Essay on Beginning of Mass Communication

Mass communication, by definition, is the process in which professional communication using technological devises share messages over great distances to influence large audiences.

Since the beginning of time, people have had the need to communicate with one and other. The most common type of communication is speech, but you could not talk to someone who lived 20 miles away. Then written language was developed, people marked symbols on paper, stone, or whatever was available. Then hundreds of years passed, and people who wanted to share their ideas with people had to do allot of writing, until someone thought to make a writing machine. This machine is called the printing press.

Gutenberg's invention of the printing press is widely thought of as the origin of mass communication-- it marked Western culture's first viable method of disseminating ideas and information from a single source to a large and far-ranging audience. The story of print is a long and complex one (Irving Fang, 34-36).It may be too much to claim that print was the single cause of the massive social, political and psychological changes it is associated with. However, print did wield enormous influence on every aspect of European culture. Some historians suggest that print was instrumental in bringing about all the major shifts in science, religion, politics and the modes of thought that are commonly associated with modern Western culture.

The technology of modern mass communication results from the confluence of many types of inventions and discoveries, some of which (the printing press, for instance) actually preceded the Industrial Revolution. Technological ingenuity of the 19th and 20th centuries has developed the newer means of mass communication, particularly broadcasting, without which the present near- global diffusion of printed words, pictures, and sounds would have been impossible.............

ESSAYS ON TECHNOLOGY