Technology and the Media Essay -- social issues

Technology and the MediaIn this essay, British historian and broadcaster Asa Briggs looks at how techno uniform advances made in recent decades have caused a whirling in the media, allowing people to communicate in ways they had never conceive of of. Briggs notes that although these new modes of communicationincluding the television, the personal computer, the Internet, and other digital technologiesare procurable throughout many parts of the being, these media may be used in different ways depending upon the prevailing political and social circumstances. Briggs also raises questions active the future of the media and how the unfolding media revolution will affect peoples lives.Technology and the MediaThe sense that the world is in the middle of a continue communications revolution has been strong since the 1960s when television made its grand breakthrough. It was thence that the Canadian writer on communications, Marshall McLuhan, made his unforgettable statements that the medium is the message and that the world was becoming a global village. It was then too that the word media became part of daily speech, covering not all electronic media, live television, but older print media, particularly the press.Comparisons were pull between the progress and the development of television in the 20th hundred and the advent and diffusion of printing in the 15th and 16th centuries. notwithstanding much had happened between. It was not until the nineteenth century that the newspaper became the dominant pre-electronic medium, pursual in the wake of the pamphlet and the book and in the company of the periodical. It was during the 19th century also that the communications revolution speeded up, beginning with transport, the railway, and leading on through the telegraph, the telephone, radio, and campaign pictures into the 20th-century world of the motor car and the airplane. Not everyone sees that wreak in perspective. It is important to do so.It is generally r ecognized, however, that the introduction of the computer in the 20th century, followed by the invention of the integrated circuit during the 1960s, radically changed the process, although its move on the media was not immediately apparent. It now became possible to combine thousands, ulterior millions, of individual transistors on a single chip. Computers became smaller and more powerful. They became personal... ...iafrom books to motion pictures and from cable to satelliteendanger individual freedom? Will the probability of choice, declare oneselfed to individuals, mean that the field of choice will be genuinely widened? may we not have more and more of the same thing?It is logical to separate out questions relating to technological developments from questions relating to ownership and control, but, in practice, visions of the future world involve bringing them together. It is difficult in turn in circumstances to deflect the blurring of image (seeing the world as it is pre sented to us or as we present it to ourselves) and reality. Can truth survive? The media in their mediation can create what has come to be called virtual reality and Internet can offer fantasy ways of escaping from the restraints of life as it is lived to a world of cyberspace. Cyber haggle have multiplied during the 1980s and 1990sfrom cybernaut to cyborg through a whole new vocabulary.It may well be that through an movement to chart the words that we use, and the dates when they were first used, we can achieve a greater understanding of a continuing historical process that encompasses the future as well as the past.