The evolution of media, from old media to new media, has transformed the way we understand the world around us. New media is interactive and is user-generated while old media is a more traditional way of communicating through television, radio, newspapers, magazines, books, etc. New media gives us a new perspective by allowing us to interact with one another through the Internet. Media has become much more personal and diverse as user-generated content becomes more prominent in our lives. We are exposed to various viewpoints that shape our understanding and knowledge of the social world, but does the form of media actually affect the way we understand the content which is presented to us? For my paper, I will determine whether or not the medium is the message by analyzing two different types of media sources and how they affect our understanding of the content. For my old media source, I have chosen a news clip from the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric that deals with the ongoing Egyptian uprising. For my new media source, I have chosen a video blog, or ‘vlog’, by an Egyptian man named Omar who discusses the crisis in Egypt from a personal point of view. Both media sources deal with the same topic but result in different understandings of the crisis.
Although both mediums focus on the same issue there are a lot of differences between the two.
So I am here to explain the timeline of the EVOLUTION OF MEDIA! Of course we would never have the technology that we have today if it weren’t for these events! Let us go to the very beginning shall we!!
1) PRE-INDUSTRIAL STAGE
So in the beginning of time, or the stone age, the first means of communication was cave paintings which were created by cavemen to show us their inborn talent of art as well as telling us about their ways 30, 000 years ago. How convenient!
The “Code of Hammurabi.” is another proof of communication, this dated back to 1772 BCE, containing the laws and codes of the Babylonian king named Hammurabi!
2) INDUSTRIAL STAGE
We are finally in the Industrial stage, THE BEGINNING OF TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCES!! YAY! As shown in the picture above, that is the start of newspapers, and the very first newspaper EVER was printed in the late 1590s in Western Europe. Feel old yet?! Besides this gigantic machine, there were also other invention created in this stage like;
THE VERY FIRST CAMERA,
THE TELEGRAPH,
AND THE VERY FIRST PHONOGRAPH! So be glad these things were invented, without them the technology we have today may or may not ever exist~
3) ELECTRONIC STAGE
OMG Chris Pratt!! I promise you, this picture is important in knowing the next stage of the evolution of media. Or to be more specific his Sony Walkman. One of the reasons why we could finally listen to music anywhere! This stage is what slowly made us lazy people! With also the use of these different inventions;
TELEVISION!
THE WORLD OF VHS!
AND OF COURSE THE FIRST COMPUTER!
5) DIGITAL AGE
Do I still need to explain? The age of Happiness has finally arrived, THE DIGITAL AGE! THE AGE OF THE MILLENNIALS! The reason why life is now made easier, from communication, and others. These gadgets are;
These are just some of the ages that we have experienced and known about. Though we are still not sure about the future, how their ways of communicating would much different from what we have now.
Well that’s about everything! I do hope that each and every one of you are now well informed with the Evolution of Media! Though please inform me if there is anything I missed or if I made a mistake! Thank You and I hope you enjoyed and became well informed. BYEEEEE!!! (=^~^=)
A lot has changed in my short time on this planet. I grew up to the sound of the ole dial-up and now I can watch someone talk about why the Earth is flat for an hour from anywhere on the disc!
The way we create, consume and criticize media is one of the things whose recent evolution is probably what piques my interest the most. Not necessarily the content of the media, which is always changing, but trends in the structure behind it.
Tech has obviously improved exponentially. Health, science, education - all significantly changed in the past few decades. But same goes for the past few centuries.
Media has, necessarily, been slower to evolve. Can't have TV shows without a TV. It basically went from book to newspaper to radio to TV to Internet. There's at least a few decades between all those things, if not longer. However, from TV to today is what I'm most interested in.
For decades, for generations, TV was channel-surfing via an antenna or a satellite dish served by your cable provider. A lot of those words mean nothing to a teenager now.
I'm 26. I started with cable (10 channels), then we got satellite (500 channels), then by the time I was 16 or 17, Netflix the streaming service came out. So I'm in a very small window of people who were young enough for all of these things to happen in my childhood. 5 years older than me and you didn't get Netflix as a teen. 5 years younger and you didn't have cable as a teen. Maybe 10 years. You see the point.
Then realize that the 16 year-old of today hasn't grown up without Netflix being a household word. If the 16 year-old of today wanted to watch Peter Pan, he would boot up Disney+. I would've gone to Blockbuster and rented it for $3. If he wanted to see a kitten falling down stairs and then doing a backflip, that's probably somewhere on Youtube. If I wanted to see that as a kid, well, I'd better start looking for a very gymnastic cat with all its lives.
