ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the intersections between communications technologies, the political and economic conditions that determine access to the technologies, and language. These technologies are not evenly distributed; who has access to such technologies, how they are used to create media content and to whom they communicate are crucial questions in the study of media. Epistemologically, political communication approaches can pose a challenge to ethnographic approaches to media that privilege thick description over thick contextualization. In the market model, technologies of media production and distribution are owned by individuals and corporations. Many of the ideas of alternative media providing liberation from the controls imposed by private and state ownership of the means of media production have been carried over into consideration of digital media. In general, both political economic analysis and popular ideologies have centered around three fundamentally different types of media control.
