Broadcast Media

       Broadcast Media technology is relatively new compared to print media. Initially, radio was invented as a means of military and marine communication, especially over the Atlantic Ocean. Its commercial use began through the efforts of Harold Power, who set up the American Radio and Research Company. From the Tufts University campus in Massachusetts, USA, Power initiated the first commercial broadcast on March 8, 1916. The broadcast lasted three (3) hours and consisted of dance music, a professor’s lecture, a weather report, and bedtime stories.

          1922 – Philippine radio began

 -         Herman set up 3 experimental 50- watt AM stations in Manila and Pasay

1926 – Herman consolidates this into 100 -  watt AM stations

1946 – James L. build BEC, aim to set  the first television station in the country.

1950-1970 – Radio was promoting long-distance education

1952 – Bolinao Electronics Corporation (BEC) change its name to ABS

1957 – ABS merged it with radio network, CBN. ABS-CBN became the first radio-network

1960 – Bob Stewart started DZBB- TV Channel 7

1986 – Maharlika Broadcasting Network change its name to PTV 4

2010 – TV 5 was established

History of Print Media

The History of Printing starts as early as 3500 BCE, when the Persian and Mesopotamian civilizations used cylinder seals to certify documents written in clay. Other early forms include block seals, pottery imprints and cloth printing. Woodblock printing on paper originated in China around 200 CE. It led to the development of movable type in the eleventh century and the spread of book production in East Asia. Woodblock printing was also used in Europe, but it was in the fifteenth century that European printers combined movable type and alphabetic scripts to create an economical book publishing industry.

 This industry enabled the communication of ideas and sharing of knowledge on an unprecedented scale. Alongside the development of text printing, new and lower-cost methods of image reproduction were developed, including lithography, screen printing and photocopying.

The large-scale production of books did not begin in the Orient until the Ming Dynasty in the 13th century (Tsien, 1985). However, western historians give the credit to German Johannes Gutenburg, who built a metal movable type printing press in 1439, which had a more efficient method of printing books and pamphlets.

1439 – German Johannes Gutenberg build a metal movable type printing press

1605 – The first newspaper in the modern sense was published by German Johann Carlous

        1609 – Another newspaper was started in Germany called “File”

-         Print Media began in Philippines

1811 – First locally produced newspaper was published “ Del Superior Governor”

1846 – “La Esperanza” was released, a paper written for the local Spanish community

1848 – To rival the “La Esperanza” they released “Diario de Manila”

1865 – First article written about the disaster in the Philippines on the typhoon in September 1865

1889 - “La Solidaridad” was released. It is the nationalistic newspaper that served as the mouthpiece of the revolutionary movement.

1900 – The Manila Daily Bulletin was founded by an American for shipping journal

1908 – The first newspaper magazine was founded, “The Philippine Free Press”

1945-1972 – This era was called “The Golden Age of Philippines Journalism” by the scholars.

1972 – Former President Marcos ordered to take over and control all private owned newspaper

1990 – The Manila Bulletin was set up by the foreigners.

Ethical Reflection: Postman’s Faustian Bargain

New technology is a kind of Faustian bargain. It always gives us something, but it always takes away something important. That’s true of the alphabet, and the printing press, and telegraph, right up through the computer. – Neil Postman

A Faustian bargain is deal with the devil, a pact with Satan, an agreement that allows you to have anything you've ever wanted. And in exchange for extreme wealth or power, all you have to do is hand your soul over to the devil for eternity. The popular theme of the Faustian bargain started in folktales, but its stories are still told in popular films, music, comic strips, books, and television programs today.

          McLuhan’s probes stimulated others to ponder whether specific media environments were beneficial or destructive for those immersed in them. Neil Postman founded the media ecology program at New York University and was regarded by many as McLuhan’s heir apparent. Like McLuhan, Postman believed that the forms of media regulate and even dictate what kind of content the form of a given medium can carry. For example, smoke signals implicitly discourage philosophical argument.

New technology always presents us with a Faustian bargain – a potential deal with the devil. Postman’s believed that the primary  task of media ecology is to make moral judgments.

A new technology always presents us with a Faustian bargain – a potential deal with the devil. As Postman was fond of saying, “Technology giveth and technology taketh away… A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided”.

The environment of television turns everything into entertainment and everyone into juvenile adults. Triviality trumps seriousness.

