We explain to you what the origin of the media is and how the inventions affected today’s communication.
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What is the origin of the media?
The media occupy an indispensable role in industrialized society, such as forms of information circulation, opinion makers and platforms for the debate and visibility of public affairs . But they did not always exist as we understand them today.
The human being has felt the need to communicate with others from the dawn of civilization, in fact therein lies the invention of verbal language and, subsequently, of cave paintings and other means of primitive representation of thought .
But it would not be until the time of the great empires when, already invented writing, that communication could be made massive and constant. The hieroglyphs in the pharaonic tombs, the reflections of the Greek Greek philosophers and especially the imperial edicts published in the streets of ancient Rome are good examples of this. Of course, there were no independent media yet, but they were usually ads from the ruling political class.
The invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440 revolutionized the field of books and communication , since his machine made it possible not only to mechanically replace the scribes of the Middle Ages who copied and copied a text by hand, but also allowed to print in a short time many times the same text , to distribute it to the public.
In June 1605 this gave rise to the printing of the first newspaper , by the young John Carolus, and was called “Collection of all distinguished news.” There he summarized the news that his network of informants transmitted to him and that until then he copied manually.
This first newspaper was followed by the “WeekleyNews of London” in 1622 and in 1704 the “Boston News-Letter”, the first newspaper of continuous circulation. Since then the proliferation of printed newspapers was worldwide.
Other inventions would provide key technologies for the evolution of mass media . Cinema, for example, would emerge in the late nineteenth century in France , with experiments to capture the image derived from photography , another budding technology.
The invention of electricity , some years later, would make it possible to massify cinema and at the same time give rise to the invention of radio in 1896 , being in 1901 the first transmission of the human voice. Both inventions would revolutionize the idea of communication, because man could transmit visual or sound messages over time and space, without being forced to write.
From there to the invention of television would spend less than half a century. The first television broadcasts would be from the BBC in London and in 1936 the first ones would be thrown with programming.
The massification of this device was another big step in the history of the media, since having a television in each house, the opportunity was born to constantly inform and entertain people in the comfort of their home, either by transmitting information Pre-recorded or live information happening elsewhere on the planet.
Finally, the emergence of the Internet in the 80s and computerized digital technologies in the 90s enhanced the communicative capacity of the human being to infinity. The possibility of sharing information through social networks , emails and other formats of cyber community are great contributions of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first.
With the Internet, mass communications also became interactive, customizable and viralizable , given that information consumption has become increasingly frantic. That is why more and more attention and care is given to companies and information and telecommunications technologies, as well as to the mass media; they are often considered an important political power that competes with states and perhaps has fewer regulations than they should.
