When human beings learned how to control
their body parts to be able to talk, language (a
system of conventional, spoken, manual, or
written symbols) is one of the first things that the
brain developed and enhanced. Thus, we could
consider oral traditions as the basic ancestor of
information and communication flow.
Not only was language essential to use for everyday life, it
also developed humans into having more complex thoughts.
This is the reason why ancient civilizations and older cultures
have a tradition of passing down stories through oral means.
Even specific art forms such as poetry, especially epic poems,
have their roots in oral traditions. It is only upon the invention of
writing when some of the orally handed-down stories and
information were recorded.
ARCHAEOLOGISTS
Archaeologists have also found evidence
that early human beings were able to
communicate through writing symbols or
drawing crude pictures. For example, the
Chauvet cave paintings discovered in Southern
France, show evidence of symbols etched onto
the walls, dating back to more than 30,000
years ago. This shows that as humans, we have
this basic tendency to record what goes on
around us. We also have this need to
document our experiences so that others could
learn or improve from them. This is also to help
facilitate our daily life transactions.
Angono Petroglyphs
Discovered in Angono,
Rizal, Philippines (1965), 127
figural carvings engraved on
the wall of a shallow cave of
volcanic tuff, Declared a
National Cultural Treasure
(1973)
Different regions of the earth developed varied ways
of recording human transactions and memory. Tribal
cultures like those found in Africa, South America, or
Native America used materials they found in nature to
record their existence. Barks of trees, bones of animals
or sticks painted on with nature-found substances were
used as recording devices of information. Similar
materials were found in the Asian regions.
Early evidence of more formal-looking
recordings could be traced back to ancient
Mesopotamia, also known as the cradle of
western civilization located within the former
Tigris-Euphrates river system in the region where
modern -day Iraq, Kuwait, parts of Syria, Turkey,
and Iran are now located.
Clay and stone tablets were found to have some form of
symbolic impressions that make up ancient languages, the most
important discovery of such is called the "Code of Hammurabi."
Dating back to 1772 BCE, it contains (282) written laws and codes of
the Babylonian king named Hammurabi who ruled during those
ancient times. From writing in stones and clay, humans were able to
develop other materials for documentation. With the discovery of
papyrus by ancient Egyptians and other forms of writing tools, this
eventually led to the advent of paper. The new invention spread
into other parts of the world, making the recording and
documenting of human life even more extensive and profound.
Indeed, the written word could be considered
as the greatest tool that human beings used to
communicate with each other during those
times. Learning how to write words down
prompted civilizations to discover newer devices
that helped develop our modern-day media.
Newer forms of media were thus born, such as
handwritten books, which were developed and marketed
into consumer items. However, the laborious task of
replicating books by hand-copying, proved too tedious
and costly that the amount of early volumes was
inaccessible to those who cannot afford it. As a result, the
nobility or the upper-class citizens had more access to a
wealth of educational printed materials, adding to the
existing inequality in social classes.
In East Asia, woodblock printing was developed around 200
CE when Chinese and Korean craftspeople "wrote" letters on
textile or paper using letters carved onto wood blocks. Imagine
each letter or character of the various Chinese languages is
etched onto wood blocks, then they used ink and pressed it on
a surface. In the year 1040, the movable type was invented,
replacing the system of woodblock in certain areas in the
region.
In the year 1040, the movable type was invented, replacing
the system of woodblock in certain areas in the region. But the
most important contribution to revolutionizing the printing press
is German goldsmith Johann Gutenberg's (Johann Geinsfleich
zur Laden zum Gutenberg - German craftsman and inventor
who originated a method of printing from movable type)
improvement of the movable type printing press. Using his skills
and knowledge in metals, he created a better version of the
movable type in 1453. The relatively fewer letters of the English
alphabet - as opposed to the more intricate Chinese
characters - contributed to the early success of this invention.
Because his printing press could mass
produce many pages in a given day, the
printing of books, became cheaper and
faster. As a result, the cost of book and
printed matter lessened, making it more
affordable to more people from various
walks of life.
This first form of mass media production
revolutionized the way Europe and the
western civilization developed. Spreading
towards other parts of the world. It also led
to more reinventions that ushered the
human race into modernity.
INDUSTRIAL
AGE
When civilizations started embracing more
technological advances like the Gutenberg printing
press, the world was ushered into the industrial age. The
harnessing of electricity for daily use was also
characteristic of this age, as some of the technological
inventions developed with various electricity-related
experiments and rapid economic developments, this
age clearly saw the active role of technology in
advancing the way we communicate and disseminate
information.
