Communication Media

G-FMBF5NWNX5 Understanding the most widely used communication media, and their respective effects on human culture, is an important part of understanding why we behave the way we do.  By communication, I mean transmission of information, not physical transport.  In my earlier posts, I described how all higher order animals, including our ancestors, use vocalization and body English to convey information between individuals and with other species.  Canines and a few others can even smile to convey their feelings.

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 20^th 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 19^th 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 20^th 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 21^st 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 22^nd 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 21^st 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.