The means for making meanings and the means for communicating these meanings are shaped, first and foremost, by social and economic factors. In a social-semiotic theory the assumption is that the cultural technologies of representation, production and dissemination and the affordances and facilities that they offer are used within the frame of what is socially possible at any one time. Communication always has been and will remain subject to social, cultural, economic and political givens. The environments, conditions, choices are mediated by the interests of members of social groups so that practices, resources and technologies of communication respond, at different rates at different times, to social, economic and technological developments.
In anglophone societies currently, the roles and relations of 'state' and 'market' are primary among the factors shaping communication. European (nation) states have, for the last three or four decades been in a phase of rapid and deep transition. After a period of about 150 years in which the aims of the (nineteenth-century) nation-state, with a nationally conceived and to some extent nationally controlled economy, shaped conceptions and practices of communication, the trend now is towards a situation where the demands of globally organized markets are reshaping the ground of communicational conditions. The still ruling conceptions and metaphors around communication - as for other social practices and structures - come from that earlier period, shaped by its requirements and structures. One instance is the still active even though by now barely residually present nineteenth-century notion of the 'mass' - as in 'mass-society', 'mass-communication'. New social, economic, political and technological givens require new names/metaphors capable of functioning as essential guides to thought and action.
Kress, Gunther, Multimodality- A social semiotic approach to contemporarycommunication, London: Routledge, 2010. S.19