Hominids took the vocalization further and developed a modest
language capability by about one million years ago, with a vocabulary beyond
anything previously evolved. In this
manner, speaking face-to-face, singing together and body English/facial
expressions became the initial and only set of communications media our hominid
ancestors used until relatively recently.
Representational art, e.g., body painting and cave drawings, appeared
somewhere around 50,000 years ago. More
importantly, writing was introduced no later than 4,000 years ago in Egypt,
Mesopotamia and possibly in the Indus river delta.
Writing was the beginning of a series of new media put to
work by our clever species. For
simplicity, I’m going to discuss six primary media introductions during the
last 4,000 years, and their effects on human affairs.
1. Writing - using various physical media
– introduced about 4,000 years ago.
2. Telegraph - “What hath God wrought?”,
test message sent from the Supreme Court chambers in DC, over a fledgling commercial
carrier, to Samuel Morse’s partner in Baltimore, May 24, 1844
3. Photography – Starting with
Daguerreotype photos which became widespread in the US and Europe during the
1840s
4. Radio - wireless telegraphy became
widespread on ocean-going vessels in the first decade of the 20th
Century. Audio broadcasting (AM radio)
became widespread in industrialized countries in the 1920s.
5. Television - broadcast TV over the
airwaves was introduced in a few cities in Europe and America starting in the
late 1920s, but rapidly expanding in the late 1940s and 50s.
6. Internet - developed under US
government contract in the 1970s, it rapidly spread to most of the planet in
the 1990s.
Note: Much of what I
have absorbed from a layman’s perspective about communication media started
with the works of Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), Professor of Communications at
Toronto University. I can personally
recommend two of his many works:
·
Mechanical Bride- 1951
·
Understanding Media - 1964
Writing from
about 5,300 years ago was quickly adopted by governing authorities and the
elites for its obvious ability to convey unambiguous messages of considerable
length across time and distance. Kings
and queens wanted their names carved in stone; merchants needed records of
their transactions, and so on. However,
the masses of humanity, even in cities, for the most part remained illiterate
until the middle of the 19th Century Anno Domini.
Nevertheless, writing immediately was put to work in
building and sustaining large city states and empires. It seems that agriculture begat towns and cities,
which needed and invented writing to enable large political entities. Notice the Mesoamericans independently
developed writing under exactly the same circumstances. Later, books made of ink on parchment or
papyrus were used to codify religious works like the Torah. Having the doctrine in written form enabled
widely dispersed Jewish religious communities to remain true to their
Covenant. Weekly synagogues provide the
perfect venue for a literate teacher to read from the book, so the illiterate
audience can be familiar with the law. Until
relatively recently, however, writing as a means of conveying information to
large numbers of people was limited by its need to be printed on a physical
layer.
Telegraph –
widespread in America and Europe by the late 1840s, the first reliable transatlantic
cable went into operation in 1866.
Information that previously took 10 days to cross the Atlantic now took
only a few minutes using Morse code. With
dispatches moving at near light speed, newspapers around the world took on a
new feeling of realism. None of us were
there at the time, but the feeling must have been profound, giving the average
literate citizen a sense of the coming global village.
Photography – After
1840, for the first time in history, it was possible to quickly make a
high-definition, reproducible image of any visible scene. Ancient stone sculptures, particularly by the
Romans, produced a similar degree of realism, also some painters of the second millennium
AD, but each rendition took so much time, and they were limited to very small
numbers for the elites of society. After
photography hit the scene, newspapers began reproducing photographs in their
daily papers, replacing the earlier artist’s renditions. It’s no accident that telegraphy and
photography emerged during the Industrial Revolution, which in turn emerged as
a direct result of the Enlightenment.
While still-picture photography lives on in a big way with
our modern digital cameras, it’s spin offs of motion pictures and video (with
sound) as communications media cannot be ignored. Presently, motion pictures (including video)
are primarily delivered via television channels or movie theaters, with some
DVDs thrown in. Penetration of streaming
video into the Internet medium has already begun. More on this below.
Radio – Wireless
telegraphy began shortly after the turn of the 20th Century,
primarily used by marine transportation. By
the 1920s, audio broadcasts became widespread in industrialized countries. Radio receivers became a standard fixture in
homes with electricity. Politicians
could now speak to millions of voters, merchants could advertise their wares to
mass audiences. People in these
countries rapidly became accustomed to receiving their entertainment in their
living rooms instead of the local tavern.
