The Media Revolution of the 19th Century

Grant Tabler
Jerry Chomyn
AHSS 2190
29 October 2010

The Media Revolution of the 19^th Century

Information is a commodity that we never seem to have enough of. We are inundated with so much information that it becomes increasingly difficult to find information that is useful to us. This is a symptom of something Neil Postman called “the curse of this information age” (Postman 5). Though we have not always had this information overload, it was not so long ago that technology was developed to combat information scarcity. In one century however, humanity invented the technologies that could not only help solve information scarcity, but also help bring about this information overload. In the 19^th century, spurred by the rapid growth of the industrial revolution, humanity brought forth technologies that are more significant to media than the inventions of any century that preceded it; this paper will highlight some of these inventions, and show how they laid the ground work for the modern information age.

Technocentricity

A scrap of thought I had floating around my documents since some time last year. The idea lead up to the formulation of my Term Paper for my History of Communications class.


"In my day we didn't have any of these modern conveniences"

This is a quote that our generation often associates with the older generation. It is a stereotype which they have perpetuated in which they have had a harder life and in which we, the privelleged new comers, are living a life of laziness with all our new fangled technology. This is an opinion that we ourselves have adopted and perpetuated in our culture to the point where we have developed what I will call a technocentric viewpoint of our world.

That is to say, we believe that any sufficently advanced technology, certainly anything we use daily in our modern lives must have come from our century, or at most the last 100 years. This is an ignorance that we apply because we really don't analyze our past. We think of things like x-rays, hydrogen fuel cells, fiber optics, computers, telephones, even things like radio waves came from scientists and inventors of our century, because how could those primitive 19th century ancestors of ours without any modern convieniences possibly gain such tools of innovation?

In truth all these things were invented in the 1800s...