Media Through the Ages: A Journey from Print to Digital Interactivity
Introduction
First and foremost, the creation of media changes how we view, express, and understand our world on a heightened level of consciousness. The initial term of media, which was coined in the 18th century, simply meant mass media. Later in the nineteenth century, media such as paper (money) and electricity were classified as a medium. At the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, the term changed along with its language to define newspapers, magazines, radio, and other forms of mass media. With the change in definition and language, so did the media concept itself. "The growing wealth and importance of multimedia data (images, text, videos, audio, and associated metadata) are evident; processing them meaningfully and efficiently has become crucial for an increasing number of domains, e.g., media and news, forensics, security, marketing, and health" (Zahalka et al, 2020). The approach of defining, categorizing, and understanding media takes a more pragmatic and logical approach because mass media now is being described as "information."
In addition, the media concept was not fully defined or had a singular definition(s) because media is constantly evolving and still evolving. Furthermore, creating new media such as podcasts, e-books, social media, cinema in some cases, and video games makes it more complicated to define and understand media. Also, the users of multimedia define media differently than the literature does. Most people view media as a visual concept as opposed to its predecessors of traditional media in the 18th and 19th centuries, which were newspapers, print media, radio, and oral communication such as speeches and word of mouth. In addition, visuals being incorporated with media enhance the messages and the media itself, termed new media. New media is mainly associated with media that uses or is composed chiefly of technology of some sort. Though new media has existed since the 1960s, the term has fluctuated constantly due to technological advances such as the internet, television, and other forms of interactive media. However, from a pragmatic perspective, the term separates traditional media from modern media (computerized media). Also, the creation and innovation needed to create new media is an intricate process as opposed to conventional media. New media is all about the user or consumer being in control of what media they see, use, and interact with as opposed to being dictated and controlled by the distributors. However, the pragmatics of media do not start with creating new media but with the history of language associated with media.
History of Multimedia
The history of multimedia originates with the history of film, which has no set or defined origin due to the nature of times and the creation of moving images. Photography is also a part of multimedia history, but film is more immersive than photography because of the production it requires. "Messter's indefatigable search for the application of moving image parallel to its entertainment uses to testify to such a pragmatic understanding of the different potentials of the cinematic apparatus that he stands at the intersection of several histories, many of which we are only now recognizing as having histories: those configurations and applications of the basic apparatus I earlier listed as its S/M practices" (Elsaesser, 19). With cinema being pictured in motion (motion pictures) aside from films or cinematic creations, satellite technology, military cameras, and technology were also used to create space exploration videos for enhanced viewing and study.
These are also forms of cinema and "established" forms of multimedia, and logically, these are forms of multimedia that have been around for centuries. However, the definition of media and new media and what is classified as media bring a different approach to understanding multimedia. However, new media is nothing more than old media, which has been enhanced by technological advancement. Old media, in terms of early photography, sound, and cinema, are all their separate forms of media. However, with the integration of technology and digital platforms, media has become more interactive, faster, and contains large amounts of data. "Geoffrey Batchen in "Electricity Made Visible" argues that new media has a history as old as modernity itself" (Chun, 5). From a logical and reasonable perspective, "new media" is not necessarily new; it has taken a different form. The cliché saying "there is nothing new under the sun" is the correct phrase to further emphasize the concept and emergence of new media.
What is Multimedia?
Multimedia is the convergence of multiple media as a form of expression and communication. "Multimedia has developed an unavoidable fragment of any performance. It has originated a diversity of presentations, from entertaining to educational. The development of the internet has also enlarged the request for multimedia content. Multimedia is the media that uses numerous forms of information contented and information processing (e.g., text, audio, graphics, animation, and video interactivity) to inform or entertain the user" (Pavithra, Aathilingam, & Prakash 271). ). Multimedia also has unique software that creates forms of multimedia. "The hardware and software used for creating and running multimedia applications are known as multimedia technology (Kapi et al., 2017).
Multimedia technology includes integration, diversity, and interaction, enabling people to communicate information or ideas with digital and print elements" (Abdulrahman et al., 2020). Unlike traditional media, multimedia comprises five prominent elements: text, audio, graphics, animation, and video. Of all the elements, text is the primary element of multimedia. Text is used to express specific information, titles, headings, and subtitles and to further improve information or searches through search engines. Audio is the auditory component of multimedia that adds sounds, music, and narration of the presented media. Graphics are the visual aspect of multimedia that keeps viewers engaged and entertained throughout the message. Animations are 2-D or 3-D images that give a creative form of movement, and video combines moving images, audio, and sound to create a motion sequence.
