1.2 Development of Mass Media

The world's line: The print revolution — Gutenberg's press (c. 1450): the multiplication of texts; the newspapers' rise in the 17th–18th centuries (the public sphere's birth — the coffee-house world of circulating print); the 19th century's mass-circulation press (the penny-paper, literacy's spread); The broadcast arrival — radio (the 20th century's first true mass medium — the propaganda age's lesson), television (the visual's dominance over print); the spectrum's scarcity as the regulatory rationale (licensing's foundation — Unit 3's "why"); The digital disruption — the internet and social platforms: the everyone-a-publisher world; the citizen journalist; the viral dynamic; the algorithm's amplification — mass media's structure inverted from few-to-many to many-to-many and back. The Nepali line (the exam's ladder): The Rana era (pre-1951): censorship's world — Gorkhapatra's state monopoly (from 1901); the suppressed private press; The 1951 opening: democracy's dawn — the multiparty era's first private papers; The Panchayat decades: controls — licensing and bonds; state-media dominance; The 1990 Constitution: the post-1990 explosion — the private press's golden age (the daily- boom era), the FM radio pioneers (Radio Sagarmatha's licensing fight); The 2007/2015 Constitutions: Article 19-type protection (no prior censorship; no closure/ seizure/cancellation of registration except by law) — and the 2005 royal-coup censorship as the cautionary memory; The digital era: online portals, social media's mass reach, the registration debates (Unit 3.6).