So to sum up so far, a lot has changed very quickly - about how we consume media. What about how it's formatted?
And how we consume it always necessarily comes before what it is we're consuming changes. Remember when "Netflix Originals" didn't exist? The platform was built, the people came, and then new media came from it.
We've seen TV shows go from the binary of "22 minutes or 44 minutes" to "however long we fucking want". The disintegration of the binary of "comedy or drama". When I was a kid, sitcoms had seasons of 22 episodes, once a week, in the fall. Drama shows usually had 16 episodes. Now Netflix puts out "Mike Tyson Mysteries", with any number of episodes in a season, with each only 11-13 minutes long, pretty much at random. Letterkenny puts out 6-episode seasons once a year on Christmas. Back in my day, we never knew if this season would be the last. Even if the last episode was a cliffhanger, there was no promise of a resolution. Sitcoms kissed the rings of the networks every year hoping to be renewed. The other day South Park announced it was making 6 more seasons and a bunch of movies.
There are a few TV formats that I consider "evolution proof" - game shows (not reality, game), soap operas, late night and standup. All of these date back to radio times and have rarely if ever changed format. I'm personally hoping that, within my lifetime, I'm able to see a change in the way standup is done. We've seen very few attempts to break the mold, and the only example I can think of right now is Mulaney's Sack Lunch Bunch, and to be honest I think it left a lot to be desired. But that's to be expected if media itself is going to change formats - it'll take a lot of trial-and-error.
Quick tangent: I'm not talking about comedy itself. Comedy is constantly changing formats. Vine made absolute stars out of SIX SECOND-LONG content creators. I mean standup. I'd like to see its definition change from "70 minutes of uncut, unedited, scripted jokes told in story form on a stage in front of an audience with a microphone and maybe a few props done by one person, with pauses for laughter and applause, sometimes with audience interaction" to "long-format comedic content delivered by one person to an audience", taking away the mic, the stage, the very structured format. With the exception of maybe Bo Burnham, even if you've never seen a specific comedian, you know what to expect and when to expect it. You can Just Tell when the last joke is about to begin. You're not going to be surprised when the guy picks someone out of the crowd to make a few jokes with. You probably even know the definition of a call-back by name because they're so common. I don't know how it would necessarily change, but I don't think it's impossible.
Back to the main post for one more point: fandom. We've talked about the evolution of the consumption of media and what format we're watching it in. We know the content has evolved. But I think one of the most interesting changes in this category is the way we interact with shows now.
I'm currently sitting in my Simpsons-character-covered tracksuit I bought for $15 on Wish, next to my closet which contains about 15-20 t-shirts. At least 8 of them are Simpsons-themed. When I started building this collection, it started about 5 years ago when I saw my very first Simpsons shirt in a Bluenotes, and it was the only one I had for a few years. I would buy any Simpsons shirt I saw for a while. Today I went to the mall, and if I still had that policy I'd have blown through my savings in one trip.
I actually consider myself lucky; The Simpsons isn't as popular on merch you'd find at the mall as say Rick and Morty, Adventure Time, or Spongebob. I've seen giant stuffed Pickle Ricks, but never an oversized Homer.
My point being, I'm a superfan, but of a slightly older show that isn't nearly as popular as it used to be. If you walk into a Hot Topic, you can probably find any pop culture property on a t-shirt, mug, keychain and temporary face tattoo. This was not the case 10 years ago.
And that's just fandom with regard to the physical world. Did you know that John Mulaney, who did 3 Netflix specials 4 years ago, has THREE subreddits? Every time I get into something new it used to cross my mind, "Hey, I wonder if there's a subreddit for this yet". Now it's "I wonder which of the several subreddits that surely exist for this show/movie/vague concept is best".
A lot of the time when I see the concept of fandom discussed in mainstream media, it's still a severely outdated depiction. Even documentaries tend to stop at "and then Comic-con was invented. The End". I hate to praise it for anything, but if it did anything good, The Big Bang Theory did properly define "fandom" for the world.
I remember when 99% of people polled would not have heard of "fan fiction". I started writing it at 12 when the category for Harry Potter fan fiction on fanfiction.net had but a few thousand entries. My show of choice, Death Note, had a few hundred. I got in on the ground floor and built my way to the top. I abandoned that account 6 years ago and I still get 10-20 story comments or favorites per week.