A video clip inserted above  is about Neil Postman on Cyberspace, 1995

The Digital Age: Rewiring the global village

 

The mass age of electronic media is becoming increasingly personalized. It is a period in human history characterized by the shift from traditional industry that the Industrial Revolution brought through industrialization, to an economy based on information computerization.

When wired, magazine on digital culture was launched in 1992, the editors declared Marshall McLuhan the magazine’s “patron saint.” There was a sense that another revolution was looming, as many returned to the words of McLuhan for guidance. However, digital technology doesn’t pull the plug on the electronic age, because, quite frankly, it still needs its power source. The digital age is wholly electronic.

With that said, there’s no doubt that the introduction of digital technology is altering the electronic environment. The message of electronic media is becoming increasingly personalized. Instead of one (1) unified electronic tribe, we have a growing number of digital tribes forming around the most specialized ideas, beliefs, values, interests, and fetishes. Instead of mass consciousness, which McLuhan viewed rather favorably, we have the emergence of tribal warfare mentality. Despite the contentious nature of this tribalization of differences, many see the benefit in the resulting decentralization of power and control.

We are living in Digital Age as we are all using internet, social media, digital clock, computer and etc. We are all using the gadgets that are invented in digital age.

The Electronic Age: The Rise of Global Age

Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.

- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964.

It started with a device created by Samuel Morse's invention of the telegraph and led to the telephone, the cell phone, television, internet, DVD, video games, etc. This ability to communicate instantly returned us to the tradition of sound and touch rather than sight. Being able to be in constant contact with the world becomes a nosy generation where everyone knows everyone's business and everyone's business is everyone else's.

McLuhan insisted that the electronic media retribalizing the human race. Electronic Media bring us in touch with everyone, everywhere, instantaneously. This age shows that feelings is more important than thinking.

What is the Global Village?

According to Wikipedia, the term global village represents the simplifying of the whole world into one village through the use of electronic media. Global village is also a term to express the constituting relationship between economics and other social sciences throughout the world. The term was coined by Canadian media theorist, Marshall McLuhan,^[1]and popularized in his books The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) and Understanding Media (1964) McLuhan changed the way the world thought about media and technology ever since his use of the word in his book ^[2]. McLuhan described how electric technology has contracted the globe into a village^[3]because of the instantaneous movement of information from every quarter to every point at the same time.^[4]

Because electrons are mostly invisible, our visualizations of them tell us more about our dreams than about electrons. This cool and unusual book gathers our earliest collective dreams about circuits and electronics, and makes them visible. It got me thinking about our assumptions for tomorrow. I love it when a book like this makes me see the world differently.
— Kevin Kelly, senior maverick for Wired magazine and author of What Technology Wants

People use technology to fit into a digital community to which they aren't physically connected, but mentally connected. Each social media platform acts as a digital home for individuals, allowing people to express themselves through the global village.

I encourage you to watch the clip below. It was from McLuhan as he talked about the Future of Health Technology.

The Print Age: Prototype of Industrial Evolution

If the phonetic alphabet made visual independence possible, the printing press made it widespread. In The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan argued that the most important aspect of movable type was its ability to reproduce the same text over and over again, and a press run of 100,000 copies of Understanding Media suggest that he was right. Because the print revolution demonstrated mass production of identical products, McLuhan called it the forerunner of the industrial revolution. He saw other unintended side effects of Guttenberg.

This is the Era where printed books finally introduced. Same text, content or information can be read by different people in the whole world.

With printing came a new visual stress: the portable book. It allowed people to carry books, so they could read in privacy isolated from others. Libraries were created to hold these books and also gave freedom to be alienated from others and from immediacy of their surroundings.

A clip below will give us more idea about the Print Age

The Age of Literacy: A Visual Point of View

Turning sounds into visible objects radically altered the symbolic environment. Suddenly, the eye became the heir apparent. Hearing diminished in value and quality. To disagree with this assessment merely illustrates McLuhan’s belief that a private, left-brain “point of view” becomes possible in a world that encourages the visual practice of reading texts.

In this era, people will use their eyes than hearing. People will now practice to read books. Words are no longer alive and immediate. They can be read and reread.

The picture below is the Phonetic Alphabet that was used to make it possible.

