DEFINING COMMUNICATION AND TECHNOLOGIES: - week 1 lecture!

So basically this lecture informed us upon the basis of what communication and technologies are, how the intertwine with one another and where they originated from. Communication is any process that transfers, transmits or makes information known to other people and this originated from Aristotle's book Rhetoric more than two and a half thousand years ago. This account of communication is simple but effective where communication is face to face and the communicators have a common background. Unfortunately the world is no longer like that and a more complex model has been suggested by Shannon and Weaver in their book The Mathematical Theory of Communication which suggests that a better model is:
The speaker produces an effect on the transmitter which sends a message (which is degraded by the noise of the transmission process) that is intercepted by the receiver which converts it into an effect that is heard by the listener. So therefore this problem of interpretation have been accentuated due to the fact that new communication technologies are interactive. Technology is the scientific study of mechanical arts and their application to the world. Technology is a constantly developing relationship between the material world and human ideas. Marshall McLuhan argues that technologies are extensions of human body. Analog technology functions by representing variable forces that are continuous in both time and space through dials that allow the relatively imprecise modulation of those forces. Digital technology relies on storing bits of binary information. The printing press was the first communication technology to make information available to a mass audience: books, pamphlets and newspapers were a nerccesary precondition to the development of mass society. In 1837 Samuel Morse first sent electrical impulses down a wire in patterns that could be reinterpreted as a message at the other end. He sent the first public telegraph message in 1844. In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell patented the first telephone whichallowed sounds, including the human voice to be transmitted over longdistances. In 1895 Marconi invented a process of wireless telegraphy that allowed messages to be sent over long distances by modulating electro-magnetic radiation. In 1926 John Logie Baird first demonstrated television that was gradually refined until it could broadcast sound and moving pictures together. By the late 1930s, TV was ready to be marketed to a mass audience and was presented in London and at the 1939 New York World Fair. World War Two intervened and it wasn't until the late 1940s that TV gained a mass market in the USA. TV was introduced into Sydney and Melbourne in 1956 and to Brisbane in 1959.

Those were the notes that I took from the lecture that I thought were interesting and useful! Not a favourite topic in all honesty but it is interesting to learn where it all originated from and why.