The Media: Its Beginnings, Purposes and Evolution

In this weeks' reading from The Information Revolution and World Politics, I learned how the different means of communication began and evolved through time. The evolution of media types, such as: the telegraph, the printing press, the radio, the telephone, and the television were impulsed by the necessity of providing a larger number of people with information and the popularity each of these mediums achieved.

Some types of media communication evolved faster than others and had a larger audience than others. For example, the telegraph and radio were immediate hits, compared to the rest and how long it took people to support the new media types. Furthermore, these two medias reached a greater number of people than inventions before them. The telegraph’s reach progressed to over international waters, making the flow of information between countries very quick. On the other hand the radio managed to enter most peoples’ homes, even into the poorest communities. As we can see from the above examples, the audience of each type of mass communication focused on a different kind of person, but still reached a lot.

The recount of events that most impacted me was the history that led to the evolution of the radio and how its use had many distinct objectives. Objectives like, its use for national security, intercepting enemy broadcasts during the war, commercial, educational, and informative broadcasting. With this last one, countries began to use it in their favor and influence how other nations and their own people perceived the country. Examples of this are: Radio Ghana, which impulsed “nationalism and anticolonialism, and religious stations sponsored by Protestant groups who had the objective of spreading their beliefs to others."

The influencing of peoples’ opinions by the different broadcasting at radio stations could work positively or negatively. In my opinion this can largely relate to the topic we spoke of in the last class of framing. Other than just informing the news, it is possible to give a country a negative spin because of an action or offense committed by a person from that country. Important examples of this were the attacks committed on 9/11, as all Arabs in the United States suffered through discrimination and hate crimes because one person from the same race performed a horrible violent act. As we have seen, the types of mass communication have evolved uniquely and their purposes evolve with them.