IntroMe.docx

**THE INFORMATION REVOLUTION** **[WRITING: THE FIRST INFORMATION REVOLUTION]** **Communication Through Ages** - Communication is very important. It is a key to understanding between people. Through the years, communication has evolved. The way people communicate with each other today is...

**THE INFORMATION REVOLUTION** **[WRITING: THE FIRST INFORMATION REVOLUTION]** **Communication Through Ages** - Communication is very important. It is a key to understanding between people. Through the years, communication has evolved. The way people communicate with each other today is entirely different from the prehistoric era. Before, communication was limited to interpersonal interaction, from person to person. Until it evolved into alphabets, signs and symbols, letters, and telephone. Today, the Internet era has paved the way for innumerable means of communication. **Cave Paintings** - The oldest form of symbols used for communication is cave paintings. According to theorists, cave paintings were created to mark a territory or to record events. The oldest cave painting was discovered inside **Chauvet Cave in France** around 30,000 B.C. Other earliest cave paintings were found in South Sulawesi, Indonesia and **Coliboaia Cave in Romania**. **Symbols** - Our early ancestors have used different variations of signs and symbols to communicate. Around 10,000 B.C., petroglyphs were created. They were carvings in the rock surface, usually referred to as a rock art. In 9,000 B.C., **pictograms** were developed in which ancient people logographic images to tell a story. Later on, ancient cultures developed **ideograms**. Egyptians had their **hieroglyphs**. Chinse created **characters**. Lastly, the **alphabet**, which redefined language and communication was developed around 2,000 B.C. **Smoke Signals** - Apart from letters and symbols, ancient people also rely on elements to communicate. Smoke signals were primarily used in sending messages in China. In 200 B.C., guards execute smoke signals to send messages along The Great Wall of China. In 150 B.C., **Greek Historian Polybius** developed smoke signals representing the alphabet. **Carrier Pigeons** - As we all know, pigeons are naturally great with directions. Over 2,000 years ago, the ancient Romans used pigeons as primary messengers between military men. In the 12th century, messenger pigeons were widely used. According to **Naval Chaplain Henry Teonge**, merchants used pigeons as a "postal" service. They also played a vital role in World Wars I and II. **Writing** - Unlike language, writing is not pre-wired in the human brain. It had to be invented, and because of that, we often see writing as the first communications revolution that extended natural human abilities. - The first kinds of writing involved the use of **clay tokens** dating back to 8500 BCE to ancient Mesopotamia. **Hieroglyphic** symbols emerged in Egypt around 3500 BCE, while formal Chinese writing emerged around 1500 to 1200 BCE. **Types of Written Language** 1. **Logographic** - The logographic writing system, or logogram, will be less familiar to most people, as very few languages use it today. One of the most famous logograms in human history is the **Egyptian** **hieroglyphs** found at ancient Egyptian archaeological sites, but it is a language is already extinct. **Logograms** contain characters that represent a meaning rather than the phoneme, but the characters can still be pronounced based on the sound it was assigned to by the users of the language. Chinese is perhaps the only language today that still predominantly uses logograms, and it evolved from glyphs very much like Egyptian hieroglyphs. Imagine what the Egyptian language would be like today if the civilisation had been successful in passing down its culture over the centuries. 2. **Syllabaric** - The syllabaric writing system, or syllabary, is also not as common today, but it is similar to the alphabetic writing system in that the eventual script is pronounceable. The difference is that the characters in syllabaries represent syllables that are already a combination of consonants and vowels. A syllabary that is still widely used today is the **Japanese Kana script**, which includes all the icons in the Japanese script that are not **Kanji** (Chinese characters). The syllabaric nature of the Japanese language explains why the direct translation of loanwords into Japanese is always so choppy, for example like how "McDonald's\" becomes "ma-ku-do-na-ru-do". 3. **Alphabetic** - Most people in the world will be familiar with the alphabetic writing system, as it is employed by the most number of languages. This type of writing system often uses characters to represent the basic sounds (phonemes that consist of individual consonants and vowels) in the language, such that reading a bunch of characters together allows a word to be pronounced. Written English uses the Latin **script**, which is an **alphabetic** writing **system**. However, with about 40 phonemes and only 26 characters, we often find that a single character may have more than one pronunciation depending on the word, which is why not all English words can be correctly pronounced at first glance. **Technologies of Writing** - Along with language, written communication may require four basic items: an instrument, a carrier (medium), a vehicle, and a way to prepare the vehicle. In Chinese traditional culture, these are called the **"Four Treasures of the Study,"** and the specific examples are the brush, the paper, the ink, and the ink-stone. 