Media Usage

When you hear the word ‘media’, what comes to your mind? For me, the first image honestly that comes to my mind is a television broadcast of the daily news. Because for logical reasons, I’ve always thought of media use as a means of providing information to the public. However, as I thought about it further, I find that media can be dissected further to reveal more uses which extends more than just towards the general public. Media usage does not only involve communication with the general audience and our social networks, but also in the proximities of our own private lives.

Ages ago, media has already been used, even in the Stone Age. It might not be apparently obvious to the naked eyes, but those cave paintings you see from pictures of archaeological discoveries? Yes, they were the films and television shows of the Stone Age. Those were the ways the Neanderthal would tell their stories and preserve them for the future generations to see. Those were the ways they can talk to their peers effectively without having to vocally voice out their thoughts, seeing as the languages of today that allows us to understand each other wasn’t invented yet back then.

This tells the story of how two men on horses are being chased by slightly agitated and deformed cattles.

As we progress along the timeline, humans start to become more and more advanced with their communication system. We start to use fire as a signal to faraway associates, invent papers and ink to simplify the now-extinct cave paintings into a smaller and more mobile communication, train animals like pigeons to carry our messages to another party because the mailing system wasn’t too structured yet, create telephones that enables us to hear the voice of a loved one from afar, even invent something like Morse Codes for the purpose of the military’s communication system. Looking back, these traditional methods are all the things of the past now compared to what we have invented now.

Could be non-existant in twenty years time, who knows?

When we entered the modern era, it’s almost as if new breeds of communication devices have been produced for everyone to enjoy and utilize to their fullest. More specifically, the Internet has contributed a lot in the creation of these devices. The World Wide Web has extended our reach further than just a few hundred miles, as well as providing a very fast speed in connecting with the person we needed to contact. This very Internet transformed our ordinary cell phones that can merely call or message our person in contact into a high tech, multi-purpose device that can also be a camera, contains playable games, connect to the Internet and even record our locations at the present time as well as the usual weather forecast. At this rate, our phones can be their own shopping malls.

It can tell the time too? That's just mindblowing.

The reason most of these things have come to exist is because we humans find the need to contact another one of our species to reach out in the easiest and best way possible. We need to share and exchange for the benefit of our survival and lives, and for the sake of our emotional needs as well. Without another person to communicate with, it is almost as if we could fall into our own insanity, because one can only contain so much inside of their minds and hearts.