New forms of communication or back to the future?

Friday, 11 June 2010 15:52

Since the beginning of time, mankind has communicated. In Stone Age times it was by hand gestures, primitive speech and drawings on cave walls. For hundreds of years, the only real progress was the invention of paper and writing instruments to go with it.

The invention of the printing press by Caxton in the 15th Century helped us take a quantum leap forward by making the written word accessible to more than just a few privileged monks. Then once newspapers appeared on the scene in the early 17th Century, even more people had access to news and information.

Of course, things really hot up by the 1800s with the invention in fairly quick succession of the telegraph, telephone, gramophone and wireless – the age of media ‘for the masses’ was slowly dawning.

However, the late 20th Century will be seen as the great era of mass media with magazines, movies, television, VHS, cassettes, cable and satellite TV, CDs and DVDs all vying for our attention. It is the period from 1945 until the mid 1990s though which can now be seen as the Golden Age, when large swathes of the population read the same papers, watched the same films, listened to the same music and enjoyed the same hit shows on television.

Anyone over the age of 35 can still remember a time when top rated TV shows would command audiences in excess of 20 million or when Number One records would have to sell several hundred thousand copies. Newspapers too would routinely be read by a majority of the population at local, regional and national level.

Even now, we still have the mass media – shows like the X-Factor, Britain’s Got Talent and soap operas still pull in the TV viewers while blockbuster films still command enormous audiences.

However, every major form of communication in the Western World has experienced a decline in the past 15 or so years – book and record sales, newspaper readership, TV and film audiences have all seen a slump. All because of something invented by the British scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. That something is the internet.

With the advent of broadband technology and the production of superfast microprocessors over the second decade of its short life, the internet has come into its own and is providing the backdrop to a revolution which surpasses even that created by the invention of the printing press or the television.

The recent development of interactive websites (wikis) which in turn gave rise to web logs, or as we now commonly refer to them ‘blogs’, presaged a further technological development – so-called social networking sites which we now refer to as social media.

Now, for the first time in our history, ordinary people like you or I have the power to broadcast our thoughts, images and films to the rest of the world. And it is this democratisation of the means of media production which has truly revolutionised how mankind accesses information.