Easy accessibility to media outlets leads to a larger of number people seeing the information, and in turn leads to a faster curation rate of this information, which leads to even more people seeing it, and so on.  It’s become a second nature to consume and curate material, just like picking up the newspaper in the morning was twenty years ago.

The media landscape is and always will continue to grow and evolve into something bigger than what we can imagine.  Personally, I do not own a smartphone or tablet of any kind.  I am limited to only my laptop.  Though a laptop does give you the full range of information that any smartphone would, I still feel a sense of being behind the times, as compared to someone who does own a smartphone, because of this lack of constant accessibility to the world.  Eventually, an upgrade will be in my future, because of the current and evolving trend that the entities within the growing media landscape are becoming more of a necessity than a hobby.

One of the biggest concepts that came as part of the internet was the search engine, which would enable users to search for anything they want on one site, which would guide them to wherever they wanted to go on the World Wide Web.  The biggest search engine company today is Google, which I would like to go back and look at the brief history behind this giant of a company.

It all starts back in 1995 when Larry Page and Sergey Brin meet at Stanford University.  In the beginning, these two future business partners disagreed on most things and didn’t get along with each other.  While attending Stanford as computer science grad students, Page and Bring collaborate with each other on a search engine called BackRub.  This search engine would run through the Stanford server for over a year, and ended up taking up to much bandwidth on the university’s server.

In 1997, the partners decided that BackRub needed a new name.  They would eventually come up with Google, deriving from the term googol, which is a number starting with a 1, followed by one hundred zeros.  The meaning behind the name is a philosophy that Google would organize an infinite amount of information on the web. In 1998, they would hire their first employee, Craig Silverstein, and would be mentioned in PC Magazine as the search engine of choice in the Top 100 websites for 1998.

As the years roll on, Google’s success would become greater and greater, hiring on some top names in the industry and building offices all around the world, such as Tokyo and Australia.  Today, Google is available in over 72 languages, including Kilngon.  The success of Google is amazing, considering that it only started with two college students and their thoughts.  It just goes to show what humans are capable of with just one simple idea.

http://www.google.com/about/company/history/

The Book starts with the printing press and the printing press in its contexts. Below are a few quotes:

[On Canadian economist Harold Innis]“Another central concept in Inni’s pioneering theory was the idea that each medium of communication tended to create a dangerous monopoly of knowledge. Before he decided to to become an economist, Innis thought seriously of becoming a Baptist minister. The economist’s interest in competition, in this case competition between media, was linked to the radical Protestant’s critique or “priestcraft”. Thus, he argued that the intellectual monopoly of medieval monks, based on parchment, was undermined by paper and print, just as the “monopoly power over writing” exercised by Egyptian priests in the age of hieroglyphs had been subverted by the Greeks and the alphabet. “

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“Samuel Hartlib, an East European exile in Britain who supported many schemes of social and cultural reform, wrote in 1641 that “the art of printing will so spread knowledge that the common people, knowing their own rights and liberties, will not be governed by way of oppression.”

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“All the same, some commentators wished the new epoch had never arrived. The triumphalist accounts of the new invention were matched by what we might call catastrophist narratives.  Scribes, whose business was threatened by the new technology, deplored the arrival of the press from the beginning. For church-men, the basic problem was that print allowed readers who had a low position in the social and cultural hierarchy to study religious texts for themselves, rather than relying on what the authorities told them. For governments, the consequences of print to which Hartlib referred were no reason for celebration.”

This flattening of consumption of the migratory knowledge, which for its times were both dangerous and radical, spurred some groundbreaking democratic effects. This together with the birth of intellectual property rights are very talked about and well discussed effects of the evolution of printing press.

What’s interesting to remember in these times of rapid technological and social media developments are Inni’s thoughts that the printing press undermined the intellectual monopoly of the medieval monks. However, one of the things that the printing press spurred, the birth of the modern and highly regulated intellectual property legislation, is an example that Inni’s was right in his notion that each medium of communication tends to create a new dangerous monopoly.

It’s still to early to make a substantial guess but we should ask ourselves two interconnected questions:

• Will today’s dangerous monopoly of ideas, the modern and unilateral intellectual property, be undermined by the all more converged Internet?
• What might be the next dangerous monopoly of knowledge?

Other Groundbreaking Effects of the Printing Press

These processes were important but the printing revolution managed to spur some additional processes. For example the birth for a market of news, the birth of advertising, and the evolution of private reading

[On private reading] “The dangers of private reading were frequently discussed. Whether or not it acted as a tranquiliser (see p. 18), contemporaries sometimes viewed the activity as dangerous, especially when practiced by subordinate groups such as women and by the “common people”. Parallels with twentieth-century debates about “mass culture” and the dangers of television are clear enough, and they were pointed out more than a generation ago by the sociologist Leo Lowenthal (1900-1993). Today, the rise of the Internet has initiated another debate of this kind.”

The evolution of, and subsequent fight over, the printing press was multifaceted. On the one hand it was an evolutionary technological process; on the other hand it was a struggle of ideas and social discourse; and on the perhaps most radical hand was it a blast of societal innovation that spurred so many parallel processes that ended up shaping the medial, societal, and democratic functions of the representative governmentally controlled mass-society.