Radio newscasts began to supplant newsreels (in theaters) and newspapers
as the preferred source for daily news.
McLuhan describes radio as a “hot” medium, meaning it is concentrated in
a single human sense – hearing, same as the telephone in this regard. McLuhan maintains people are affected
differently, with more immediacy, by hot media.
Some believe there would not have been a Roaring Twenties without the
influence of radio and the telephone.
Today, radio still has a foothold in automobiles, but that’s about it. Cellphones, which are two-way radios, are
gradually replacing land lines for telephony services. Cellphones become smartphones and smart watches, bringing in
email, texting, Internet access, even two-way voice and video conversations. You can wear Dick Tracy's 2-way wrist radio.
Television started in Europe in the 1930s and became
widespread in America in the early 1950s.
Other countries quickly followed, until by the 1990s there was scarcely
a country left on the planet whose citizens did not have ready access to
satellite television. Because of my age,
I clearly remember this particular media revolution. As a young boy, I recall sitting next to the
family radio that occupied a prominent place in the living room of our
home. This was before transistors, so
radios were fairly large. My evening
entertainment consisted of listening aptly to various dramatic serials like
the Phantom and the Whistler. When my
favorite programs were not on, you could find me running around the
neighborhood after dark with my friends, climbing fences and getting into mild
forms of mischief.
When TV arrived, there were only a few in the neighborhood,
so all the youngsters gathered at key homes to watch TV together. Unlike the solitary radio experience, these
were more like a party, with the typical fare consisted of wrestling and roller
derby for the kids and game shows like Beat the Clock and What’s My Line for
the adults. TV proved to be a much
bigger draw than radio. By the end of
the 1950s, not only did every home have TV, but most people spent considerably
more time every day viewing TV than they previously did listening to the radio,
when that was all they had.
By the 1960s, microwave stations extended network television
feed to even the most remote parts of America, spreading a kind of New York/Los
Angeles brand of culture to places where it previously did not reach. Before network TV came, some parts of the South
did not celebrate Independence Day.
Before network TV came to rural New Mexico, the most popular athletic
pastime for young people was riding bucking broncos, not baseball and football. At every turn, we see how TV has affected our
way of life and helped spread American culture around the world. Even election campaigns are different than
they were in the days when newspapers and radio were king.
McLuhan describes television as a “cool” medium, meaning its
impact is diffused over two senses, vision and hearing. I’m not sure I can pinpoint exactly how that
plays out, but it is obvious TV is much more effective at conveying information
than radio or newspapers ever were. It
grabs your attention with its immediacy.
The video camera is merciless and shows every fault in a person’s
appearance and deportment. After 60
years, TV has become ubiquitous and holds no more surprises. The global village is clearly apparent in
living rooms all over the planet.
Internet – The Internet
and its world wide web became widespread in the early 1990s. The primary driver was the rapid adoption of
personal computers. Standard browsers
are the universal client. I recall in
the 1980s we used floppy discs to transmit data from one PC to another, before network
technology and Internet Protocol provided the needed connectivity between PCs
and servers. The use of physical media
to load software and other information onto PCs has mostly been eliminated.
You could say TV was simply radio with moving pictures. However, the combination of personal computers
and the Internet is fundamentally different.
There is nothing like the client-server model in any of the previous new
media introductions throughout history. Unlike
broadcast radio and TV, the Internet is interactive. Telephony is interactive too, but limited to
that one aural sense. The Internet provides combined
two-way voice and video conversation, plus myriad other services.
The global village that was born with the telegraph has now reached
full-fledged status. There is a portal
into this village, accessible by approximately half of the households on the
planet. The concept of cyberspace is
widely understood and used by a large portion of the human race. People routinely engage in near-real time,
two-way communication with others around the planet, often with people they
don’t know. Millions of discussion
forums and other cyberspace communities have sprung up like mushrooms.
The Internet has opened the door to a huge increase in the
sheer volume of information the average connected person has access to and
consumes. Likewise, the quality of
information available to the human race has rapidly increased. Consider Google’s mission to bring the entire
world’s accumulated knowledge to the average person’s fingertips. Amazingly, in just a few years Google and its
competitors succeeded, at least for a respectable portion of that noble goal. Premier educational institutions like MIT and
others are sharing classroom instruction materials and live video lectures with the world, online free
of charge.
