The way messages are transmitted through mass media has evolved in unprecedented ways throughout human history. Our Information Age is the latest in a series of social revolutions that define and span recorded history. A desire to produce communication as well as to consume it has been present in every generation. The following are brief summaries of four key technologies in mass communication.
The three most widely used and influential forms of print media
technologies are books, newspapers, and magazines and in this age of
digitization it is easy to dismiss print media as passé. However, even if the mediums are changing
from books and magazines to e-books and Kindles, the mass reproduction of the
written word still holds immense power.
“Paper is the most common, the most homely of things, hardly worth
mentioning alongside the computer, digital compact discs, and satellites in
geostationary orbit. Yet, with all these
electronic wonders at our command, to imagine a world suddenly without paper is
to plunge us into the midst of the Dark Ages… To understand paper's impact is
to be aware of the force that communication technology exerts on our lives
(Fang, 1997).” Print media have many
uses. Its different forms can be used to
entertain, inform, educate, persuade, and sometimes even to sell. Print media have also traditionally been used
in advocacy, both for business and social concerns, which can include advertising,
marketing, propaganda, public relations, and political communication. The audiences for print media are large and
varied. Books, magazines, brochures,
etc. are made to target audiences from specific age groups, to groups with
specific interests, to a socioeconomic segment of society. For example, “every weekday, more than 54
million newspapers are sold, with an average of 2.3 readers per copy. Although demographics describing these
readers vary from paper to paper, newspapers reach both males and females and
are read by adults of all ages (Trenholm, 2008).” The examples of how influential these media
have been on society abound. “Paper
dispersed the Renaissance through Europe. Paper fueled the flames of the
Reformation and the Counter-Reformation and every religious, political, and
social upheaval since (Fang, 1997).”
Film
Story telling through film has been entertaining, enthralling, and
influencing billions of people around the world since the 1890’s. It is a unique medium in that it not only
provides a glimpse into other lives and other worlds with such depth of detail
in images, sounds, textures, but also transcends any differences in language,
nationality, culture or age. “Motion
pictures, the photography of movement, are the most important cultural
phenomenon of this century, an invention arguably exceeding the atom bomb in
their political impact and certainly in their cultural impact. If the world
were deprived of the motion picture, life for most of us would be less
knowledgeable and less pleasant (Fang, 1997).”
Film is also unique in that it is an art form as well a form of media
technology in addition to also being artifacts created by specific cultures,
reflecting those cultures, and, in turn, affecting them and other cultures
around them. Even the Sumatran native
who cannot spell is able to grasp the meaning of pictures which move, and he
can love, hate, or identify himself with those who appear in them (Fang,
1997).” In addition, without film there
would be no television - a medium which is present virtually in every household
in the developed world, but was met with hesitation at first, like most other
technologies. “The television caused
widespread concern as well: Media historian Ellen Wartella has noted how
“opponents voiced concerns about how television might hurt radio, conversation,
reading, and the patterns of family living and result in the further
vulgarization of American culture (Bell, 2010).” Films are primarily used as a form of
entertainment. However, documentaries, for
example, are used to entertain, but also to inform and educate. They have also been used extensively as a
political and propaganda tool. Film has
an extremely wide audience, and in fact, for a lot of films, their success is
based on reaching as wide an audience as possible. For smaller budget films, niche audiences are
sometimes enough to make a project successful.
In fact, the public, through ticket sales, influence how and when movies
are made.
The Internet
The Internet is a technology, a tool, a medium, a phenomenon that has
intrinsically changed and revolutionized the way so many of us live our
lives. “Around the world millions of
people each day use the Internet, a network that links more than 40,000 (no one
knows for certain) government, business, college, and private networks with
more than two million host computers in 200 countries from Australia to Zambia,
to tap into databases, swap e-mail messages, or chat with users who share a
special interest (Fang, 1997).” The
internet is unlike other types of communication media technologies in its rate
of adoption. Its movement from invention
to popular phenomenon has been faster than that of any other medium to date -
books took nearly 400 years, newspapers took 200 years, magazines required
about 170 years, sound recordings about 60 years, movies about 50, radio about
40, and television about 30. The
Internet took only 15 years (Trenholm, 2008).
“The amount of vital information which is placed and shared over the web
every day for governments, institutions of all kinds and private citizens is
truly staggering. But like any new
technology it was not immune to dissenters.
“By the end of the 20th century, personal computers had entered our
homes, the Internet was a global phenomenon, and almost identical worries were
widely broadcast through chilling headlines: CNN reported that “Email 'hurts IQ
more than pot'," the Telegraph that “Twitter and Facebook could harm moral
values" and the “Facebook and MySpace generation 'cannot form
relationships' (Bell, 2010).” But none
of this diminished its popularity. The
popularity of Internet communication has increased dramatically over the
years. In 2005, a study found that 78.6
percent of all Americans use the Internet, spending about 13.3 hours per week
online on e-mail, web surfing, reading news, shopping, seeking about hobbies, online
banking, medical information, instant messaging, and seeking travel information
among others (Trenholm, 2008).
Mobile Devices
“The first “mobile” phones were hardly mobile at all. They were
handsets attached to a large and heavy battery which were mostly installed for
use in cars. Costing well over $1,000
and with little more than 20 minutes of talktime before the battery ran out, it
is easy to see why even the experts thought they would never be anything more
than a niche product for the very rich (From bricks to the iPhone, 2010). However, stopping at any public place
nowadays one would be pressed to find anyone who is not talking, texting,
e-mailing or surfing the internet on their phone. In fact, “many of today’s cell phones have as
much computing power as the largest and most expensive computers did only a
generation ago. Cell phones are not
simply movable land lines. They have
taken the networked computer and made it mobile (Trenholm, 2008).” Further, as the technology becomes cheaper,
the number of people who use a smart phone and other mobile devices, such as
iPads will continue to increase exponentially.
In addition, although most mobile phones are used to talk, text and
e-mail with family and friends, this technology really does appeal to people of
all age groups, all walks of life and for so many different purposes. Children can use them as learning devices and
business people can use them to video-conference into meetings. The incredible variety and breadth of
capability of applications is astonishing, and people really do have whatever
information they could ever wish to retrieve at the palm of their hands at any
time they want. iPads are even capable
of accepting credit cards with the use of a small attachment, which truly
changes the nature of operations for small businesses of all kinds.
References
Bell, V. (February 15, 2010) Don't touch that dial! A history of media
technology scares, from the printing press to Facebook. Slate.
Retrieved from: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2010/02/dont_touch_that_dial.2.html
Fang, I. (1997) A history of mass communication: six information
revolutions. Focal Press. Retrieved from
http://home.lu.lv/~s10178/sixrevolutions.pdf
From bricks to the iPhone: 25 years of the mobile phones. (February,
2010) The Guardian. Retrieved from:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gallery/2010/feb/14/mobile-phones-gadgets-iphone
Trenholm, S. (2008) Thinking through communication, 5th Ed. Allyn &
Bacon