1. **Stone** - Stone is the most durable medium but not at all flexible. Carvings and paintings on stone are found throughout the ages, in all parts of the world, as permanent records of empires and faiths. The best-known example is the **Rosetta Stone**, a decree involving an Egyptian king's divinity, carved on a granite-like rock in 196 BCE and discovered in 1799 by **Pierre-François Bouchard**, a soldier who was part of the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt. 2. **Clay** - Clay was the simplest and earliest writing medium. Between half a million and two million clay tablets and markers from ancient Mesopotamia have been recovered in the modern era. Scribes once used a wedge-shaped stylus to make marks in clay, which was then fired in kilns to create a permanent record; or the clay could be recycled for reuse later if the record was not permanent. Early Mesopotamian writing is called **Cuneiform**, which is Latin for "**wedge shaped**." Cuneiform translation began in 1835 when **Henry Rawlinson** 3. **Papyrus** - Papyrus is a plant native to the wetlands of the Nile Valley of Egypt. It was originally used by the classical civilizations of Egypt, Greece, and Rome. It is pounded flat and laid crossways to create a sheet of papyrus paper, and is effective because the plant has a glue-like material that holds the sheet together. 4. **Wax Tablet** - Wax tablets on a wooden backing were often used in ancient Greece and Rome for writing that was temporary. Two tablets could be hinged together to protect the wax, which is an idea that probably led to the codex (book) 5. **Parchment** - Parchment was a widely used medium in the ancient Roman Empire that employed the skin of sheep, goats, cows, or other animals. 6. **Silk** - Silk was used since at least the second century BCE in China for transmitting and preserving important religious and civil texts. Silk was flexible but very expensive, and its use was highly restricted to royalty. 7. **Paper** - Paper is traditionally said to have been discovered by **Ts'ai Lun**, a Chinese monk who observed paper wasps making a nest around 105 CE. The technique is a huge improvement over hard-to-prepare animal hides, brittle papyrus, and expensive silk. Finely chopped wood or rag fibers are mixed with glue in a vat and then poured over a screen. The thin layer of fibers on the screen dried into paper. Cheap paper became widely available around 1400 in Europe and was apparently in surplus by the mid-1400s. 8. **Scrolls** - Scrolls: Parchment, papyrus or paper rolled up on either end. Information is kept sequentially in a scroll; it can't be accessed at random like a codex (book) 9. **Codex** - Codex (book): The word comes from the Latin for "**caudex**," meaning the **trunk of a tree**. A codex is a group of pages of paper or parchment that is gathered from one side at the back. A codex is a book if the pages are separate, but older forms of codex may also have pages folded in series, like an accordion. **[PRINTING: THE SECOND INFORMATION REVOLUTION]** **Johannes Gutenberg, Printing Press** - German goldsmith Johannes **Gutenberg** is credited with inventing the printing press around 1436, although he was far from the first to automate the book-printing process. - Gutenberg's system of printing text with moveable type was new in 1454, but the process of making an impression with ink on a raised surface was ancient. The earliest known printed images are from **"cylinder seals**" used in early Mesopotamian civilizations from around 3500 BCE. **Bi Sheng, Moveable Printing** - Chinese artists and scribes used **woodblock** **printing** for images, and sometimes text, starting from the sixth century CE. Still, the transition from engraving and woodcuts to printing with moveable type was not easy to make. When thousands of impressions are needed for individual letters, something stronger and more flexible than wood is required. Chinese scholar **Bi Sheng** (906−1126 CE) was the first to come up with a solution to the moveable type problem. **Laurence Coster** A Dutch printer named **Laurence Coster** (1370--1440) came close to solving Europe's printing problem. The story is that he was playing blocks on the floor with his children when he had the idea to separate parts of the wooden block. These are just a few of the many rival claims to the legacy of moveable type printing, and the question is often asked whether Gutenberg is in fact the inventor of the technique From the records and testimony that we have, it does seem clear that Gutenberg was first to solve the key problem of metal type and assemble all the necessary ingredients to create the printing revolution. **Printing in Venice** Mainz, Germany, was the birthplace of printing; but Venice, Italy, was its cradle. Two German printers, **John of Speyer** and his brother **Wendelin**, were the first to bring printing to Venice in the late 1460s. They produced at least 800 copies of four books---three Roman classics and a book by St. Augustine---in a seven month period between 1469 and 1470. **Publishing Books** a. **Nicholas Jenson** (1420--1480), of Champagne, France, was another printing pioneer in Venice. He invented **"roman" type**, which was based on the capital lettering used in Roman architecture, along with a standard lower-case script style developed by monks between 800 and 1200 CE. Jensen, the Speyers, and other early Venetian printers catered to an elite readership, and they tended to see books as works of art in themselves. b. **Aldus Manutius** (1449--1515) changed the high-end business model in the 1490s when he began publishing books for the public at reasonable prices, rather than as works of art for the elite. Between 1494 and 1515, his company produced 157 different books, some with more than 1,000 copies. By 1500, Venice had produced half of the four million first printed books, called **"incunabula"** (Latin for **cradle**). But other cities were catching up. **[MASS MEDIA: THE THIRD INFORMATION REVOLUTION]** Publishing Books Book publishing dominated the printing trade after Gutenberg's invention caught on, but a wide variety of small publications were also coming into print. Book merchants offered single-page woodblocks and engravings, along with pamphlets and booklets, such as religious tracts and sermons, exhortations to join causes, or speeches by monarchs and other public figures. Four basic kinds of news publications emerged between the late 1500s and early 1700s (Schramm 1988): 1. **Relation**: a one-time publication about a single event, for example a battle or a coronation, usually printed on a small single sheet. 2. **Coronto**: a small bound book about news from a foreign country. 