The Communications Revolution and You *
YOU ARE AN EYEWITNESS to a communications revolution.
At the beginning of the 21st century, an entirely new medium—the World Wide Web—has emerged at the center of a converging global communications system.
Nearly everyone is now familiar with this decentralized computer network linking hundreds of millions of people to over a billion pages of information. As a mass medium, it’s extraordinarily flexible, combining elements of newspapers, magazines, radio, and television along with new interactive formats. It’s also a personal medium, allowing one-on-one conversations, support groups, virtual communities, and individualized access to information.
Just as unforeseen social impacts occurred with the introduction of printing, film, radio, and television in previous generations, the Web is producing its own set of social shock waves. Incitements to violence, hate speech, declining morals, erosion of professional standards, and “dumbing down” of the news are items from a long list of concerns.
Not all of these can be blamed, directly or indirectly, on the Web. And in any event, attempts to impose heavy-handed government regulation would be unprincipled and probably unworkable. In a series of cases that went to the heart of the control issue, the U.S. Supreme Court said that the Web would have full Constitutional protection as a medium of political speech, like print media, and should not be even partly regulated, like television and radio. This was a factor in its rapid growth in the last years of the 20th century.
With rapid growth came job opportunities for skilled Web writers, designers, and programmers. At the same time, many saw an increasing need to understand this new and complex system within the traditions of free speech and public service.
The challenge for a new generation of journalists, broadcasters, advertising, and public relations professionals will be to build a system that provides more than just a quicker way to receive the same old information products. As shown in the graphic (above), the traditional "top-down" information system has become only one limited mode of communication.
When you learn to create new media and design Web pages, you are learning to use a powerful new tool with impacts that are not fully understood. It’s more than just code running on a server. There are ethical, social, and legal responsibilities that come with the job.
The idea behind this program, as well as the book Web Design for the Mass Media, written by an RU faculty member, is to raise a few important issues as you learn the skills you need. And so, as you begin to appreciate the extraordinary power of the new media, you’ll learn how to work not only effectively, but also wisely.
These are exciting times to be entering the mass media.
Improved Means to an Unimproved End?
Job opportunities are a good reason to learn about the Web. But what, if anything, makes the Web more than just another flashy gizmo, like an electric fork or a self-licking ice cream cone? If we can get the same news through another medium a few minutes or hours later, what difference does the Web make?
Henry David Thoreau asked a similar question about the telegraph in his often-cited 1854 book, Walden. There is an illusion about “modern improvements” Thoreau said.
“Our inventions are ... pretty toys which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end ... We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate... We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.”
As it turned out, Maine and Texas had all kinds of important things to communicate—election returns, debates over slavery, and business news along with the latest buzz about British royalty. But the point is important. Speed and quantity of communication do not necessarily improve quality. And the idea that the new media, as well as the old, merely allows us to "Amuse Ourselved to Death" (in the words of the late communications scholar Neil Postman) may prove more to be a precient warning .
The Vision for a World Wide Web is not a new one
The digital media revolution, like most technological revolutions, started out as a concept among scientists and visionaries long before new hardware allowed engineers to create prototypes.
One early visionary was science fiction writer H.G. Wells, known for books like “War of the Worlds” and “The Time Machine.” Wells believed that a global system of electronic encyclopedias would advance intelligence far more than universities, which he considered stodgy and reactionary.
Another visionary was White House science advisor Vannevar Bush, who had overseen the development of scientific defense projects in World War II. Bush thought people in the future would use a device he called the “Memex” to store books and personal information.
In 1964, Martin Greenberger of MIT wrote that computers could become the “information utilities” that would fulfill Bush’s “Memex” vision.
Another visionary was Ted Nelson, who represented the unlimited horizons of the California perspective of the 1960s. Nelson envisioned automatic links
between ideas and called them “hypertext.” He tried to start a universal publishing system called “Xanadu” in the 1960s and 1970s, but ran up against the limits of available computer hardware and software.
While none of these ideas was successful in its own right, each helped paint a different picture of what a global interactive medium could become.
And it has become all these things, and more. Much more. Asked what was the good of electricity, Thomas Edison once famously asked, What is the good of a new-born baby?
* Adapted from the introduction to Web Design for Mass Media, published in 2001 by Allyn Bacon Longman, currently under revision. Copyright Bill Kovarik, 2001
At the same time, new comm- unications technologies have displaced many thousands of journalists and production workers in broadcasting and printing. New jobs in media are going to students with new digital media production skills. 
HG Wells 
Vannevar Bush 
Martin Greenberger 
Ted Nelson