Means of communication and their evolution

Means of communication

And their evolution over history

1456

~1890

1925

1997

The press

The radio

The television

The first social media

1793

~500 BC

1871

1990s

The telegraph

The letter

The modern internet

The telephone

Sources: wikipedia.org edscuola.it lacomunicazione.it flarescape.com

Created by: Emanuele Orecchio

Means of communication

Their use and consequences in our lives

The ability of communicating had always been determining for man's evolution and cultural progress.Every new device of communication has radically tranformed culture and society, by shortening times and distances of communication. While the first means of communication, like smoke signals, were very difficult to use and were really slow, over time we proceeded in creating new ones that were easier to use and even less expensive, like the letter, so that almost everyone could use them. While nowdays the private communication has almost reached the perfection, mass communication still has some serious problem, like the fast spreading of false infomations.

Distance communication over history

The letter

The letter had been the main mean of communication for centuries until the end of 19th century.It was already used in the Middle Ages to excange news about personal information, like the family, feelings

or topical information like the beginning of a war.At the beginning it was only used by upper middle classes, because the most of the people were illitterate and had not enough money.

Composition and problems of the letters

Once there were not letter envelopes, and that's why the addressee was writtend on the letter's side.Postal commssions were payed by the person who received the letter and people wrote as much as possible, so as not to send numerous sheets, thus

increasing the commission.The main reason because letters are no longer used is the time, in facts even today, they need some days to be received by the addressee and a few more to receive an answer.

The first important step forward mass communication

The press

A big change in the history of communication technologies was the invention of the mobille press, by Johannes Gutenberg in 1456.Printing methods hav existed for centuries and were mainly used to reproduce written texts. However Gutenberg combined the different technologies that had been developed in the first phase of industrial era to create a new printing technique that used chemistry for the production of new types of ink and mechanization to favor the massive production of paper. The most important feature of this new way of printing, was its cheapness, that permitted the replacement of manuscripts with printed books.

The first step forward private communication

The telegraph

which consisted of points and lines only.After it was invented, it spread quikly all around the world, giving governments the possibility of exchanging informations with every region, and even with overseas colonies by using submarine cables, really fast. The traditional electric telegraph stopped being used after the ivention of the telephone.

The telegraph is a remote communication system created for data transmission using certain codes.The fisrt telegraphic infrastructre was built in France in 1793, was created by Claude Chappe and was based on remote transmission of optical signals, though the best one was built in 1837 by Samuel Morese, that allowed the reproduction of letters with a system of symbols

The beginning of mass communication

The radio

Radio is the transmission of sount content enjoyed in real time, by multiple users located in one or more geographic areas , equipped with specifical electronic devices.The invention of the radio had been possible thanks to the studies of scientist like James Maxwell, Heinrich Hertz Guglielmo Marconi and Nikola Tesla around 1890. The first radio transmission had started in USA and then it had spread all around the globe. Its invention has been really important during World Wors, because it was used as means of transmitting military informations and controlling public opinion.

Remote voice communication

The telephone

In 1871 Antonio Meucci created the first telephone, which was later perfected by Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison,For several years this new communication device was only used by wealthy people and by railways, not only because of its elevated price, but also because the majority of people didn't really nedd it. Only after World War II it started being used by almost everyone. Its most important difference with the telegraph was the abiility of transmitting the voice by using electromagnetic waves. The evolution of phone happened really quickly and it was mostly about its size, in fact, as we all know, they are still ued nowdays.

Remote mass video communication

The television

The first television was invented in 1925 by John Logie Baird.After a series of experiments, the device was made available to the public, and it spread all over the world, becoming the most effective

and persuasive means of mass communication that man has up to now developed, and contributing to a radical transformation of life habits in every country in the world.

The evolution of television's technology

The first televisions were black and white, chatode ray tube and mostly single-channel.Since then it has been a succession of small changes, in design, size and mass consumption.

One of the most important revolutions was the plasma technology that allowed us to create flat TVs, that was repleced a few years later by LCD and OLED technologies, which are still used nowdays.

Global connection

The internet

the neighboring nodes were damaged.From the 60s the ARPANET network changed and evolved until the early 90s, when CERN phisicists decided to develop a system that has become the internet as we know it today, the Woeld Wide Web. Then the internet has grown and spread worldwide ,thanks to the authorization given in 1994 to commercial companies to connect to the network and the advent of the personal computer. Today the internet is a means capable of connecting people everywhere, without political, spatial or temporal barriers.

The internet is a worldwide system of public access computer networks.It currently represents the main means of mass communication, offering the user a wide range of content and information services. Its origins date back in the 1960s during the Cold War. The US Ministry of defence needed a network system capable of preserving the computer connection between the American military bases in the event of a nuclear war. Thus, a decentralized network named ARPANET was born, designed so that each node could continue to process and transmit data even if the

Daily use of the internet

and LinkedIn were launched, but the most important one was Facebook, conceived by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004, which allowed the users to completely customize their profiles and to share photos and videos. Nowdays it has more than 2 billion active users.Another social media, Twitter was created only 2 years later, and offered the users a personal page in which they could post their comments and messages. From 2006 onwards, countless other social media have been developed, including Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, TikTok etc... which underline the continuous rise of the social phenomenon, a reality that is increasingly present within people's lives.

Social media

The internet paved the way for the development of social media, new categories of real-time communication systems that caused an evolution in social relations. Social networks are Internet services usable through the Web, that facilitate the management of social relationships and that allow communication and sharing by text and multimedia means. The history of social media began in 1997 with the launch of SixDegrees.com, which closed in 2001. After it, other social media like Freindster, MySpace