Impact of Mass Media on Extra Marital Affairs

In essence , the mass media are the tools or technologies that facilitate dissemination of information and entertainment to a vast number of consumers .They are the tools of large scale manufacture and distribution of information and related messages . These tools 'mediate' the messages; they are not the messages themselves. However, Marshall Mcluhan, the media prophet, liked to proclaim that ' the medium is the message', though the title of one of his books suggests rather that 'the medium is the message'. The media are technologies; they are also messages and messages. They can also be looked at as industries, as cultural or entertainment industries.

While cinema, radio, television, cable and the press can easily be recognized as 'mass media', it requires some stretching of the established meaning of the term to include recent technologies (sometimes termed the ' new media') such as pagers, cellular phones, satellites, computers, electronic mail and the internet as 'mass media'. More correctly, these new media may be termed 'interactive media' for they are not as much transmission technologies from one source to many receivers, as interactive technologies , which involve feedback , exchange and participation .

As generally interpreted the ' mass' media are the press , cinema , radio and television . But books , magazines , pamphlets and direct mail literature and posters also need to be included in the label . They are so termed because their reach extends to vast heterogeneous masses of the population living in a wide and extensive area of a country.