Five Eras Of Mass Communication Essay
Svitlana Tyminska
HUM 105
Professor: Alex Bean
6/8/2015
Five Eras of Mass Communication Mass communication plays an essential role in our lives. It is a process of distributing information, producing different ideas and values among the people. It helps people to share knowledge and cultural aspects, and can be defined as a base of human civilization. We have passed a long way of evolution as human beings and our communication has improved incredibly. As of today, we can name five main eras of mass communication: oral, written, printing, electronic, and digital. With fast growing technologies and the importance of mass media today we can say that very soon we can step into another era of communication, even more advanced and modern. The communication between people started from signs and signals more than thousands years ago. They were used with our ancestors to indicate danger, coordinate hunting, to show the presence of food. With a further human development, especially vocal apparatus, starts the oral era or "The age of speech". Language helped humans to cope with social and physical environment and "provided them with a capacity to classify, abstract, analyze, synthesize and speculate". The language was used as a tool of domination and resistance. The writing era emerged five thousand years ago in different regions of the world. It shows a transition from"…pictographic representation to phonetic systems, from representing complex ideas with pictures or stylized drawings to using simple letters to imply specific sounds." A move from writing on stones to more portable and lighter papyrus was one of the first advances in writing media. The third era called printing era had started in the middle of the fourteenth century. It 's associated with Gutenberg 's invention of first printing press machine. He introduced us to a new era of mass media, which changed a structure of society by increasing the literacy rate. With this
HUM 105
Professor: Alex Bean
6/8/2015
Five Eras of Mass Communication Mass communication plays an essential role in our lives. It is a process of distributing information, producing different ideas and values among the people. It helps people to share knowledge and cultural aspects, and can be defined as a base of human civilization. We have passed a long way of evolution as human beings and our communication has improved incredibly. As of today, we can name five main eras of mass communication: oral, written, printing, electronic, and digital. With fast growing technologies and the importance of mass media today we can say that very soon we can step into another era of communication, even more advanced and modern. The communication between people started from signs and signals more than thousands years ago. They were used with our ancestors to indicate danger, coordinate hunting, to show the presence of food. With a further human development, especially vocal apparatus, starts the oral era or "The age of speech". Language helped humans to cope with social and physical environment and "provided them with a capacity to classify, abstract, analyze, synthesize and speculate". The language was used as a tool of domination and resistance. The writing era emerged five thousand years ago in different regions of the world. It shows a transition from"…pictographic representation to phonetic systems, from representing complex ideas with pictures or stylized drawings to using simple letters to imply specific sounds." A move from writing on stones to more portable and lighter papyrus was one of the first advances in writing media. The third era called printing era had started in the middle of the fourteenth century. It 's associated with Gutenberg 's invention of first printing press machine. He introduced us to a new era of mass media, which changed a structure of society by increasing the literacy rate. With this
Cited: Vibert C. Cambridge: “Evolution of mass communication: mass communication and sustainable futures.” Campbell, Richard, Martin, Christopher R., Fabos, Bettina” Media and Culture with 2015 Update: An Introduction to Mass Communication”, 2014, print.