Now try finding someone who hasn't heard of fan fiction. Find someone who's too old to have written on AO3.
Finally, and I know it's been a long ramble but bear with me, I want to address the homicidal, drunk-driving, pregnant-wife-killing elephant in the room: stans.
If you don't get the reference I just made, please google "origin of the term stan". Caught up? Good, so now answer me this: how did we take a term that refers so very, very obviously to a very, very negative situation and turn it into something someone says casually or even proudly of themselves?
Obviously when I say I stan Green Day that doesn't mean I'm going to write Billie Joe threatening letters and kill my girlfriend, it means I consider myself one of their biggest fans. I think in all of English vocabulary, there's only one other word that's taken such a 180 in definition and it's one I can't say.
Anyway, that's me done. Now that there's more streaming platforms than people who've fucked your mom, I'm interested to see where we go from here.
Hello! Come and join to the journey of Media through the ages with the list of my favorite movie recommendations!
1) The Croods (2013) - The movie depicted the Pre-industrial Age on a fantastic way! The movie’s plot is simple and predictive yet fun!
Grug and his family embark on a journey to search for a new place to live after their cave is destroyed. A young boy helps them trek through unknown places to find new shelter.
2) The Current War (2017) - The movie depicted the Industrial Age on the most accurate way possible!
The movie shows how information is passed on to one another in times of industrial competition, in this case, the battle of industrial electric companies and the famous Nikola Tesla! Hence figuratively called “The CURRENT War”.
3) Young Sheldon (2017) - Sorry to disappoint but this is a sitcom :( On the contrary, this is a great comedy and family-friendly TV-series! This is a TV-show set on 1980′s, a great timeframe to show how innovative things were in Electronic Age!
The series is a spin-off prequel to The Big Bang Theory and begins with the character Sheldon Cooper at the age of nine, living with his family in East Texas and going to high school. Look at that sexy electronic computer!
4) The Social Network (2010) - This is a great movie! It is a biographical movie of the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. On the image, it shows how technology advanced to cater to the needs of the humanity—through the Internet (Information Age)
Don’t be distracted on the fact that the movie is innovative in a harsh and sinful way! I won’t spoil you anymore, watch it for yourselves!
And that folks, is the evolution of media. Have fun browsing the Internet with those movies! They’re 10/10, personally rating. :P
Compare and contrast the evolution of communication from orality to literacy and the evolution of media from traditional media to convergent media. What could be assumed (or predicted) for the future of media production and consumption and/or mass communication?
McLuhan (1964) categorized human history into three distinct eras pertaining to the means of communication. The first era is the oral tradition (or orality), which extends from the time humankind first acquired speech to the beginnings of literacy. Meanwhile, the second era is the age of literacy which encompasses the period from the invention of writing to the discovery of electricity. Moreover, the third communication era employs the electric flow of information which comprise the period from the first use of the telegraph in 1844 to the present (McLuhan, 1964).
On the other hand, media have four major stages in evolution, specifically: pre-industrial age, industrial age, electronic age, and the new media. The first three mentioned can be classified as new media, whereas media convergence started between electronic age to new media. The evolution was generated because of the yearn for innovation of human beings. Hence, on account of innovation, media has widely evolved as well. From traditional means of sending and mailing handwritten letters to the post office perse, we now have SMS and we can already chat through emails and other platforms with the aid of the internet. Thus, it is now faster, reliable, and efficient.
Nevertheless, the evolution of communication from orality to literacy and the evolution of media from traditional to convergent media are somewhat interconnected with each other. Both communication and media are concurrently innovating. Thus, as the media develops, it is likely possible that media production/consumption and mass communication would be more accessible for everyone. Furthermore, it would be easier for us to convey information across the globe. The world would become more linked with one another through various platforms generated on the internet. Hence, information can be smoothly accessed by anyone, anytime. However, despite its positive impacts, there are at the same time downsides to this. Our culture will primarily be at stake because foreign influences which are very much appealing specifically to the younger generations are circulating online. Also, our everyday lives became very much dependent on technologies and convergent media which in some way teaches us to be lazy because everything is just a click away. More importantly, broadcast industries are slowly being terminated because people rely on getting information primarily on the internet. In the same way, the spread of false information which is very common on the internet nowadays will worsen.
