Roots of Communications

What is postmodernism ?

We are in a time that’s being called post-postmodern. That’s two “posts” – meaning after. The rapid industrialization of Western societies, and the growth of cities, led to the notion that everything would one day be understood, provided we approached things in an analytical and logical way. Darwin finds that all things are subject to evolution, photography and film capture the world around us for study and appreciation, humans travel faster and further with the invention of the automobile and the airplane, electricity banishes the night.

Effects of World War 1 on modernism:

It has been said that World War One marked the failure of modern art, and a watershed for the emergence of the post-modern.

The artistic community took it upon itself to lead the way, as it were, in the post-war society, given the catastrophic failure of many public institutions. After the war, there grew a kind of social vacuum, a sense that there was a lack of people and institutions to believe in. Many artists felt that it was therefore the responsibility of art to orient the collective social aspiration, to shape a new spirit in the wake of such destruction, and the delegitimization of so many hopes and values. In this way, the Modernist art of the postwar era was at once ultimately moral, hopeful, and rooted in a deep social conscience, but also vividly subversive and challenging in its (many) aesthetic forms – like the best art, the best music, and the best literature, its moral heart lay in its readiness to challenge and confront the spectator.

Gradual development in the field of communication:

In communications, it is now possible to send information to people over huge distances – radio waves blanket the earth, telephone cables are being laid everywhere, cars and planes allow packages and letters to be delivered in days rather than weeks. The world is being knitted together and organizations can reach more and more people with content. It’s still a push model, but with the invention of radio, telephones and later television, communications can now go directly to people’s homes and offices instead of just out in the public sphere.

With invention of the telegraph in the 1840s messages could travel from point-to-point at the speed of shifting electrons rather than of galloping horses or relays of visual signals from tower to tower. Basic transmission time between Paris and London went from days (horses) or hours (visual relay) to minutes. However, the need to receive the messages in a special telegraph office, copy the text onto paper, and then either deliver the paper to the recipient or have the recipient come by to pick it up meant that total message time was longer for anyone who did not have a telegraph office on-site. Initially, telegrams were also expensive enough that their use was limited to government agencies, large business firms, and relatively wealthy individuals. Mass publics began to benefit from telegraphs in the 1860s and 1870s as newspapers expanded their use of telegraphic news services to get stories from distant locales. This roughly coincided with a further expansion of literacy and development (using steam driven presses) of newspapers inexpensive enough for lower middle class, worker, and small farmer households. These developments reinforced one another: without wider literacy fewer people would have an interest in newspapers but without lower prices the newly-literate would have less access to reading material.

Development of radio in the 1920s and television in the 1950s into mass media meant that audio and visual signals traveling through the air at the speed of sound could spread information to large audiences simultaneously. Governments, broadcasters, and equipment manufacturers all had reason to encourage purchase of radios and televisions, and the cost of basic radios or TVs was soon low enough for most households in industrial countries to have them. The smaller, more portable versions of the 1960s and 1970s made them widely available in developing countries as well. Yet, like newspapers, radio and television broadcasts were one-way media. The publisher or broadcaster could send messages to many people but individual readers, listeners, or viewers could only contact their fellow audience members through face-to-face conversation or the occasional publication of a letter to the editor in the newspaper or the inclusion of listener or watcher comments on the radio or television station.

Telephone services, which first emerged in the late 19th century and expanded considerably after World War I, allowed possessors of telephones to contact each other, but phone service remained fairly expensive,1 available only to a minority of households even in the industrial countries until after World War II. In many developing countries, access to phone service remained extremely uneven through the 1980s. Only after 1990, as more governments realized the economic importance of extending phone service, and as satellite technology and then cell phones made it possible to connect users without building a nationwide wire network, did differences in access begin to narrow.

Yet, telephones (even cell phones) only link pairs or small groups of users; they do not provide a way for large numbers of people to communicate back and forth simultaneously. Such capability began to develop in the 1990s as the Internet emerged from being a small set of computer connections between specialized users in the USA and Western Europe to the vast world wide web of today. The Internet allows rapid communication among large numbers of users, whether they are accessing someone else’s site, running their own site, reading or posting blogs, or interacting on social sites or chat rooms. The Internet has been a great leveller, allowing individuals and small groups the same possibilities of communicating open to governments and other large organizations. Wireless technologies can carry Internet data, though not at quite the same speed as broadband fiber optic cables, and the same differences in access that affect telephones also affect the Internet.

Even in industrial countries, where Internet access is more widespread than in developing ones, newspapers, radio, and TV coexist with the Internet. Individuals move back and forth among the various media when seeking information. Thus, the older patterns of one-way distribution and of two or small group conversations coexist with the new Internet pattern of multi-party, multiple-direction participation coexist.

Conclusion:

These advances in communication have sped up the transmission of new scientific and engineering knowledge, reducing the gap between what is known in the leading laboratories or research centres and what is known elsewhere. Videoconferencing over the telephone network, a merger of telephone and TV technologies made possible by replacement of copper wires with broadband fiber optic cables, created some possibilities but these facilities were restricted to those who could afford the special equipment required. The addition of webcams to computers opened videoconferencing to anyone with access to the Internet and a computer with video capabilities. These are now sufficiently inexpensive that even households can engage in videoconferencing; small labs, independent inventors, and individual engineers can certainly take advantage. The Internet has also changed scientific publishing. It offered the possibility of getting research results out to colleagues and the public more rapidly than was the case with traditional publishing. It also allowed more effective by-passing of peer review systems, with the potential of challenging the whole system. After some initial hesitations, the major journals accommodated the Internet by posting accepted articles online prior to or simultaneously with publication in the traditional hardcopy format and maintaining electronic archives of past issues.

- Shreya_20bdc029