Telecommunications media

Telecommunication is the assisted transmission over a distance for the purpose of communication. In earlier times, this may have involved the use of smoke signals, drums, semaphore, etc. In modern times, telecommunication typically involves the use of electronic devices such as the telephone, television, radio or computer.

Social impact
Telecommunication is playing an increasingly important role in social relationships. In recent years, the popularity of social networking sites has increased dramatically. These sites allow users to communicate with each other as well as post photographs, events and profiles for others to see. The profiles can list a person's age, interests, sexuality and relationship status. In this way, these sites can play important role in everything from organising social engagements to courtship.

Prior to social networking sites, technologies like SMS and the telephone also had a significant impact on social interactions. In 2000, market research group Ipsos MORI reported that 81% of 15 to 24 year-old SMS users in the United Kingdom had used the service to coordinate social arrangements and 42% to flirt.

Other impacts
In cultural terms, telecommunication has increased the public's ability to access to music and film. With television, people can watch films they have not seen before in their own home without having to travel to the video store or cinema. With radio and the internet, people can listen to music they have not heard before without having to travel to the music store.

Telecommunication has also transformed the way people receive their news. A survey by the non-profit Pew Internet and American Life Project found that when just over 3,000 people living in the United States were asked where they got their news "yesterday", more people said television or radio than newspapers. The results are summarised in the following table (the percentages add up to more than 100% because people were able to specify more than one source).

Telecommunication has had an equally significant impact on advertising. TNS Media Intelligence reported that in 2007, 58% of advertising expenditure in the United States was spent on mediums that depend upon telecommunication. The results are summarised in the following table.

Thompson notes how the use of technical media of communication can "alter the spatial and temporal dimensions of social life" The development of telecommunication technology in the second half of the 19th century was particularly momentous in the altering of social life with characteristics of spatial and temporal aspects being altered. As Thompson argues the advent of telecommunication technologies, such as the telegraph and telephone, resulted in the "uncoupling of space and time" in the sense that concepts of space and time were altered in the communication process. This prepared the way for another transformation, which Nowotny describes as: the “discovery of despatialized simultaneity” revolutionized the experience of simultaneity as it "became detached from the spatial condition of common locality." With this came the possibility to experience events as simultaneous and changed telecommunication forever.