Advancements in media

I have chosen three items from the Centennial exhibition at the New York Public Library to illustrate how far media has come in the past several thousand years. The first items I noticed when I entered the exhibit were Cuneiforms from Mesopotamia, 3^rd-2^nd millennium BCE. Cuneiform scriptures, written on clay tablets, are one of the earliest known forms of written expression. At first glance, I would have guessed they were a million years old. I imagined this archaic form of writing was used by cavemen. The second item I chose was the Biblia Latina (bible in Latin) written by Johannes Gutenberg in 1455, the first major book printed with movable type printing press The final item I chose was the New York Times website. That’s right, on a Macbook screen in a glass case, a window was open to NYTimes.com. This modern piece of machinery is a perfect illustration of how far we have come from when we were carving on clay tablets.

Media and their widespread effects have been around ever since humans lived in tribes, extending the range of people’s words, giving form and substance to one's thoughts. It has been said that the Paleolithic cave paintings at Lascaux are no less viable expressions of media than TV shows and magazines of today. But the recognition and study of its impact on every aspect of every day life is only a few decades old. This is probably because in recent years, media has become more accessible than ever before. When Gutenberg wrote the Biblia Latina, there were only enough resources and time available to make 135 copies. Because of innovations in media, practically any book (not to mention website, movie, CD, etc.) ever printed is readily available to us.

These three items, from very different time periods, show the progression of media from thousands of years ago, when we carved in clay to record our thoughts, to the 1400’s, when movable type was available but to only an elite few, to today, when almost everything ever printed is readily available in a matter of seconds.