INTRODUCTION OF MEDIA

We often hear the term fourth estate being applied to the media. The
term refers to the four pillars of democracy and the media is the fourth pillar and an
important one at that. Ever since many countries adopted democratic norms of
governance, a vibrant and a free media were thought to be the necessary conditions for
a healthy democracy. This is because in any democracy, there needs to be a medium
wherein the authorities and their actions are commented upon and analyzed critically.

Without self-reflection and self-debate, no democracy can hope to actualize the noble
principles behind the conception of freedom and equality. Further, the media is vital to
the countries because of its inherent nature of questioning and criticism that is directed
at the ruling dispensations. This means that without a free and fair press, no country in
the world can hope to aspire to democratic norms of governance.

In conclusion, we are living in extraordinary times and the challenges of the future call
for extensive changes to be made in all aspects of our lives. The media has a
preeminent role to play in this future and hence, there is a need more than ever for the
media to perform their assigned roles professionally.

Short Story of Media

Forty thousand years ago, some human ancestors painted on the walls of a cave on
the Indonesian island of Sulawesi (below). They left stencils of their hands and other
markings.

Cave paintings in France and Spain have been dated to a couple of thousand years
later. Experts don’t know exactly what purpose the artwork had, but some suggest they
might be the first examples of communicating through a medium. The “audience” for
such paintings was very small.

Wider Audience
the so-called “mass media” had to wait for the creation of new technologies before
coming to life. The first of these was paper, invented in China in about 100 BCE.
However, another 1,500 years had to pass before Johannes Gutenberg built the first
printing press. This meant that books could be mass produced whereas before each
one had to be handwritten.
By early in the 17th century, the first newspapers appeared but, because few people were
literate, readership was limited. As more people learned to read and write the reach of mass
media grew. By the early 1800s, high circulation newspapers such as The Times of
London were developing huge readerships. High-speed rotary printing presses churned out
large volumes and the development of railways made for wide distribution.

The arrival of photography changed the media scene. In 1862, Matthew Brady held an
exhibition of photographs he had taken of the U.S. Civil War. Shocked Americans stood and
stared at Brady’s images of the dead at the Battle of Antietam. The New York Times noted that
Brady brought “home to us the terrible reality of war.”

By late in the 19th century, new technology allowed newspapers to print photographs.

In 1895, the Lumière brothers gave the first public demonstration of moving pictures in Paris.
Some members of the audience were frightened.

Instant Contact
Samuel Morse invented his code in 1835. A series of dots and dashes could be sent
down a telegraph wire and received at the other end. Messages could be sent over long
distances at almost instantaneous speed. Until then, the fastest speed at which
information could travel was about 55 km/h via railways.

(Telegraph messages were still in use in the 21st century; the last one being sent in
India in July 2013.)

In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Now, instant two-way voice
communication was possible.

In December 1901, the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi raised a radio antenna
attached to a kite on Signal Hill, St. John’s, Newfoundland. He received a radio signal
from Cornwall, England, 3,400 km away. Instant communication without wires or cables
was now possible.

Five years later, the Canadian inventor Reginald Fessenden transmitted speech across
the Atlantic.

Over the Airwaves

On November 2, 1920, radio station KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania went on the air
to report the results of that year’s presidential election. Eight years later, pictures were
added to sound. W3XK was located in a Washington suburb and it broadcast television,
mostly to hobbyists, for four years.

However, the widespread installation of television sets in people’s homes did not
happen until the late 1940s. The technology of television kept improving over the years.
There was:

 First cable delivery system – 1948

  Canada got its first TV service - 1952
 First colour broadcast but nobody had a colour receiver – 1953
 First satellite broadcast – 1962
 Colour technology improvements encourage widespread use - 1965
 Beta home video recorders introduced - 1976
 High-definition television demonstrated - 1983
 First digital broadcasts - 1998
 Flat screens – 2005, and
 Three-dimensional television – 2010.

The Internet
The most recent media jolt came in 1965, but hardly anybody knew about it. Two
computers communicated with each other in a lab at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. The technology broke a message down into individual packages which
were then reassembled at the receiving computer.

