Below is something we all know, but I think just thinking about it is astounding
There have been ten major mass media conductis: physical arts (paintings/sculpture, etc), books, newspapers, magazines, films, recordings, radio, broadcast television, cable television, and computers. Each form of media goes through a life cycle. That life cycle are five stages of development in industry: innovation, penetration (growth), peak (maturity), decline and adaptation. I didn't develop this list of the stages, ist just sort of how mass media or mass communications have been described in teh research literature. The first mass commuantion device was art work in caves or decorative household items, and the last is a whole bunch of computer assisted conduits of communications.
But I think most people would see that where we are now, computers, is very ill defined mass communication medium because it is everything in a blender. Ist not even a move from physical to electronic like magazines to radio. When we talk about mass communications being in the era of computers we are collapsing all communication - arts, books, newspapers, magazines, films, recordings, radio, and television smashed into a medium of interpretable binary code. It is a single medium (protocols of data movinging) that supplants and replaces all others.
I think that si what is so weird about teh last 20 years we went form a world where very little was a computer data medium to a world where the physical mediums of communication are becoming the oddity that is small. The bedroom of a teen ager in 1990 has art on the wall as a poster, books on a shelf, newspapers articles maybe clipped out and hung, magazine to be read, maybe a VCR/DVD for movies, a boombox or stereo system for music, a radio for broadcast radio and a TV for broadcast or cable TV. Today, you very literally could have a bed and smartphone w/ a monitor/HDTV and all medium of mass communications are available and the device to receive or transform it for consumption is a single slab of glass, metal and plastic 4 mm x 60 mm x 120 mm.
Just thinking about the above makes me think I don't want to live to be 100 years old; because 47 years from now how everything works will likely be baffling to me. In my minds eye I imagine being invited to my great grand niece's wedding and I shuffle into a room that just appears to be a glowing cube. And, I'll say "Where are the people, I don't hear music, and I don't see tables and chairs!? Am I dead? Is this heaven?" And my 80 year old grandniece will say, in a tone that makes me feel like a particularly stupid field mouse., "Uncle Linc you have to join the R-VR PsychoReality Gestalt to see or hear anything at teh wedding". And I'll say, "I have to connect the who to the what now?" as she shoves a fist sized glowing fiber up my butt.
And, that will be okay, It will be a better, safer, more fair world; but it will all just seem so complex and odd - it will make me feel old.
Mass Communications today is weird - running down the slope to a singularity
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