Which advancement in media had the greatest impact on people? It can be from any time period; i.e. invention of paper, internet, alphabet, facebook, myspace, this forum…ANYTHING!!
Guttenberg.
That one is kind of a slam dunk.
After that I would say broadcasts (radio and TV) then the internet. Each were quantum leaps in the dissemination of information.
I think the spoken word and the alphabet, while certainly prerequisites, go a bit far afield as an answer to this question.
In both chronological order and order of importance:
Language
Writing
Paper
Printing press
Telegraph
Radio
[del]You can add the Internet to that list.[/del]
Edit: never mind, beaten to it by Whack-a-Mole
Not an advance in media, exactly, but I’d argue that the development of the public school system did as much as the printing press. After all, what good is the ability to mass produce books if most of the citizenry is illiterate?
And I think the Internet is eventually going to eclipse all other innovations and inventions in its impact on people.
Gutenburg and the Internet pale in comparison to paper. Assuming we are talking about media in the literal sense (a medium of exchange of information), paper wins hands down. The reason is that before paper, no one had any way of easily transporting information across distances. Paper didn’t make writing; it made it vastly more useful.
Historically, we can also point out that paper made organization possible. It was needed to comunicate ideas and information across distances and allowed governments to flourish.
Gutenburg ultimately made paper more useufl, but he didn’t radically change the way we live. No one invention did that, although a series of improvements made lots of books possible 9along with a lot of bad Bible translations). The Internet, while good, doesn’t ultimately do much that we couldn’t do before. It does it faster, but not in the same “completely change the world” sense as paper.
Steven den Beste wrote an interesting article on this some years ago. It’s interesting because he concentrates on the rapidity and ease of dissemination and its effect on censorship.
Aren’t you forgetting that before paper there was papyrus, and clay tablets, and stone tablets, and bark and… ?
Paper was far more easily produced than clay tablets and such, but its appearance in Europe at the same moment that printing was catching on was important–each fed the other. Either one without the other wouldn’t really have done much. And the literacy rate was also greatly increasing in the years before the press, but they were well timed to each other.
So I say: mechanical printing on paper.
How about the codex? Much easier to navigate than the rotulus, you can flip between two pages, etc.
Nah, printing. The number of volumes in circulation shot up exponentially over 30 years. It did change life.
I think it has to be the printing press. Print is still the only medium where the information and the medium are integrated to be usable with no other device (you don’t need a player, a receiver, a telephone or even batteries.) With diagrams or picture books, you don’t even need to be literate to get the information.
Paper is far cheaper and more durable than any of the alternatives. The printing press would have just been a novelty if there hadn’t been paper to print on.
Electricity, the vacuum tube, and the microchip. Not media, obviously, but look what they made possible. Immediacy, portability, miniaturization.
Yeah, but the net effect? Immediate, portable, miniaturized porn.
This incredibly huge shift in the availability of information. . . in the 16th and 17th centuries it caused a huge shift in scientific knowledge, religious reformations, political revolutions, etc. The current technological shift has mostly greatly impacted access to . . . porn. Instant messaging? Porn. Internet? Porn. Second Life, etc? Porn.
I’m mostly joking.
Answering the thread title more then the OP, but what about Cable TV? Once Cable TV came out we started getting 24 hour news coverage on every little thing somewhat interesting. I think that has let to the spread of media more then anything else in my lifetime.
I’m not sure that it is too clear what the effect of the Internet/computers as media has been as we’re only so far in to the ‘digital revolution’. The printing press has been in existence long enough for us to clearly see its impact. It’s just too early to tell with the internet.