The History of my Obsession

My favorite medium is my cell phone, so to investigate the company behind it, I had to look into Verizon Communications, Inc.

Verizon Communications Inc. is the result of many different mergers. It’s a great example of how synergy of similar companies can create one major, powerful company. (Synergy, as we learned in Ralph Hanson’s “Mass Communications: Living in a Media World,” is when multiple items combine their strengths to be better than they were individually.) Verizon is the result of a major merger between in 2000 between the Bell Atlantic Corp. and the GTE Corp. (which are both companies with their own history of mergers and synergy.)

Verizon customers span a broad spectrum, from individuals, to small businesses, to huge corporations, to the government. It is also much more than just a phone company—it also does internet and television. Verizon deals mostly with media services—getting you the connections you need to get the contact you want. While it might not control what you look at on the internet, it can control how quickly, how easily, how often. It might not create the television programming, but it controls which channels you can choose from. It's also continuing to change the face of these television, cell phone, and internet, by merging them together into one device. Through synergy and concentration of ownership, Verizon has gained the power to make these changes and improvements.