3. **Diurnal**: a regular publication that covered one subject, typically events in government. 4. **Mercury**: a small bound book that would cover events from a single country for six months at a time. **Kawaraban** - Despite the difficulty of publishing news using woodblock printing, a prototype of newspapers, called kawaraban, emerged in Japan in the seventeenth century with news about natural disasters, social events, love suicides, and other topical issues. **Rotary Drum Printing** - January 1, 1847, rotary drum printing was invented by **Richard March Hoe.** It is a printing press in which the impressions are curved around a cylinder so that the printing can be done on long continuous rolls of paper, cardboard, plastic, or a large number of other substrates. **Electrophotography** - **Chester Carlson**, on October 22, 1938, invented a dry printing process called electrophotography commonly called a **Xerox**. It was a way of transmitting and printing facsimilies of printed images using a beam of directed ions directed onto a rotating drum of insulating material. Based on this electrophotography dry printing, on February 17, 953, **Remington-Rand** invented the first high speed printer for the **Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC).** **Daisy Wheel Printer** - **David S. Lee** invented the daisy wheel printer January 1, 1969. The system is an interchangeable metal or plastic \"daisy wheel\" holding an entire character set as raised characters moulded on each \"petal\". While on January 1, 1976, the very first IBM 3800 was installed in the central accounting office at F. W. Woolworth's North American data center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1976.\" The IBM 3800 Printing System was the industry's first high-speed, laser printer. A laser printer that operated at speeds of more than 100 impressions-per-minute. **Printing Revolution** - Even so, the printing revolution did not occur because one lone genius invented a single new technology. Printing emerged because Gutenberg's insight into the key problem of moveable metal type occurred at a moment when all of the right conditions and technologies were in place. These included a surplus of paper and ink, as well as presses for printing, foundries for metalsmithing, and a system for business investments. **Phases of Printing Technology** **Phase 1: Craft Printing (1455--1820s : Printing Chapels)** Type is set by hand, letter-by-letter, from upper and lower cases, at a rate of about five words per minute. Paper is fed manually into hand-pulled wooden (and sometimes metal) presses at about 250 impressions per hour (a "token"). Each impression is one-sided, which means that once the ink has dried, the "same token" has to get a second run. Newspapers and magazines are sent to subscribers through the mail or sold in general merchandise stores. **Phase 2: Steam Printing (1820s--1890s : Steam printing and Stereotyping)** Type is still set from large cases by hand. A large daily newspaper might employ 100 workers just to set type. Hand-set type is too loose to use in higher-speed presses. This problem is solved by casting metal copies of hand-set type into "stereotype" printing plates. The plates are cast in cylindrical sleeves to fit on rotary presses. The introduction of **steam-powered printing presses** speeds up production to thousands of impressions per hour, expanding circulation of newspapers and magazines. The steam press, first used in 1814 at The Times in London, allows a new kind of low-cost "penny" papers by the 1830s. Subscriptions by mail are common for magazines, but now children also hawk newspapers on city streets. **Phase 3: Hot Type (1890s--1960s: Hot type, Linotype, Halftone and High-speed Printing)** German-American **Ottmar Mergenthaler** invents the first successful **typesetting** **machine** in 1886. Operators sit at a keyboard that releases blanks, then molten lead is poured over them to create a line of type (hence the name, Linotype). At about thirty words per minute, ready to fit into a page, **Linotypes** speed up the process by five or six times. Photo halftones engraving, invented in the 1880s, allows photographs to be etched into metal plates and then printed. Previously, only line drawings could be printed on a press. **Phase 4: Cold Type (1950s--80s: Cold Type/Photo Typesetting and Offset Printing)** Photo-mechanical process invented by **Rene Higonnet** and **Louis Moyroud** sets type six times faster than Linotypes at a cost of about \$10,000 for a small unit in the 1970s. By the 1980s, word processing and typesetting are now both handled by mainframe computers. Sheets of photo-sensitive paper containing separate blocks of type, headlines, and halftones are assembled (laid out and pasted up), then transferred to negatives and burned onto offset aluminum printing plates. Skilled pre-press workers are no longer needed, and the production workforce is cut in half. Offset printing uses light aluminum plates instead of heavy cast-lead stereotypes. This allows smaller, cheaper, faster presses that can print color with accurate registration. Home delivery routes become common; postal service subsidies for publishers are reduced. **Phase 5: Digital Media (1980s--present: Digital Production/Desktop Publishing and Pagination)** Personal computers like the Apple Mac (introduced in 1984) and laser printers allowed "desktop" publishing, making it far easier and cheaper to prepare type and photos for the press. Improved computers allow digital layout (pagination), eliminating most pre-press layout and paste-up. Editors can now send pages straight back to the press, and nearly all the production workforce is eliminated. **Associated Press** introduces first digital photo handling desks in 1989, eliminating halftone "engraving" shops in printing plants. Digital versions of pages are sent through the Internet to large presses in centralized locations, bypassing small printing operations. News of all kinds is now available to billions of people through the **World Wide Web** and other non-print digital networks.