Senior High School

ICT Department
Media and Information literacy

LESSON 2 : The Evolution of Traditional to New Media

Content Standards
The learners demonstrate an understanding of the historical background of
media and information; basic theories of media and information systems; and
concepts of ownership, control, and regulation of media.

Performance Standards
The learners shall be able to examine technology and identify media through
the different ages.

I. EVOLUTION OF MEDIA

Pre-Industrial Electronic Age

Age/ Pre-Historic (1930s-1980s)
(Before 1700s)

Industrial Age Information Age

(1900s-present)
(1700s-1930s)

Pre-Industrial Age (Before 1700s) - People discovered fire, developed paper

from plants, and forged weapons and tools with stone, bronze, copper and iron.

Examples:
• Cave paintings (35,000 BC)
• Clay tablets in Mesopotamia (2400 BC)
• Papyrus in Egypt (2500 BC)
• Acta Diurna in Rome (130 BC)
 Dibao in China (2nd Century)
• Codex in the Mayan region (5th Century)
• Printing press using wood blocks (220 AD)

Industrial Age (1700s-1930s) - People used the power of steam, developed

machine tools, established iron production, and the manufacturing of various
products (including books through the printing press).

Examples:

• The very first newspaper was printed in the late 1590s in Western Europe
while the First newspaper advertisement appeared in 1704; Magazines
followed suit in 1741.
 • Daguerreotype Camera- developed by Frenchman Louis Daguerre in 1839;
It captured images in flat copper plate sheets
• George Eastman invented the firs easy-to-use handled camera called the
Kodak Camera, making photography accessible to masses in 1888.
• Telegraph- invented by Samuel Morse in 1844; It allowed the rapid transfer
of messages via wires and cables, as the sender encoded the information and
the receiver decoded it at the other end.
• The human voice was the next to be delivered through wires upon the
invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876.
• Phonograph- was invented by Thomas Edison in 1877 to record sound
and music and was later developed by Emile Berliner, thus the creation
of the gramophone system (a device used to play back music recorded on
flat discs or records)
• Eldridge Johnson- improved the gramophone by the invention of the motor
system making the previous manually- operated turntable more mechanized
• James Clerk Maxwell- a Scottish physicist who experimented with
electromagnetic waves (radio waves) in 1873
• Heinrich Hertz- a german physicist who demonstrated the first transmission
of the radio waves in 1887.
• Frenchman Ėdouard Branly and English physicist Oliver Lodge-
worked on improving radio wave frequency transmissions of both the
transmitter and receiver technologies
• Guglielmo Marconi- the first person to recognize the commercial viability of
the radio system; radio was first used in the maritime industry at the onset
of the 1900s until it got heavy communication and information usage during
World War 1.
• Philo Farnsworth- holds the credit for making the first television
transmittal of a picture in 1927. in 1930, he received the first patent for the
electronic television and made a public demonstration of the early prototype
of the television in 1934.

Electronic Age (1930s-1980s) - The invention of the transistor ushered in the

electronic age. People harnessed the power of transistors that
led to the transistor radio, electronic circuits, and the early computers. In this age,
long distance communication became more efficient.

Examples:
• Transistor Radio
• Television (1941)
• Large electronic computers- i.e. EDSAC (1949) and UNIVAC 1 (1951)
• Mainframe computers - i.e. IBM 704(1960)
• Personal computers - i.e. Hewlett- Packard 9100A (1968), Apple 1 (1976)
• OHP, LCD projectors

Information Age (1900s-present) - The Internet paved the way for faster
communication and the creation of the social network. People advanced the use of
microelectronics with the invention of personal computers, mobile devices, and
wearable technology. Moreover, voice, image, sound and data are digitalized. We
are now living in the information age.

Examples:
 William Gibson coined the term cyberspace
• Social networks: Friendster (2002), Multiply (2003), Facebook (2004)
• Microblogs: Twitter by Jack Dorsey, Instagram founded by Kevin
Systrom and Mike Krieger (2006), Tumblr (2007)
• Video: YouTube founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim
(2005)
• Augmented Reality / Virtual Reality
 • Video chat: Skype (2003), Google Hangouts (2013)
• Search Engines: Google (1996), Yahoo (1995)
• Portable computers- laptops (1980), netbooks (2008), tablets (1993)
• Smart phones
• Wearable technology
• Cloud and Big Data
 Personal Computers also evolved during the time of Steven Paul Jobs and
Stephan Gary Wozniak
 Bill Gates of Windows introduced various models and prototypes of hardware
and software during the 1970s

Resources:

UNESCO (2011). Media and Information Literacy Curriculum for Teachers. United
Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

2016. Teaching Guide for Senior HIGH School- Media and Information Literacy.
Commission on Higher Education.

Evolution of Media retrieved from https://www.slideshare.net/markjhonoxillo/the-

evolution-of-traditional-to-new-media