The printing press was, in our opinion, the first great technological advancement for the media industry. Invented by Johannes Gutenberg in 1441, the printing press opened the gates to a flood of media advances. Back in the 1400’s religion and the church was the greatest influence among people, causing everyone to rely heavily upon the word of priests. With this new invention, Gutenberg was able to reproduce a 42-line Bible, which could be easily distributed among people, without and bias from local churches. This opening for religious knowledge can be counted as the downfall of the Catholic Church, but it can also be counted as the rise of spoken and free word. Marshall McLuhan discusses the printing press in his novel The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man saying: “ “The invention of typography confirmed and extended the new visual stress of applied knowledge, providing the first uniformly repeatable commodity, the first assembly-line, and the first mass production” (pg. 24). With this new invention, Gutenberg created media that could be spread and developed much farther than the spoken word itself, because printed words have the capability to become universal and long-term.
Similarly, hundreds of year after the invention of the printing press, the world’s next greatest invention surfaced. There has always been speculation about who is the official inventor of the telephone, with some people choosing to believe it was Alexander Graham Bell, while the U.S. Congress just recently announced an Italian inventor named Antonia Meucci was the real inventor. Whoever it may have been does nothing to alter how important the invention itself has become. What the printing press did for expanding the purpose of written words, the telephone did, once more, for speech. With the invention of the telephone, people became able to pass information over long distances that virtually anyone could understand. Important messages no longer needed to be hand delivered, or sent through code. Unfortunately, along with this great invention, troublesome problems occurred. After this invention, information that wasn’t issued for the public could be leaked, or phone lines could be tapped; but this is to be expected.
In a timely fashion after the invention of the telephone, television was invented. Television is another sort of media that has evolved over the decades. Originating back in the early 1900’s, inventors experimented with different types of electromagnetic wave functions and receptors that eventually created the television we know and use so commonly today. What these inventors had no idea about was the brilliance or the phenomena that the television would become. Since it’s inception in the 1900’s, TV has become one of the world’s greatest media outsources. Used by almost everyone across almost every country in the world, TV has become an even larger producer of news and information than even the telephone. But like every source of new media, the television was double sided. Theorists like Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan understood both sides of the television machine. Postman even went as far as writing a novel titled “Amusing Ourselves to Death” which analyzed television effect of culture and society. As far as technological advancements go, television is the same as the rest of them: brilliant but harmful.
It seems that the idea on most inventors minds after the creation of the printing press, television and telephone, was what could we bring to the world next? The answer apparently, was film. Over the years, both roll and digital film have changed drastically. Starting with film created by George Eastman, the founder of Kodak, film has grown into a massive multi media development. Even now, the idea of roll film has been pushed aside to further develop what is referred to as “digital” or “electronic film”. The shape, size and power of them have all been changed throughout time. Having started with flimsy plastic, it’s almost a miracle that now we can find a video camera inside an IPod and inside cell phones, and the most unexpected things. Film has changed the world that we all live in and society itself. It helps us shape our beliefs and views on the world because we have been able to document time as it goes on, in actual pictures. People use film to entertain, to tell stories and to express their feelings, much like they had previously been using print and speech to do.
Finally, another pivotal invention has been gaining speed for the past couple of decades. Having almost perfect each of the previously stated inventions, researchers and developers created something called the World Wide Web, or more lovingly titled: the Internet. The Internet has had an extremely huge impact on society in the last decade or so. The Internet is just another source of media, which we use to extend our bodies. With the Internet, we as a society, are able to bring the office with us on the go, stay connected via social networking sites, can view videos on video sharing sites and do so much more. The Internet has led society in a new direction of technology and media that is being embraced and used all over the world. Besides the printing press, which is the number one greatest invention of all time in our opinion, the Internet has definitely trumped all others in the fact that it is able to deliver print, voice and graphic media to the entire world.
So, as the world turns and technology changes there is no doubt in our mind that new inventions will come about to rock the media world, but as of right now, these five are the most important.