History of the Media

History of the Media

Society is based on the sharing of information. Many people wake up everyday and the first thing they do is read the newspaper or watch the television. Although a good portion of the American society cares little about what is happening outside of their own boarders, the few that do, vigorously search through articles and opinions to understand a wide variety of topics. With modern technology as it is now access to information, specifically the news is easy. Our culture has evolved around instant databases (i.e. the Internet) and demands to know what is happening the moment an event occurs. Unfortunately, we didn't wake up one morning with the ability to access all the raw data we want to suddenly appeared. It started several hundred years ago, in 1455, with a man named Johannes Gutenberg. Gutenberg was the first man to introduce the idea of mass media by printing copies of the most popular book of the time; The Bible. Obviously a brilliant business man, printing something everyone would want, he was able to sell copies at exorbitant prices and make as many copies as he saw fit. Gutenberg's work has been acknowledge as the start of rapid reproduction of documents by most intellectuals and has even started an online p 434q1619e roject entitled the Project Gutenberg where most old texts and famous volumes have been reproduced in eBook form to be quickly and freely shared throughout the world. Getting from a simple printing press to sophisticated scanning equipment didn't happen over night. The growth of information sharing as it exists today took nearly 500 years.

Not much happened between Gutenberg's creation and late 1800s in the way of inventions. The renaissance came and went but enforced the idea of sharing art, culture, and most importantly; information. By the early 1890s telegraph wires crossed the Atlantic and touched every continent on the map with the acceptation of the Antarctic. Within hours people in the New York were capable of sending a message to Sydney and getting a response before the day was out. A job which used to take a courier weeks now took an operator, knowledgeable in Morse code, a few hours and telegraph. By 1892, Thomas Edison patented the two-way telegraph and business began to boom. Family members anywhere in the world could, at a price, contact other family members nearly instantly. More important then families, however, were the news agencies. Suddenly they were able to write about events virtually as the happened, relative to their time capabilities before. Although Alexander Graham Bell made the "first" telephone call nearly 20 nears prior, telephone lines didn't extend as the telegraph lines did until the mid to late 1920s. In fact the first trans-Atlantic telephone call wasn't made until 1915. Imagine the news agency capable of telling a story across the global in words instead of Morse code. Suddenly direct quotes and live interviews began to take over.

The information flow began to open up and people were able to make split second decisions and contact someone else, live, and find out what was going on. Reports could call in to their editors and give them entire story in a matter of minutes even if they were a thousand miles apart. Of course the primary median of news at the time was still newspapers, though that changed by 1934 when it was estimated half of all homes in the United States acquired radios. This was due primarily to the invention of the FM radio by Edwin Armstrong a year prior. People began to get used to listening to the radio both the news and music. Ironically its creation led to mass hysteria in 1938.

On Halloween day, October 30^th, 1938 the Mercury Theater on the Air musical group decided to perform H. G. Well's novel The War of the Worlds. It's a story about aliens from Mars landing in New Jersey and killing bystanders with heat rays. Soon aliens are landing all over the United States and destroying its infrastructure; bridges, railroads, buildings, and the suburbia. Within minutes they are releasing toxic gases into the air killing anyone who breathes it in. For those people who heard the introduction at the start of the program they knew it was an adaptation of the novel, but for those who didn't they quickly began to panic. It's well known in history that fear spreads rapidly and soon large groups of people began to run for safety. New agency began to report that people were actually feeling the effects of the poisonous gases and some had even sited the Martians. With the report that people began to blow the situation out of proportion CBS was forced to release a statement saying that it was fictional.

The radio companies learned from the mistakes of CBS and planned to never make them again. However, someone else learned a great deal about the American people due to these events; the US government. Since radio had become the staple way the American family got its news the US government quickly realized they could use it to their advantage. About 10 years later, in 1942 World War II started, and like every war, the US government needed to build wartime support. This was not the first time the US government turned to spreading propaganda, but not they could do it on a mass scale. And thus mass media became mass propaganda. They began to build up hype about how great our soldiers were doing and how weak Hitler's regime actually was. The news agencies played along because they were given total control over the airwaves. Their profits were soaring and thus they had everything to gain by gluing the average American family to their radio sets every night after work, school, or a long day of chores.

Over the next twenty years the United States and the Soviet Union began to make huge strides in space-based telecommunications. In 1957 the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first orbiting satellite capable of beaming signals back down to earth. Within three years the US followed suit by releasing Echo I, an orbiting balloon which could reflect not only signals, but viable radio signals. This made both radio quality and accessibility increase tremendously. By this time Zenith had produced the first practical television and TV news began to grow. AT&T realized its capabilities and in 1962 launched Telstar and beamed images across the Atlantic. A year later, TV news suddenly took off with the dramatic reporting of the Kennedy Assassination. This was the first time a crime of such magnitude was recorded and broadcast on nearly-live television. It revolutionized the mass media. Suddenly the sales and use of television sky rocketed. Instead of listening to the radio more and more people began to turn on the television for their daily news. Soon everyone from major magazines to newspapers began to turn to the digital age. By 1971 Intel had produced the first realistic microprocessor and the theory of the Internet had already been put to the military and scientific organizations. The flow of information had never been so accessible. The idea of sharing scientific data with people in the neighboring building let alone across the world was outstanding. In a timely fashion two people could work together on the same project with little to no delays. 9 years later, in 1980 CNN was born.

CNN is the largest international news agency in the world today, but that wasn't always so. For the first ten years of its birth CNN wasn't really popular at all. In fact it was struggling. Like everything else, war helps. In 1991 the United States Government, and specifically George Bush senior, decided to remove Iraq from the sovereign state of Kuwait. Like every other war, the US government had to build support for their actions. They turned to the needy CNN and offered them a deal. CNN was given nearly exclusive coverage of the war, the soldiers, and its affect on the American people. They were given the power to manipulate and write history as it happened.

Modern technology has shrunk the world, making information sharing easy. Today, in minutes, we can get up to date information any event happening anywhere on the globe by a touch of a button. A century ago people we using the telegraph as their main form of international communication, today a simple cell phone call can connect you with a cousin, brother, aunt, or mother on the other side of the world. The media has taken over our lives by controlling the flow of information and choosing which stories are worthwhile and which ones are not. Mass media is currently a profitable business and allows governments, such as our own, to control their people through propaganda.

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