medium of all. Maybe calling television the media can be justified technically because, as a medium, it embraces functions of several media such as newspapers, magazines, movies, and recordings.
The major media can be divided into two kinds, print and electronic. The print media — newspapers, magazines, books, pamphlets, catalogues, circulars, brochures, anything you read — are the oldest, dating back to the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century. The electronic media — radio, television, films of all kinds, records, tapes, anything that is transmitted by the use of electricity — are less than a hundred years old.
Another meaning the word mass suggests is "the people", a phrase too often associated with adjectives like dull-witted, credulous, ill-informed, uncritical, and passive. Or are the mass of people well-informed, sophisticated, thoughtful, and active?
An experiment recently conducted in Europe by the Society for Rational Psychology showed that watching television is psychologically addictive. The idea of becoming addicted to television brings up questions involving subtle conditioning and brainwashing that could be friendly or vicious, altruistic or self-serving. In a commercial society the media's ability to stimulate motivation to buy — almost as though people were puppets on strings — builds other people's power. It can be power for good or power for bad, but it is always power for control.
Another indicating of media influence is in the language we use. Whole new vocabularies come into existence with new inventions. Words introduced in the media frequently enlarge into meanings far beyond the scope originally intended for them.
Topic: English as a universal language
English is becoming the world's first truly universal language. It is the native language of some 400 million people in twelve countries. That is a lot fewer than the 800 million people or so who speak Mandarin Chinese. But another 400 million speak English as a second language. And several hundred million more have some knowledge of English, which has official or semiofficial status in some sixty countries. Although there may be as many people speaking the various dialects of Chinese as there are English speakers, English is certainly more widespread geographically, more genuinely universal than Chinese. And its usage is growing at an extraordinary pace.
Today there are about 1 billion English speakers in the world. By the year 2000, that figure is likely to exceed 1.5 billion
Media and Transportation
English prevails in transportation and the media. The travel and communication language of the international airwaves is English. Pilots and air traffic controllers speak English at all international airports. Maritime traffic uses flag and light signals, but «if vessels needed to communicate verbally, they would find a common language, which would probably be English», say the U.S. Coast Guard's Werner Siems.
Five of the largest broadcasters-CBS, NBC, ABC, the BBC, and the CBC-reach a potential audience of about 300 million people through English broadcast. It is also the language of satellite TV.