Earliest Foundation of Computer Science and New Media
The earliest foundation of computer science is the creation of two primary systems: the binary system and the numeric system. In the book New Media Old Media, a chapter entitled "Electricity Made Visible" states the binary code is a numeric system that transmits luminous information to light-sensitive chemistry to make an image. With this being a breakthrough for digital content and or media, this was the very start of a technological revolution. The binary number system is one of the most influential developments in the history of technology. "The formalization of the system and its additions and refinements over 200+ years ultimately led to the creation of electronic circuitry constructed using logic gates. This creation ushered in the technological era and left the world forever changed" (Lande 2014). After this legendary breakthrough, pioneers combined time, mathematics, drawing, and painting into binary impulses to create a photograph. However, this raises many questions about the language and pragmatics of the history of media. Photography, computing, and telegraphy are all different and stand-alone within art and media, yet they are the same. This interrupts many people's understanding of media and what media is. However, they all intersect at some point from a logical, philosophical, and theoretic perspective. During these breakthroughs, around 1880, images were transmitted into numerical data and sent elsewhere to be printed and used for commercial or scientific study.
Another addition to the history of old and new media would be sound and auditory devices used to create sound, predominantly in the film industry. These optical sound systems of the 20th century could produce robotic voices that needed no instrument or a human voice, just simple technology. This, in simpler terms, was acoustic data using inscription. The new sound system was introduced around the 1930s. But before the invention of robotic sounds, earlier forms of auditory sound systems were used and created. In 1787, Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni, who is referred to as the father of acoustics, read inscriptions of sound that were arbitrary in most cases. "Chladni's discovery that a layer of quartz dust upon a sheet of glass would, when vibrated by a violin bow, form distinct and regular patterns or Klangfiguren (tone figures), as he called them, that correspond to specific tones, effectively demonstrated the existence of visual traces of pitches whose iconic-indexical character differentiated them in a semiotically crucial fashion from all other conventional means of notating sound" (Levin 49). From a logical perspective this also would be the starting point of sound in essence "new media" but only in correlation with the time. The later sounds system would be or should be considered "new media." Still, it's only an advanced version of its predecessor.
This would be classified as new media but new media of the time. Time is also essential when understanding pragmatics and evolving advancements. In a logical sense, "new media" is not new, but the media of the present times is far greater than those forms of the past. In addition, photography was one of the first forms of established new media, but cinema was also. However, the most confusion of media histories lies within the definition and language of what media is more than new media. A better term to use when understanding old and new media history would be "new technology." By associating the word "new" with media, the language of media and its pragmatics take a drastic turn in our understanding.
Furthermore, the convergence of photography, telegraphy, and computing would also make new media a form of multimedia because multimedia consists of multiple mediums in one, while photography required various mediums to produce images at the time. Lastly, aside from language, the history of media is also in the hands of those who write it. Media and new media are language, and language will always be subjective.
Multimedia and The Rise of Information
As time progressed, so did the world regarding people, society, innovations, technology, business, art, and knowledge. With everything evolving and "deserving a place in the universe (society), we need more ways to communicate information, knowledge, data, personal perceptions, and storage to hold and communicate globally effectively and efficiently. Old media or traditional media could not suffice the "new world" because it was too slow, ineffective, and not fast enough to keep up with the pace of growing information and language. But with the rise of the internet, television, and dot com, in some cases, more information could be shared faster, effectively, and transported to other digital entities in a matter of minutes and or seconds. Also, much of traditional media was controlled by distributors, and some consumers of the media may be uninterested, uninformed about how the media was presented, or not understand the media at all due to media regulations and guidelines. "Throughout the world, governments regulate media using measures ranging from content restrictions in broadcasting licenses to constitutional freedom of expression provisions" ( But new media brought a slight change for distributors and users because the user could now follow the information they wanted, watch whatever they wanted whenever they wanted, and control what they saw. Multimedia applications also enable the user to instantly display information related to a specific topic that is being viewed. Most powerfully, the computerized book form allows the user to look up information quickly (without referring to the index or table of contents (Pavithra, Aathilingam, & Prakash 271).
