Modern Communication Technologies - Essay Example

Modern Communication Technology Name: Institution: Executive summary This paper highlights the different technologies that have evolved over time to become what they are today. Four technologies have been discussed in which three are physical objects and one is a virtual concept that rides on other technologies. Televisions, computers and Smartphone are physical items which have been improved over time to become what they are today. On the other hand, social media is an idea supported by the internet and content providers who are ordinary people with ideas to share. These technologies haven used to communicate information and ideas. The television what the earliest and it was used to communicate information one way. Computer have come up and enabled a two way communication which may be simultaneous or non-simultaneous. Eventually networking has become a necessity and in this case social networking; this has brought about social sites and the idea of social media. These concepts will be discussed in details with this paper. Introduction In this century and age we are in transition towards living in a fully digital world. Manual data processing and analogue systems are being phased out and ushering a new era of digital system and automated processing. The gadgets that we use on a daily basis have become powerful enough to help us achieve many goals within the shortest time possible. However, resources have become limited due to advancement of technology which in turn forces better ways of resource management to be invented. A discussion on televisions, Smartphone, and computers will highlight the evolution of technology and how the balance between resource saving and powerful systems has been struck. Social media has been enabled by the invention of these technologies; without computers and internet, social media would have been hard to achieve. Televisions Televisions have eventually become part of our day to day lives in this time and age; it’s a source of entertainment, information and educative content. Televisions have existed since the late 19th century where European and North American inventors come up with innovative ideas that gave birth to the technologies that support television (Wu et al. 2006). In 1900 at the World’s Fair in Paris, the word “television” was first introduced in the First International Congress of Electricity held in France (Bellis, n.d). The word ‘television is a hybrid word, coming from both Greek and Latin. “Tele” is Greek for “far,” while “vision” is from the Latin “visio,” meaning “sight.” Televisions have evolved from giant boxes to flat thin energy saving appliances. Moreover, televisions have changed in terms of technology used, their appearance, picture quality and various other aspects. A good example is the color system. In the beginning, the television was a monochrome system; it could only display one color. Then the color television came about in the 1940s where several standards were adopted an example being the NTSC color TV standard on 17 December 1953 (Wu et al., 2006). A major distinction is the concept of analog and digital television; it is differentiated by the signal that the television receives and converts into video and audio. Figure 1: John Logie Baird and his television apparatus in 1926 According to Wu et al. (2006), digital television has become a preference from the global community and many countries are now switching to it. Apart from delivery of interference and distortion-free audio and video signals; it can do so while achieving much higher spectrum efficiency than analog television. It can also interface with other communication systems, computer networks, and digital media, very easily. This enables data casting and multimedia interactive services which an important element of the ongoing digital revolution leading toward the information society (Wu et al., 2006). Having a television set only is not simply enough; one needs to have reception to broadcast signals from the television service providers. Many countries have different local broadcasters that provide content to be displayed and consumed by the citizens. It may range from television series, movies, news a good example being the internationally recognized CNN and so much more. The content is however regulated by different local and international bodies that restrict the broadcasters from showing content that may damage the morals or adhesion in the society. In March 1935, among the television service was started in Berlin, Germany. Electronic cameras were developed in 1936, in time for the Berlin Olympic Games. This allowed a greater audience to watch the Olympics from miles away. In November 1935, television broadcasting began in Paris, again using a mechanical system for picture analysis (Peters, 2000). Figure 2: An "iconoscope" camera, Berlin Olympics, 1936 Televisions have come a long way and like any other technology, they have been improving over time. They have been engraved in most societies as a source of information. This information may be harmful or very useful to the society depending on the regulations set on content being broadcasted. Health concerns have also been sited with a greater population of children being addicted to the television. However, the television has brought more good than harm to the global community in terms of information rendering. Smart phones Mobile telephones have become very popular in the 21st century. In the 90s, the mobile phones had just been introduced to the market and only a selected few could be able to afford them. They were big and bulky with only the basic features which were to receive and make calls. With time, improvement in technology has made it possible to increase the functionalities of the phone and at the same time making it more usable, smaller and provide better interaction. By1995 mobile phones had started hitting the market and they caused quite a stir. Owning a phone at that time was pretty hard and despite their “ugly” looks compared to the phones today, people went fanatical about them (Chowdhury, 2012). They were huge in size and with a long antenna, small monochrome screens and poorly placed buttons as shown in