Have digital communication technologies democratized the media industries?

Over the last century and more, since the rise of commercial media industries in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, there have been many hopes that
various new communication technologies would change information, knowledge and communication for the better.
In the period following the Second world war, computers became a new basis for
such utopian hopes, because of the possibility that their potentially vast storage
and processing capacities would make it much easier for large numbers of people
to access massive bodies of information, cheaply and conveniently, thereby
democratizing knowledge – in the sense of broadening its availability. The rapid development of computers in the post-war era was fuelled by
government expenditure on research in an era where the uSA-led world of ‘liberal
democracies’ and the Soviet union-led bloc of Communist countries competed for
supremacy. As early as the 1950s and 1960s, it seemed clear that computers would
transform societies and economies, and this generated a flurry of theories and
predictions concerning transitions towards ‘the information society’ or ‘the
knowledge economy’