"So, what was Ragotin's opinion about his role in the family?" she kept on, "It was a bit confusing, 'cause the answer was not following the question. He put it this way, 'Information has been evolving on earth for billions of years. While the naïve view of information is of something ethereal, formless, weightless, immaterial, and the rest, in reality information never exists outside of some physical substrate. Information can exist in patterns of ink on paper, sound waves, electrical pulses, radio waves, magnetic flux patterns, neuronal connections, molecules, or notches on a stick. One theory of quantum physics even proposes that the most fundamental physical unit making up our universe is information.
However, 'information' is distinct from 'meaning'; information is what a book or fiber optic cable transmits, while meaning is the human interpretation. Throughout the physical world, 'meaning' emerges from interactions between system states. If there are no interactions, there is no meaning. For meaning to be present, particular states of one system must have particular effects on another system—as when information we receive changes our behavior.
For the majority of human history, the only way for information to spread was speech. To learn what was happening among a distant tribe dozens of kilometers away, one would have to visit them or listen to the report of an emissary. With the development of written language, this limitation was only barely surmounted: language barriers and widespread illiteracy remained powerful impediments to information flows between groups, and scrolls still needed delivering. The first Christians, for instance, were limited to handwritten texts and speech. They were evangelists because they had to be; there was no other way for them to spread the information their faith comprised but by preaching to whomever would listen.
After handwritten letters and books, the next major developments in communication occurred in China, with the invention of printing in the seventh century, and later in Africa, with the development of the 'talking drum.' By encoding spoken messages into a drumbeat, which could be heard kilometers away and retransmitted by another drummer, messages could be communicated over a hundred kilometers in the space of an hour. Meanwhile, in Europe, the only way to communicate significant amounts of information was letters; and only by the fourteenth century were mail routes organized between major trading cities, while it took until the end of the seventeenth century for the mail to be accessible to the general public.
While the first printing press with movable metal type was invented in Korea in the early fifteenth century, soon thereafter Gutenberg introduced the technology to Europe. Its impact was inestimable. By reducing the human labor required to reproduce books, the printing press allowed for more copies and kinds of books to be produced. Having more copies of books stabilized and preserved existing knowledge—which had been subject to greater change over time in the age of oral and manuscript transmission—and having more kinds of books resulted in more widespread critiques of authority. The printing press was necessary for Martin Luther to spread his critique of the Catholic Church, and once his message had convinced many, the printing press allowed for the development of the first political propaganda, inspiring and fueling the massive bloodletting of Europe’s religious wars.
With the rise of newspapers in the sixteenth century, the threat to authority represented by the printing press only increased. Governments censored newspapers and used them to secure their power. Punishments for printing objectionable material were harsh, including breaking limbs and using an awl to bore through the tongue. Nonetheless, seditious material continued to be printed and distributed. While governments could exercise control over printers within their borders, Europe’s political diversity allowed for critical works to be published elsewhere for importation into the target country. Thanks to the ineffectiveness of state censorship, the small coterie of educated people in Europe had access to ideas that challenged the legitimacy of their political and religious leaders. This educated elite developed a political consciousness that rejected the absolute sovereignty of kings and demanded to be ruled by general laws approved by public opinion.
The printing press created the conditions necessary for the emergence of a public sphere, where the seeds of the Enlightenment, and the American and French revolutions, were nurtured. Recognizing the power of the printing press and public opinion, Napoleon warned that 'four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than 100,000 bayonets' and Edmund Burke noted that 'there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all.' From its beginnings, the media was a revolutionary force. A truly mass media was still in embryo. And this was exactly how the conservative elite in Europe wished it to be: it would not do to have the working masses educated, reading about politics, increasing their expectations, and making them discontent with their toil and drudgery.
In 1735, a printer named John Peter Zenger published articles attacking a royal governor’s abuses of power. Another key pre-revolutionary development was the British Parliament’s 1765 imposition of a heavy tax on newspapers, pamphlets, and other printed material. The early American press was rabidly partisan, and the first political parties grew out of the organizational base provided by newspapers. Meanwhile in Britain, the 1800s witnessed the growth of combative, radical newspapers advancing the cause of the working class.
In the 1910s, when radio was emerging as a technology accessible to hobbyists in the USA, before radio programming in its current form existed, it was primarily a tool for communication and education. For those of us who experienced the internet in the early-to-mid 1990s, this description of pre-broadcast radio in 1920 by Lee de Forest—considered 'the father of radio'—'It offers the widest limits, the keenest fascination, either for intense competition with others, near and far, or for quiet study and pure enjoyment in the still is strangely familiar night hours as you welcome friendly visitors from the whole wide world.
From the whole wide world to the World Wide Web. Just as many in the early days of the internet felt it would always be a tool for international communication and education, early radio enthusiasts felt that their medium would powerfully and exclusively serve the public good. In the early 1920s, airwaves were filled with nonprofit stations mainly affiliated with colleges and universities. Commercial stations were largely appendages to bricks-and-mortar businesses—newspapers, department stores, and power companies—so that, by 1929, few were earning profits of their own.
Much like the commercialization of newspapers, the commercialization of radio proceeded according to a market logic that was other than the aggregate of true consumer preferences. By the 1950s, a powerful competitor to radio had emerged in the USA: television. The US television market reached saturation in the mid-50s, and by the mid-60s television had exploded globally.
However, even then, the future of television was not so open-ended; in the United States, the already-powerful radio broadcast networks determined television’s future. They would apply the same business model, providing predominantly light, inoffensive entertainment to attract the largest—and most well-heeled—audience to sell to advertisers.
As a consequence, television evolved into a medium like radio, with critics raising the same concerns. In 1980, the United Nations’ Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) published a report warning that the media, and the economic pressures operating on it, could lead to greater inequalities, hierarchies, and increased social control. The report’s author wrote that given the centrality of the media to all social, economic, and political activity worldwide, 'human history becomes more and more a race between communication and catastrophe. Full use of communication in all its varied forms is vital to assure that humanity has more than a history … that our children are assured a future.'"
