Print, Film, the Internet and Mobile: A Brief History of Four Media Technologies

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.

Print

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