The Origin and Evolution of Mass Communication and Technology

People can communicate in all different ways, like writing, speech, music, technology, etc. As humans, we have come a long way from having none of the resources in technology we have to what we have now and more. Technology and the field of mass communications is ever changing and always getting better. So what has changed to make technology new and improved?

Publishing is facing a huge transformation today as it did when the printing press was made six centuries ago by Johannes Gutenberg. It’s something that needs to continuously evolve as new technology becomes available and consumers preferences change. Earliest books were actually papyrus scrolls, and a lot of religious texts were hand copied by monks (Hanson, 2017). When the printing press came, it started to standardize language (Hanson, 2017), making it easier for people in a certain region to communicate.

In 1814, the steam powered rotary press was invented, and caused the popularity of serial novels a few years later. During the Civil War era, paperback dime novels became popular as well. With the growth of the dime novels and cheap magazines and newspapers, it fueled the growth of mass literacy and people’s desire to know more.

In 1933, the first comic book was created. It incredibly influenced society and birthed the graphic novel (Hanson, 2017). But now there are digital alternatives as consumers preferences change, and the Nook and Kindle took off. They allow you to carry an unlimited amount of books, magazines, newspapers, etc. to wherever you travel without having to lug around heavy books or worry about bending pages or getting the newspaper out of order, and with this, audio books have become popular quite recently as well.

Television and film have only been around for the past century. Starting in 1894, the Lumiere brothers invented the portable movie camera and projector (Hanson, 2017). After that, the film industry took off. The movie Birth of a Nation, made in 1915, was responsible for creating the feature-length film, and started the era of movie stars (Hanson, 2017).

Movies today are made as a mass produced kind of art, with the studio controlling all levels of production (Hanson, 2017). Movie audiences in 1946 was the biggest ever recorded, with 80 million tickets sold a week, and Gone With the Wind making the highest amount of money in box offices.

In 1977, Star Wars brought computer controlled cameras to movie making. It was also the movie series that changed the special effects industry. Though in 2004, the movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow became the first major film to have all-digital sets. The film didn’t do so good at the box-office, but it was still a milestone (Hanson, 2017), which led to 300, a movie that showed that having digital sets can be successful.

In the late 2000s, Digital and 3D movies started becoming relatively popular, with special film screens being made just for that purpose. IMAX theaters have become a big source of revenue to movie theaters and production studios. They grown then drop in popularity, recently having a drop in the summer of 2017.

In 1922, Philo T. Farnsworth made diagrams and comes up of ideas for the television, but in 1947, before TVs started to take off, Farnsworth’s patent on the television expired. 1951, Lucille Ball and desi Arnaz created the TV show I Love Lucy and ended the popularity of live TV. It was the first Sitcom to be filmed, rather than broadcasted live. In the 1950s, television companies started experimenting in color TV. NBCs peacock logo was a representation to tell viewers that the show was in color, but color TV’s then cost about as much and a big screen would today (Hanson, 2017).

Technological changes challenged and transformed the music and radio industries. Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, which can record sound on foil cylinders, and is the first thing that is able to record music in 1877. Eleven years later, Emile Berliner developed the gramophone, which could play music and it made music a social setting.

Samuel Morse invented a telegraph that allowed messages to be sent over wires, which is where the name Morse Code came from. There were more radio receivers than transmitters, which limited the amount of stations that were available. Theoretical work by Heinrich Hertz in 1888 lays the groundwork for the wireless telegraph and two years later, Guglielmo Marconi developed it.

The Radio Act of 1927; Federal Radio Commission enacted regulations that helped major networks along over small local amateur stations. Today it’s called the FCC (Federal Communication Commission).

The golden age of radio included music, dramas, and soap operas. One of the most popular radio show was Amos ‘n’ Andy, a story of two African American men in the middle class (Hanson, 2017). Sadly, the writers and actors were white but it was still popular with both black and white audiences. The BBC or British Broadcasting Company was created as a public service in the 1920s, and today it reaches about 95 percent of the world’s population, using online, as well as FM, shortwave and satellite (Hanson, 2017).

XM and Sirius merged on satellite radio, and the service is called SiriusXM, which has many different genre’s of music with no commercials in between songs and no censoring of curse words or content. This service is widely available and is increasingly used in vehicles.

The internet is something that hasn’t been around as long as the radio or television, it’s still considered a “new” thing. It’s “a diverse set of independent networks, interlinked to provide its users with the appearance of a single, uniform network” (Hanson, 2017). People post all sorts of things on the internet, but just because they can, doesn’t mean that they should.

Net neutrality is a big discussion now-a-days. It deals with keeping internet service providers from limiting, blocking and degrading acress for all types of content (Hanson, 2017). Internet providers want to get rid of the net neutrality because they claim that it “limits growth,” while everyone else argues that all internet content needs to be treated equally and should not be charged even more money to make sure that the content isn’t impeded (Hanson, 2017).

Internet censorship is a big deal today as well as net neutrality. There are a lot of countries that have limits on searches, and parts of Europe even has a limit on how much material you can search up about Nazis. The Chinese government even put a ban on Facebook, and a lot of other social media pages.

Media convergence brings together legacy media with new media, and breaks down traditional barriers between the producers and consumers (Hanson, 2017). It leads to the creation of new art that’s a mix between old and new content (creation of meme’s, fan films, etc.). It’s historically done through oral traditions etc. Reverse synergy is a possibility too. It’s when you get the worst of combining both old and new together. An example that’s used in Bloomberg’s online publishing a 6-year-old story about United Airlines filing for bankruptcy (Hansen, 2017).

The field of mass communication and the technology that we use today has come a long way since the beginning of it all. From the radio to the internet, technology and the way we utilize it will be ever changing and someone will always want to make something bigger and better.