Research: Media Forms

I have used mediaknowall and spark notes to gather information so that I was able to produce this blog on Media Forms.

There are different types of media forms, for example print media, images and sound, the internet and broadcasts. Each of these are different ways of communicating and passing on messages.

 

Print Media

Print media includes books, newspapers and magazines. It originated in the fifteenth century and so is the first media form to come about. Before the fifteenth century books were hand printed, therefore they were a very time consuming and expensive process. This meant they were fairly rare and so not available for lots of people. Also, monks often did the hand copying which meant the books focused on religious subjects a lot of the time. The amount of people who use print media has decreased significantly over the past years.

 





A page from a medieval, hand copied, Book of Hours.


 

Images and Sound


New media forms occurred in the nineteenth century with the improvement of technology. Parisians Joseph Niepce and Louis Daguerre showed the earliest examples of a photograph to the world in 1839. In 1878, Thomas Edison created the phonograph which allowed sound to be recorded and played back later. In 1895 the Lumière Brothers showed the first cinematograph show.


Broadcasts


Broadcasts were first introduced in the twentieth century and they mean that it is possible to communicate a single message to a large audience at the same time. The first radio transmission was sent  in 1895. Early radio transmissions were restricted to Morse Code. The Titanic broadcast its MAYDAY signals as it sank in 1912. The first mass broadcast occurred in Holland after world war 1 in 1919. A lot of inventors had ideas for the broadcast of pictures along with sound, but it's impossible to say exactly who invented television and when.




One of the first TV sets from 1939.
 

Internet


By the 1990's all media forms co-existed side-by-side. Then along came the internet. Universities and major research places started networking their computer systems in the late 1960s but the protocols for a global network weren't put in place until 1982, and it wasn't made useable for everyone until the 1990s. The technology spread quickly, and soon everyone owned a personal computer.


As technology has advanced, different media forms have been introduced. Meaning that the earlier types are no longer as popular and this continues to happen. As it stands today, more people use the internet for news than they do newspapers, this example clearly shows how advancement in technology means that the newer media forms are quickly becoming more dominant.