We explain the origin of the media and how inventions affected communication today.
What is the origin of the media?
The mass media occupy an indispensable role in industrialized society, as forms of information circulation, opinion makers and platforms for debate and the 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 since the dawn of civilization, in fact therein lies the invention of the verbal language and, later, of the paintings and other means of primitive representation of the thought.
But it would not be until the time of the great empires when, already invented writing, that communication it could become massive and constant. The hieroglyphs on the pharaonic tombs, the reflections of the Hellenic Greek philosophers and especially the imperial edicts published in the streets of ancient Rome are good examples of this. Of course, there were still no independent media outlets, but generally advertisements from the ruling political class.
The invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440 revolutionized the field of the book 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 allowed to print in a short time many times the same text, to distribute it to the public.
In June 1605 this led to the printing of the first newspaper, by the young John Carolus, and it was called the "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.
To this first Newspaper It was succeeded by the "WeekleyNews of London" in 1622 and in 1704 by the "Boston News-Letter", the first newspaper of continuous circulation. Since then the proliferation of printed newspapers has been worldwide.
Other inventions would provide key technologies for the evolution of media massive. Cinema, for example, would emerge at the end of the 19th century in France, with the experiments to capture the image derived from the Photography, another technology in the making.
The invention of electricity, some years later, it would allow the mass movie theater and at the same time it would give rise to the invention of the radio in 1896, being in 1901 the first transmission of the human voice. Both inventions would revolutionize the idea of communication, since man could transmit visual or sound messages throughout the weather and the space, without being obliged to write.
From there to the invention of the TV less than half a century would pass. The first television broadcasts would be from the BBC in London and in 1936 the first with programming would be launched.
The massification of this device was another great 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 previously recorded or information occurring live elsewhere on the planet.
Finally, the appearance of Internet in the 80s and technologies computerized digital devices in the 90's potentiated to infinity the communicative capacity of the human being. The ability to share information through social networks, shipments of email and other cyber community formats are great contributions from the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
With the Internet, mass communications also became interactive, customizable and viral, given that information consumption has become increasingly frantic. That is why more and more attention and care is given to the Business and information and telecommunications technologies, as well as the mass media; They are often seen as a major political power competing with the state and perhaps it has fewer regulations than it should.