Political media are communication vehicles owned, ruled, managed, or otherwise influenced by political entities, meant to propagate views of the related entity. A similar term, normative media, emphasizes technical and social characteristics of the media itself in shaping decisions. Harold Innis and later Marshall McLuhan were influential in developing this theory. Communication is the process of exchanging information, usually via a common protocol. ... Harold Adams Innis (November 5, 1894-November 8, 1952) was a professor of political economy at the University of Toronto and the author of many seminal works on Canadian economic history and on media and communications. ... Herbert Marshall McLuhan (July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980) was a Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar, professor of English literature, literary critic, and communications theorist, who is one of the founders of the study of media ecology and is today an honorary guru among technophiles. ...

While it is simple to recognise a political medium in an official newspaper, magazine, TV channel that directly declares to belong to a group, deep concerns might regard submission of communications to political interests and impartiality of media that do not declare their party alliances. This influence is not always conspicuous and causes people to accept ideas put forth by those who wish to control communication for the good of society, or causes those who support freedom of communication and minority empowerment to oppose them.

Some believe that big societies actually need to canalize communication. In this sense political media would often be meant to form or at least influence public opinion, a least-common-denominator for all members of society. They are a one-way street and sometimes misused. The Greeks could learn from the Egypt of the Pharaos that some risks could be suffered when medium and executives occur in personal union, concentrating too much power in one hand. This, however, implies the acceptation of a concept of media as power, which is widely but not generally shared. Opponents do argue that the simple fact of producing a communication is not by itself leading to a direct result on the public opinion, unless this one is considered as a merely passive mass in front of an irresistible communication. Public Opinion is a book on media and democracy by Walter Lippmann. ... Human relationships within an ethnically diverse society For other uses, see Society (disambiguation). ...

Modern Democratic theories and implementations, especially after Montesquieu's theories, rely on the separation of powers: Executive (government and police), legislative (parliament) and jurisdicative (court) are separated. Commonly in recent times, and especially in journalistic jargon, media are however defined as an alleged fourth power, and a difference from the others is often outlined in the fact that the power to (eventually) influence the public opinion using media is not much controlled, because media are so "ethereal", and it would be hard to weight them. Others instead suggest that this would not be a difference, since the control over official powers is extremely hard to be verified in practice. Often it is not easy, indeed, to find out who really controls a medium and how much potential efficacy it effectively could have for such goals. It is then argued that when one of the three "canonic" Montesquieu's powers gains an additional power on media, this would be extremely dangerous for the survival of democracy, and an eventual conflict of interests is contested. Portrait of Montesquieu in 1728 Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (January 18, 1689 – February 10, 1755), more commonly known as Montesquieu, was a French political thinker who lived during the Enlightenment. ... The separation of powers (or trias politica, a term coined by French political thinker Montesquieu) is a model for the governance of the state. ... Jargon is a type of terminology which is used in conjunction with a specific activity, e. ... A conflict of interest is a situation in which someone in a position of trust, such as a lawyer, a politician, or an executive or director of a corporation, has competing professional and/or personal interests. ...

As a matter of fact, private media companies became very powerful since the invention of the printing press, cinema, radio and TV, and in history the age of amanuenses (the manual copysts of Middle Ages) is perhaps characteristic in demonstrating the attention that usually official powers attribute to communication. Back to our times, in some cases people in media careers have been previously selected by ruling apparatus, and often openly declared their political beliefs, admitting a lack of impartiality. Their work has sometimes been seen as becoming a part of the executive or parliamentar communication. The Middle Ages formed the middle period in a traditional schematic division of European history into three ages: the classical civilization of Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modern times, beginning with the Renaissance. ...

It is indeed very often said that media could be useful (in the point of view of someone looking for a control over the forming of consensus) in order to discipline the popular sentiments, by detracting the public from the apocalyptic problems of mankind (e.g. global warming, ozone hole, radioactive waste, ...), and by the "psychological warfare" threating their own public until it accepts foreign or external interventions. But, as said, this needs to encounter an audience mainly composed by people without sufficient means to "resist" this intellectual pression. The lack of a sufficient individual education, due to a perhaps intentionally provoked low quality of school, is then considered one of the major reasons for the success of such attempts. Consensus has two common meanings. ... Global mean surface temperatures 1856 to 2005 Mean temperature anomalies during the period 1995 to 2004 with respect to the average temperatures from 1940 to 1980 Global warming is a term used to describe the trend of increases in the average temperature of the Earths atmosphere and oceans that... Image of the largest antarctic ozone hole ever recorded in September 2000. ... Radioactive waste is waste material containing radioactive chemical elements that does not have a practical purpose. ...

Education is by some included in social media, and in this sense it could eventually be used as a powerful mean to introduce in individuals some "politically useful" concepts: what a man learns in his youth, in the phasis in which the fundaments of character are created (which many believe will seldom greatly vary after), is brought to him by family, schools and other clubs, and mass media. Apart from the studies of facts, education could be used (some suggest) as a mean for conditioning, usually practiced by emotional and mechanical learning. Education could be then interwoven with political media, although the respective effects of a conditioning in these two fields might be much different, in the average (and admitting many exceptions) for different classes of society. This matter is however very hard to distinguish from a cultural bias, which is a common argument for "ordinary" media too. Conditioning is a psychological term for what Ivan Pavlov described as the learning of conditional behavior. ...

The power of technology is also be recalled sometimes, since western civilizations use media to carry forth knowledge and enable technical progression. Some civilization critics point out that modern societies rely on technology to invent and promote new technology, often resulting in a degree of pro-technology propaganda, and this backpropagation would mean that mankind hands over control to a living machine. As with any self-reproducing system, this dynamic makes it hard to control. Some view this as leading to the so-called technological singularity as persuasion technology advocates the creation of more persuasion technology until all are persuaded to do nothing but work on improving technology - handing effective control of society to it. By the mid 20th century humans had achieved a level of technological mastery sufficient to leave the surface of the planet for the first time and explore space. ... U.S. propaganda poster, depicting a Nazi stabbing a Bible. ... When plotted on a logarithmic graph, 15 separate lists of paradigm shifts for key events in human history show an exponential trend. ... Persuasion technology is technology that can be used for presenting or promoting a point of view. ... Human relationships within an ethnically diverse society For other uses, see Society (disambiguation). ...

At present, however, many view this process as being benevolent - the internet is both a mass and a personal medium, flexible and scalable. The internet enables a way of communication which was impossible to be foreseen in past societies. The software could potentially allow to cement structures which stand against democracy and competition of ideas, as well as structures which could gain a quite complete control over private communications and isolate eventual dissenting voices. Currently the Net is not completely identifiable as a political medium, given the lack of a central authority and a common political communication. Locally, governments could in the reality use censorship, the first experiments of which have been received with relatively little scandal. The examples and perspective in this article or section may not represent a worldwide view. ...

See also: anti-globalization movement, Indymedia, Wikimedia, Second Superpower Anti-WEF grafiti in Lausanne. ... The Independent Media Center, also called Indymedia or the IMC, is a loose network of amateur or alternative media organizations and journalists who organize into decentralized collectives, normally around geographic locations. ... The Wikimedia Foundation Inc. ... The Second Superpower is a term used to conceptualize a global civil society (including the anti-globalization movement or global justice movement) as a counterpoint to the United States of America. ...