Electronic media are lodged in the same demographics, some of the same educational developments and in their own cultural ones. New media are means for new people and new thinking to form new publics, both in the sense of audiences and in the sense of public opinions.7 As forums and means, however, newer electronic media differ structurally from mass media from print to broadcasting. Structurally, they replace the mass media model of one to many communication with any to any, or passive reception with active selection, and markedly reduce the social distance between sending and receiving, producing and consuming messages. Unlike broadcasting, they are not monopolised by governments and often are practically deployed to circumvent those monopolies. By comparison to print, their capital costs and required skills are barely higher for producers than for consumers, in part because core capital costs are shifted to infrastructure that neither producers nor consumers own. This last is particularly the case, and particularly the attraction, with tape cassettes (more recently, CD ROMs and DVD diskettes) and the internet, while asymmetries between sender and receiver are still marked in satellite television. Although barriers to entry have fallen in broad casting, they become vanishingly small for tape cassettes, other small media such as desktop publishing and for the internet. The result is that electronic media can take on characteristics of 'virtual community’ that is more truly community like than an audience in that it is interactive and potentially highly so, and also less hegemonic than aggregate 'public opinion’.
Interactivity and community were manifest in the arguably first significant electronic medium with democratic characteristics, the tape cassette. Already in widespread use for popular culture, including for circulating amateur recordings of folk music and poetry, tape cassettes became associated with Muslim publics in the run up to the Iranian revolution of 1979. Then, famously, sermons of the iAyat Allah Ruhollah Khomeini (1900 89) and others forbidden to make public addresses, circulated on tape cassettes.8 Today, sermons, recitations, lessons and religious discourse of all sorts circulate on tape, to be consumed at will and, much like newspapers, across a range of public and private settings where, particularly in quasi public settings from
7 Dale F. Eickelman and Jon W. Anderson, 'Redefining Muslim publics’, in Dale F. Eickelman and Jon W. Anderson (eds.), New media in the Muslim world: The emerging public sphere, 2nd edn (Bloomington 2003), pp. 7 13.
8 Annabelle Sreberny Mohammadi and Ali Mohammadi, Small media, big revolution: Communication, culture and the Iranian revolution (Minneapolis and London, 1994).
World History