This is evident in the way the world shifted gears from being a
predominantly agricultural economy towards a more
industrialized economy. This mean the evolution of factories,
assembly line work flows, and devising mechanisms that would
speed up the production of what human beings need. Thus,
humans and machinery were hand-in-hand towards
advancing the world into this new age.
Due to the mass-producing printing press, newspapers were
soon developed, allowing citizens access to news and
information that affected sectors of their lives.
For instance, the very first newspaper was printed in the
late 1590s in Western Europe. This form of media reached
America in 1690 while the first newspaper advertisement
appeared in 1704. Magazines followed suit in 1741 as
America also prepared to enshrine their Constitution on
paper in 1790. To think that the precursor of the newspaper is
the proliferation of politically-ripe printed pamphlets in Europe
during the 1500s, it is no surprise that modern-day newspapers
primarily highlight information that concern political and
government concerns related to its citizenry.
Image recording and the invention of On the contrary, the
photography also began during this era. development of personal electronic
Many individuals from different industrialized gadgets and recorders paved the
nations were tinkering with their respective way for more access to mass media.
photographic inventions, but it was
Frenchman Louis Daguerre who, in 1839,
somehow ushered what we now know of
photography. With his daguerreotype
system of capturing images in flat copper
plate sheets, this was the precursor of the
Yet music and film will not be left behind.
Music saw the development of the
earlier phonograph discs into vinyl
records, then the magnetic tape which
produced the open track player and
cassette tape, and later on converted
to data and stored in compact discs or
CDs.
Portable gadgets like the Sony Walkman or the Sony
Discman revolutionized the way we carried our music
with us. As for film, there were also tape formats like the
VHS and disc formats like the short-lived laser discs,
VCDs, and now DVDs.
But as soon as media products could be converted
digitally into intangible data, another era ushered in the
digital age.
DIGITAL
AGE
Digital age refers to our current age wherein information
is still seen as a commodity yet its mode of recording,
storage, delivery and playback relies heavily on digital
technology. Digital technology encompasses the breaking
down of information into the readable and easily
transferable zero-one computer binary, focusing on media
gadgets that could encode and decode such a binary.
Previous media technologies were updated and improved
upon to accommodate this computerized version of
information and communication production and
dissemination.
Early inventors of the computer system in the 1900s came from
various western sectors of the world. Similarly, the emergence of the
Internet was predominantly an American-led combination of efforts.
Spearheaded by the US government as a development project
to strengthen communication systems via interlinked systems,
research to work towards this goal started during the 1960s and
involved various industries, including several agencies from the
government sector (in particular NASA or the National Aeronautics
Space Administration), the military, scientific and mathematical
research laboratories, and academic institutions. European efforts
could also be traced in the development of various components
that helped make the Internet work.
Parallel to the development of the
networks that gave birth to the Internet,
developments in the world of computers
were also happening in various computer-
related industries.
This was evident in the way the personal computer
evolved during the time when Steve Jobs and Steve
Wozniak of Apple fame, the IBM company and later Bill
Gates of Windows were introducing various models and
prototypes of hardware and software during the 1970s and
well into the 1980s. Other countries from different regions,
namely Japan, also came into the picture with the
development of specific parts for the burgeoning personal
computer systems.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak Bill Gates
Soon, the world could see the materialization of these various
efforts as seemingly science fiction material became science and
technology fact. Sci-fi writer William Gibson, in his novel
Neuromancer, was the one who coined the term "cyberspace" to
describe the information superhighway that the world will soon
traverse upon the successful utilization of the Internet in the mid-
1980s. Not one person, institution or company could lay claim to the
exact birth and propagation of the Internet, but we are all thankful
now that this new realm of information and communication conduit,
furthering the concept of the global village.
Modern-day Polaroid one-photo-per-shot system
that went popular in the 1970s. Other systems of
capturing more pictures were developed, but none
stood out like George Eastman's improvement of the
rolled and perforated celluloid film to go with his
camera. Eastman invented the first easy-to-use
handheld camera called the Kodak Camera, making
photography accessible to the masses in 1888.
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, French painter
and physicist who invented the first practical process
of photography, known as the daguerreotype.
Though the first permanent photograph from nature
was made in 1826/27 by Nicéphore Niepce of France,
it was of poor quality and required about eight hours'
exposure time. The process that Daguerre developed
required only 20 to 30 minutes.
