What did mass media do with Distant Communication?

A medium is merely a channel or system of communication. Speech is the most widely used medium. Other media (media is plural for medium-there are no communication "mediums") include painting, sign lan­guage, the written word, music, images, or even smoke signals. A mass medium is a means of communicating to a mass, or large number, of people. Modern mass media include television, radio, newspapers and magazines, books, films, and recordings.
The spoken or written word itself is not a mass medium. If you shout as loud as you can or write a letter, you might manage to com­municate with hundreds of people. However, communicating with a large number of people, or mass media communication, was not possible until the invention of the printing press in 1456 by Johannes Gutenberg. With the development of technology-radio, telephone, television, the microchip-mass media communication has begun to reach its full potential. What were the communication media before the development of mass media?
Most common were the town criers, forerunners of toda: television news anchors. In medieval times, these loud-voiced n resentatives of the king wandered town streets literally shouti the news. But town criers were effective only in urban are, where people lived close together.
Another medium that conquered distance was the runner. p, Revere was a "news runner," overcoming the barrier of distance he rode his horse to announce in 1775, "The British are comin The most famous runner was the messenger Pheidippides, who  brought news of the victory at Marathon to Athens in 490 B.C. twenty-six-mile run is commemorated every time we rUl marathon. Runners and criers helped spread the news, but massively.
In some societies, a drum beat the message of imminent d ger; in others, smoke signals spread the word. Both these me communicate over space, but the message had to be a simple c such as "danger" or "good hunting here." One thousand years c however, there was one important reason why you didn't reo need mass media-there were very few masses. People were concentrated; the largest cities would still be small towns by standards. You could spread any message you could conceive the original medium-"tellaperson." Mass media require the social invention of large cities to take root.