With many refinements, this became The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network
(ARPANET). This was adopted as a communication system by the U.S. military in 1969.
It allowed packages of information to be routed across networks using different paths.
The idea was, and still is, that if one line of communication is knocked out by hostile
action the system will switch to an undamaged route.

In 1974, ARPANET was adapted for use commercially. LiveScience reports that in 1976
Queen Elizabeth II hit the “send button” on her first e-mail. Then, in 1990, along came
Tim Berners-Lee and his development of HyperText Markup Language (HTML), a
technology that allows people to navigate the Internet. The following year, the World
Wide Web went into action and, by 1993, there were 600 websites and two million
computers connected to the Internet.

In 1998, the Google search engine was born and the way people use the Internet was
changed forever. In 2004, Facebook went online and the whole social networking
phenomenon began.

There are now more than one billion websites with about 140,000 new ones created
daily. SmartInsights gives us a glimpse of what happens every 60 seconds on the
Internet:

 500 hours of YouTube videos are uploaded;

 149,513 emails are sent;
  3.3 million Facebook posts are made;
 3.8 million Google searches are started; and
 448,800 Tweets are sent on Twitter.
The Internet has become a mammoth information delivery system. It seems inevitable
that sometime in the future a different technology will come along and make the Internet
obsolete.

Advantages of Media

Media or mass media encompasses a wide range of media

technologies such as television, radio, film, newspapers, magazines and
the internet to name a few. These media are a means of reaching a large
audience in order to relay information, news or entertainment. We live in
the information age where every individual has easy and quick access to a
variety of information sources. The touch of a button, click of a mouse or
simply a glimpse at the morning daily is enough to make available a host of
opportunities to educate ourselves about some new aspect of the world.
The advantages of media are omnipresent and cannot be overlooked.

Every metropolis, city, town and village on the world is exposed to some
form of mass media or the other – from widescreen televisions to high
speed computers to the lone photographer in the middle of a tribal village.
Our lives are influenced by the things we experience, brought to us by the
various media channels present in the world today. Here we examine a few
of the numerous advantages of media that have changed life as we know it.
We focus mainly on the economic advantages of media.

Disadvantages of Media

Media is a powerful tool that can be used to transmit information,

news and render influence over large sections of society. If used to
broadcast inflammatory or negative sentiments, it could act as a medium to
instigate violence or worse. Some scholars have gone ahead and
described it as one of the four pillars of a democracy after the Executive,
Legislature and Judiciary. These features of the media can be looked at as
advantages or disadvantages of media depending on the perspective
taken. Since we have already covered the advantages of media, here we
explore some of the disadvantages of media, be it broadcast media, print
media or social media.

The importance of knowing the media and its influence is gathering

momentum as displayed by the large number of people going into the field
of mass media. Today, the media is omnipresent. Be it routine happenings
in the neighbourhood, global news, once in a lifetime events, or leisurely
paced travelogues, its all either on tape, print or an internet website. The
most recent development in this field has undoubtedly been the rabid
spread of the social networking culture. This has brought the lifestyle and
media culture into our homes and created a number of media evangelists
through other trends such as blogging.

Point of media
Media is a tool to communicate,inform,entertain, and make life
easily and more enjoyable to live. In such time media is evolving as the
lifestyle of peoples too. As the result media has a big impact to peoples life
as its changes peoples everyday life changes too.

Feedback Loop
Medias has positive and negative feedbacks in different ways
such as media are using to inform people in a fake information. It is used to
bully someones through media like cyberbullying, it cause the people to be
addicted in technologies like phones,computers,laptops, and etc. but it has
a positive feedback too to people like making life easier to communicate,
having a time to relax themselves with the use of media, and etc. Media is
getting massive through time such as peoples using it but the trusted
information still have a trust issues on gathering information through media.

Possible function of media to incoming 22nd century

In my perspective it changes a lot of peoples living. It may have a
more trusted information then before but still have a fake information that
allow in media. Still it depends on how people be more responsible to what
they’re gathering information and people will be more literate and
informative on what media is as the time passes by. It may have new
media come or build maybe new lifestyle as the people now depends on
the media.

Conceptual model

IN Communication
INFORMATION

MEDIA

Users Lifestyle

Entertaiment