Media consumption

Media consumption or media diet is the sum of information and entertainment media taken in by an individual or group. It includes activities such as interacting with new media, reading books and magazines, watching television and film, and listening to radio. An active media consumer must have the capacity for skepticism, judgement, free thinking, questioning, and understanding.Media consumption is to maximize the interests of consumers. For as long as there have been words and pictures, the people of the world have been consuming media. Improved technology such as the printing press has fed increased consumption. Around 1600 the camera obscura was perfected. Light was inverted through a small hole or lens from outside, and projected onto a surface or screen, creating a moving image. This new medium had a very small effect on society compared to the old ones. The development of photography in the middle 19th century made those images permanent, greatly reducing the cost of pictures. By the end of the century millions of consumers were seeing new, professionally made photographs every day. In the 1860s mechanisms such as the zoetrope, mutoscope and praxinoscope that produced two-dimensional drawings in motion were created. They were displayed in public halls for people to observe. These new media foreshadowed the mass media consumption of later years. Around the 1880s, the development of the motion picture camera allowed individual component images to be captured and stored on a single reel. Motion pictures were projected onto a screen to be viewed by an audience. This moving camera affected the progression of the world immensely, beginning the American film industry as well as early international movements such as German Expressionism, Surrealism and the Soviet Montage. For the first time people could tell stories on film, and distribute their works to consumers worldwide. In the 1920s electronic television was working in laboratories, and in the 1930s hundreds of receivers were in use worldwide.