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The evolution of the media

Posted on 13 October 2009

We can mark our escape from the confines of biological evolution to the time that the Missing Link took up the gavel and demanded to be heard.  Since then our ever-accelerating ability to communicate has been a defining feature of the pace of our development.

Central to this acceleration has been the role of (the) media.  While the evolution of media (defined as the medium used to convey information) should probably start from when the Sumerians created the first punched card, let’s truncate the story.  By way of explanation, consider the following:

Why start at the Gutenberg press?  Well, when Herr Gutenberg was pinching his brow squeezing letters into a grid, he was creating a way to efficiently communicate with a mass audience.  This, to me at least, is the genesis of today’s internet.

Skip forward some 500 years (there is a book or two in between) and the age of the shredded tree as the medium for distributing the message was brought to an end.  The internet has delivered an exponentially increasing ability to communicate.  Intuitively this can be understood as a shift from a broadcast model to an interactive model for communication.

Now we have a media where individuals can communicate with many at the touch a few buttons.  Conversely, the advent of social media tools has flipped the scales such that just one of the faceless many can simply reply to the thoughts of the individual.  It’s a fundamental shift to the way we communicate – I see it in my kids whenever I chortle at them to get ‘off the computer’.

So where does Australia sit on the media evolutionary tree?  The following chart is my best guess…

I’m expecting a big leap to the right, particularly when the real power of mobile media technologies is unravelled.