 By at least the 8th century BCE the Greeks borrowed the Phoenician alphabet and adapted it to their own language, According to Greek legends transmitted by Herodotus, the alphabet was brought from Phoenicia to Greece by Cadmos.

People on this era had more privacy than tribal era. You can get information alone just by reading and reading than in tribal era when you are not in the group you can’t get the information. When people learned to read, they become independent thinkers.  People had the freedom to be alienated from others and from the immediacy of their surroundings.

People used text and alphabets to pass the information from the author and the reader. Proximity became less important no matter how many kilometers. People can still receive the information. Words were no longer immediate and alive. 

To know more about the Age of Literacy, click the clip below made by Mary Hermosa (June 25,2017)

The Tribal Age: An Acoustic Place in History

The Tribal Age: An Acoustic Place in History

 

In this age, the senses of hearing, touch, taste and smell were far more strongly developed than the ability to visualize. It encourages high involvement, passion, and spontaneity in interactions.

According to McLuhan, the tribal village was an acoustic place where the senses of hearing, touch, and smell were developed far beyond the ability to visualize. In untamed settings, hearing is more valuable than seeing because it allows you to be more immediately aware of your surroundings. With sight, we are limited to direction and distance. We can only sense what is clearly in front of us.

Communication is most likely to be difficult because this is nothing but mouth and gestures. Somehow, communication in Tribal Era was more meaningful just like when our ancestors tell stories and pass it to the different generation of the family.  Listening to someone speak in the group is a unifying act. Everyone hears at the same time and everyone can enjoy it at the same time.

Spoken words or ideas are only alive when uttered and we can deeply feel the thoughts when we hear it. We can understand things when we hear it. Hearing gives us freedom of interpretation and perception.

McLuhan claimed that “primitive” people led richer and more complex lives than their literate descendants because the ear, unlike the eye, encourages a more holistic sense of the world. There is a deeper feeling of community and greater awareness of the surrounding existence. The acoustic environment also fosters more passion and spontaneity. In that world of surround sound, everything is more immediate, more present, and more actual.

To know more about Tribal Age here's the clip made by Chard Ampo (Jan 8,2017)

Introduction to the Evolution of Media

The Evolution of Media is unique in that it treats both mass media and interpersonal media. The evolution of media, from old media to new media, has transformed the way we understand the world around us. New media is interactive and is user-generated while old media is a more traditional way of communicating through television, radio, newspapers, magazines, books, etc. (Lecture Notes. January 12, 2011).

The evolution of media is continuing to develop with much new and efficient way of entertaining. The rise and fall of each evolution is always in motion.

According to McLuhan, it’s not technological abnormality that demands our attention, since it’s hard not to notice the new and different. Instead, we need to focus on our everyday experience of technology. A medium shapes us because we partake of it over and over until it becomes an extension of ourselves. Because every medium emphasizes different senses and encourages different habits, the engaging medium day after day conditions the senses to take in some stimuli and not register others.

The evolution of the media has been fraught with concerns and problems. Accusations of mind control, bias, and poor quality have been thrown at the media on a regular basis. Yet the growth of communications technology allows people today to find more information more easily than any previous generation. Mass media can be print, radio, television, or Internet news. They can be local, national, or international. They can be broad or limited in their focus. The choices are tremendous. (LumenLearning)

Complexity of Environments

In the “An Inconvenient Truth”, Gore offers scientific evidence that the planet is experiencing a critical change in climate. Even when global warming skeptics grudgingly admit a rise in average temperature, they suggest that there is no direct relationship between this change in climate change and the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses from human activities.

A MEDIA ANALYSIS OF HUMAN HISTORY

McLuhan was critical of social observers who analyzed the Western world but bypassed the effects of symbolic environments – be they oral, print, or electronic. He specifically accused modern scholars of being “ostrich-like” in refusing to acknowledge the revolutionary impact of electronic media on the sensory experience of contemporary society.

In the figure above, McLuhan divided all human history into four (4) periods, or epochs – a tribal age, literate age, print age, and an electronic age.

The Different Kinds of Ages in Media Evolution

1.    The Tribal Age: An Acoustic Place in History

2.    The Age of Literacy: A Visual Point of View

3.    The Print Age: Prototype of Industrial Evolution

4.    The Electronic Age: The Rise of Global Village

5.    The Digital Age: Rewiring the Global Village

6.    Ethical Reflection: Postman’s Faustian Bargain