Other technological advancements that
led to our modern-day media could be
traced to the invention of the telegraph.
Invented in 1844 by Samuel Morse, this
allowed the rapid transfer of messages via
wires and cables, as the sender encoded
the information and the receiver decoded
it at the other end.
He and Alfred Vail developed the Morse
Code From mere decoded messages, the
human voice was the next to be delivered
through the wires upon the invention of the
telephone by Alexander Graham Bell in
1876.
The prolific Thomas Edison experimented
with recording sound and music with his
invention of the phonograph in 1877. But
the person who successfully developed a
sound and music recording system was
Emile Berliner. In 1887, he created the
gramophone system which played back
music recorded on flat discs or records.
The manually operated turntable was
improved upon by the invention of a motor
system by Eldridge Johnson, making hand-
cranking operations a thing of the past. This
was how turntables got mechanized
systems.
Edison also tinkered with
another media - film - as his
invention of the incandescent
light bulb was a huge
contribution to the filmmaking
technology, especially in the
playback mechanism on a
wider screen.
The light bulb was used as a part of
the film projector he was using.
Previously, Edison invented the
kinetoscope single-viewer film system
which allowed a person to individually
watch short films by peeping through
the bulky kinetoscope machinery.
Several European and American inventors were
also working on parallel cinematic projects during the
1700s and the 1800s. However, the credit for the first
public commercial screening of a film - similar to the
system we know today - goes to French brothers
Auguste and Louis Lumiere when they premiered their
short documentary film Arrivee d'un train en gare a La
Ciotat (Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat station) in a Paris
cafe in 1895.
They used their invention called the
cinematographe which had the capacity of a
film camera to record images and the capacity
of a film projector to project the film onto a big
screen. The following year, the Lumiere brothers
opened the first theater dedicated to screening
films called the cinema.
From the combined inventions of the telegraph
and the telephone, different scientists and
engineers tinkered with these technologies as
they worked on the precursor of the modern-day
radio. Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell
experimented with electromagnetic waves (or
radio waves) in 1873 while German physicist
Heinrich Hertz demonstrated the first transmission
of these radio waves in 1887.
Individually, Frenchman Edouard Branly and English physicist
Oliver Lodge respectively worked on improving radio wave
frequency transmissions of both the transmitter and receiver
technologies. All of these innovations were taken up and
improved upon in America by Guglielmo Marconi in 1894 who
was the first person to recognize the commercial viability of the
radio system. First used in the maritime industry at the onset of
the 1900s until it got heavy communication and information
usage during World War I
Radio then became part of mainstream society when the
use became a commercial one. Its entertainment value was
explored beginning in the 1920s. From radio's original purpose
to improve people's communication processes, its use crossed
to spreading entertainment elements. The term "broadcast"
began its usage from radio to signify this one-way type of
sending messages or information to a wider audience.
If radio played a part in World War, World War lI's beginnings
coincided with the first public broadcast of television. Before
war broke out, different individuals were also tinkering with radio
waves using precursors of television components. But this time,
they were trying to broadcast not only the human voce but
images as well. American Philo Farnsworth holds the credit of
making the first television transmittal of a picture in 1927. In 1930,
he received the first patent for the electronic television so in
1934, he made a public demonstration of the early prototype of
the television.
While the major media-related technological
developments of the industrial age heavily utilized
electricity, the world was not yet ushered into the
electronic age upon the invention of such gadgetry
and devices. Thus, the electronic age is also
characterized by the way humans consumed
information in a rapidly developing pace, leading us
towards what they call the "information society."
This was first evident upon the utilization of the telegraph.
Since the transfer of information from one point to another
became fast and instantaneous, communication in itself
became a form of industry, with information being its sole
valuable product. The development of the fax machine and
the cell phone also resulted in a faster way of transmitting
messages, causing telegraph to eventually die. Soon, cable
and satellite technologies also paved the way for faster
transmittal of media content, whether for information of
entertainment purposes.
This development also led to
communication being separated from other
industries such as transportation. Before, the
delivery of goods from one point to another
encompassed the use of physical
transportation. Electronic signals or waves
and wired or even wireless technology soon
discarded this need for physical transport.
With the development of the broadcast
industry, particularly the expansion of radio
and television's reach, the term "mass media"
took its full effect as it changed the habits of
various cultures especially in the 1950s and
1960s.