Because the Internet is still relatively new, its growth and
evolution are still unfolding. Its
effect on humanity is not yet fully realized, but it’s fair to say the 21st
Century will see a massive penetration of computers and networks into every
aspect of our lives. From simple things
like refrigerators with IP addresses to designer malware and cyber
warfare. Already, government
institutions and commercial enterprises around the world have adopted computer
and Internet technologies wholesale.
In my lifetime, I’ve witnessed the transformation of typical
businesses from paper and printer-based information systems to almost total
computerization. Modern enterprises
still have printers and copy machines in their offices, but they are starting
to gather dust. Most people in public
life now communicate with emails and PowerPoint presentations. More and more meetings are virtual. Currently, these virtual meetings are merely
telephone calls with still pictures added, but increasingly live video is being
added. The objective is: voice, video
and data, all delivered in one Internet Protocol session, sometimes called
unified communication and collaboration (UCC).
The new Information Age has also greatly enlarged the
proportion of society employed full time as information workers, i.e., little
manual labor involved. Even older touch-labor
jobs in agriculture, manufacturing and services are increasingly being
conducted with a richer set of information inputs – what to plant and where,
how much water and fertilizer to apply, materials in the supply chain, market
demand forecasts, and numerically controlled milling machines - the list is
endless. Action-prompting information
that used to come straight from a human brain into a pair of hands, now often
comes over a network from a database, which in turn is maintained by humans
using keyboards.
New collaboration techniques include “total immersion” rooms
with special lighting, video cameras, speakers and microphones, where one side
of the meeting table has chairs and the other side is an array of high
definition TV screens. The effect is uncanny;
one quickly forgets or suppresses the fact that people appearing on the screens
are not physically present. Beyond that, most visual input to the senses comes via flat screen monitors. Soon enough, most flat screens will be replaced by virtual reality visors, sort of like surrround-sound for your vision. That's why Facebook bought Oculus. They want their patrons to access their service in this manner. Classic paradigm shift.
Voice recognition is another technology spawned by personal
computing. In the future, we can expect most
computers, both servers and client devices, to carry on natural language
conversations with us, as depicted by Hal 9000 in the movie 2001. The concept of a personal computer will take
on a whole new meaning. People will form
relationships with their computers that begin to replace relationships with other
humans. Some people will undoubtedly retreat
into their little cells - talking to, working with and playing with computers
instead of people.
Can we adapt to these latest changes in communication media,
or will we all fall into some kind of dysfunctional malaise, like a bunch of compulsive
gamers? I’m confident the human race will
adapt, since those who fall prey to dysfunctional modes will be marginalized,
suffer adverse consequences such as reduced income and be less likely to
reproduce, natural selection at work. However,
society must be ready to deal with those who cannot adapt and not be surprised or
confused about the resulting phenomena.
In any event, this New Century of ours promises to be a game
changer for the human race, meaning the dawn of the 22nd Century
will see a very different society, one we would barely recognize or be comfortable in. The Internet and associated computer
technologies will transform human affairs in ways we cannot completely
foresee. Hang on to your hats and keep
your eye on the ball, because it will be a fast and bumpy ride.
The older communications media are not completely fading
away. The telegraph and its Morse code
may be almost gone, newspapers and printed magazines are fading from the scene,
but radio and especially television hang on, popular as ever. Already, TV has begun to move to Internet Protocol, becoming increasingly interactive and delivered “on-demand”,
similar to other Internet services. New flat-screen TVs have this capability built in.
As more and more of our communication needs are served by
electronic media, we can expect a modest reaction – a renewed emphasis on the
value of face-to-face conversation. The
original set of communications capabilities our ancestors developed a million
years ago, in-person talking and making music together are still with us. Because our species have evolved around them,
no amount of new technology can replace them or make them obsolete. I fully expect new countercultures to reject
consumerism and modern technology in favor of a simple lifestyle, balanced with
a few essential modern devices, sort of like the Mennonites do.
In summary, the 21st Century promises to be a
Golden Age of art and science for that portion of the human race fortunate to
live in developed societies.
Nevertheless, many surprises are in store for us, good, bad and indifferent. I have a feeling our rapidly advancing
communications capabilities will be heavily involved in many of those
surprises.
PS: Last night I
watched a portion of the 2013 Motion Picture Academy Awards, aka “the Oscars”. The total television audience was estimated
at one billion viewers worldwide. For a
relatively small industry, the motion picture business (mostly centered in Los
Angeles) has a huge cultural influence on the human race, way out of proportion
to its size. The people who make movies
are acutely aware of that.