"The development and generalization of technology development have affected the function of educational institutions, and a need to raise technology-user individuals for many fields with industry at the top has emerged" (Akpinar, 2003). In addition, with the rise of businesses, education, and art, many institutions and organizations need a better approach to create content and reach new audiences and people of interest who want to know more. New media was the gateway for a greater audience and profit. With this new form of media, consumers could also search or learn more about any organization or sector of life by searching for information that was also interactive and entertaining. With the rise of information, many businesses, organizations, and individuals wanted their content or brand to be accessible to anyone. Furthermore, with new media, consumers have become more interactive with the media, distributors, and creators. Lastly, consumers of the information can also share their thoughts, experiences, and ideas with other consumers and create more information through different forms of media, which end with more information.
Pragmatics in Depth
The primary purpose of computers is to communicate the user's behavior in a simple expression. The overall function and method of computers express simplified and concise languages. "To analyze the computer behavior from the point of view of pragmatic logic, the computer behavior refers to the computer operation of the program execution. Because the computer program is a collection of pragmatic statements, the computer behavior is typical" (Zhangxing 2014). Pragmatics is the study of context-stricken language that is practical for human thought and action. Pragmatics is the foundation of language and the responses that follow it. Computers are nothing more than communication machines, and so is media. "Robotics has various interesting applications; we will describe only a few. We conclude that robotics tasks involving language and vision can be categorized into three main tasks, a robot talking to a human, a robot that learns from human actions, and a robot that performs navigation" ( Language drives information, and so does it drive computers to be able to interpret language and more specifically requested language of the user and or interpreter.
Computer systems contain language converted into information using abstraction, which creates or gives specific valuable information. Also, computers or computing are associated with algorithms and syntax, the basic programming language rules. Along with these computer components, language is something called an Assignment Statement. An Assignment Statement is a computing language that attaches a particular value to a computer variable or equation. This type of language helps a computer store data that can be used in the future. Semantically, the variable denotes a location in computer memory, while the expression denotes the computation of a value based on memory contents. "Overall, the assignment semantics is to perform the expression evaluation based on current memory contents and then update the value stored in the particular location corresponding to the variable. But what is often most interesting to programmers is the pragmatics, that is, what assignment statements are useful for. There are many possibilities: to set up a temporary variable for the value of an expression that is needed more than once, to communicate values from one part of a program to another, to modify part of a data structure, or to set successive values of a variable used in some iterative computation" (Cameron 2007).
Though an assignment statement is used to create universal variables or information, it does not always guarantee variables will be associated with a universal value for reasons such as memory damage, incorrectly written assignment statements, and the type of computer language used. With these issues within computer language, assignment statements can fail to result in a negative outcome of information. Logic and reasoning are pivotal in computers because they also help develop better computation modules and computer science. In simple terms, logic is reasoning based on observation, empirical data, inference, and mathematics, which create calculations. With inference and calculation, many solutions or conclusions can be made in uncertain environments or through language. Pragmatic force is proved through special performative verbs — pragmatic behaviors. "In computer language, pragmatic verbs are commands and functions.
Different commands or functions lead to different computer running results" (Zhangxing 2014). This affects not only the computer's results but also the computer's behaviors, which happen in sequential order. The behavior of a computer derives from the computer program(s) and language. In this sense, understanding the language the computer is using and semantic evaluation will determine whether the computer programming will suffice its effectiveness and what language is best for the computer to process information effectively at its top performance.
However, though a specific language may work for a computer, its accuracy has to match its execution as well. Mathematics is another crucial aspect of computer logic because it provides and proves logic and absolute values. In computer science and computer programming, users want accurate and logical information relevant to their request's behavior and action. Without mathematics, the sequence of collecting input data of the computer to output data to the user would not be in simple terms equal." Mathematical logic involves applying standard mathematical methods to the study of systems that themselves can be used to formalize mathematics. The apparent circularity is overcome by distinguishing between the object language, in which the formal system is expressed, and the observer's language in which properties of the formal system are expressed and reasoned about" (Reeves & Clark 2003). Mathematics in computer language helps make sense of understanding the user's language through probability and accuracy.
Conclusion
The pragmatics of media, "old" media, "new" media, and multimedia all depend on the language they are given. With innumerable contradictions, paradox theories, and numerous origins of history and meanings of media, their pragmatic gaps will always remain, especially with modern philosophy, technology, and media itself.
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4moAWESOME READ! Truly simplifies the basis of media in terms of Literacy, Language and Logic