the diagram below. Figure 3: A cell phone from 1995 Almost two decades later, mobile phones no longer have antenna and the buttons are not physical objects but part of the software. The screens are almost the size of the phone and display in color. The phones are much smaller, slimmer and use less power compared to their predecessors (Chowdhury, 2012). The mobile phone has become “smarter” due to what it is capable of doing. With a more efficient processor and better software, the Smartphone can now do a lot more including organizing a person’s day to day activities. This transformation has been enabled by the development in hardware technology that is keener in reducing the size and power of components but at the same time increasing their efficiency. The diagram below shows the look of the current mobile phones that people are fanatical about by the end of the year 2012. Figure 4 :A Nokia Lumia 800 (2012) The term "Smartphone" is simply used to create a distinction between "regular" phones and mobile phones which support operating systems and have advanced facilities. The phone operating system allows the mobile phone user to run application that may include word processing, email and internet access, organizers etc. In other words, the Smartphone has computer like features including a greater processing power. There are a number of known Smartphone manufacturers including Sony, Blackberry, Motorola, T-Mobile, Nokia, Apple. The number of manufactures is however growing as materials become more available and the knowledge becomes widely spread. The competition lies on aspects such as greater processing power, more internal and external memory support, better user interaction and provision of a better platform in mobile application development (Vaughan-Nichols, 2003). With the ability to process more information smart phone become more vulnerable to attacks like the ones on computers. The attacks may include: attacks from the internet by worms, viruses, or Trojan horses, infection from compromised PC during data synchronization and peer smart-phone attack or infection (Zhu, Wang, & Guo, 2009).. Smartphone are however improving by the day and may have the ability to surpass the normal computers on a day to day basis. Computers Computers have come a long way from the monstrous machines, which consumed a lot of power and produce a lot of heat just to do a multiplication, to the very efficient desktops and laptops we have today. It has drawn more technologies with it and enabled invention of new machines, software and objects that have taken root in the society. Evolution of computers is span over four distinct generations and the first generation was from 1940s to the 1950s. This is when the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was first created. It weighed 27 tons and consumed 150 kilowatts of power with thousands of vacuum tubes, crystal diodes, relays, resistors, and capacitors (History of Computers, n.d.). Figure 5 : The ENIAC System This was followed by the second generation computers, existed between 1955 – 1960, which used transistors which consumed less power and produced less heat. The third generation computers in the 60s are distinguished by use of integrated circuits (ICs), also known as microchips. They were made out of silicon, which is a semiconductor, making them simple to manufacture. Finally the fourth generation is dated from 1971 to present date where the CPU was used to make the micro computers (History of computers n.d). Figure 6 : A modern day miniture computer Computers have two vital components that enable it to operate as it does and these components are the hardware and software. These two are heavily dependent on each other and one cannot operate without the other. The hardware provides the platform for processing inputs and giving back output whereas the software contains the logic that is require to perfom the actual processing (Bubenko & Impagliazzo, 2005). Networking between computers is also a major milestone in the computer industry. It enables two or more computer communicate and work on the same task simultaneously. It has enables scalability of computers in terms of processing power and data storage. The internet was developed after networking became possible. It has become the cornerstone of information sharing and general communication. Video conferencing, VoIP, emails and so many other communication channels ride on the existence of the computers, networking and the internet (Ceruzzi, 2003). The day to day physical objects are being replaced by virtual objects in form of software and applications. A good example may be the use of paper to file documents. Paper use for document formulation and transfer is slowly being phased out by the word processor e.g. Microsoft word. More computer applications are being created to ease the effort needed to do work manually. According to Capron and Perron (1993), enterprise systems, information management systems and scientific applications, all these minimize the effort needed to accomplish any given task. Work that could be done in a whole day or two has been simplified to a button’s click on a user interface. Social media According to Nations (2012), Social Media cannot be clearly defined due to the different perspective everyone has on it. It is therefore easier to break it down and define the two words in the term that has become very common. Media can be defined as an instrument of communication while social refers to interaction between people. Therefore social media is a platform for interactive communication. On the other hand Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) define social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, which allows the creation and exchange of user-generated content." The main difference social media and other forms of communication media like television is that not only do social media allow you to get information; it enables one to share their own views to the world at large. Being accessible around the world, one can air their views globally and within a very short period of time. Closely related to the concept of social media is social networking; this is basically collaboration of people of the same mindset over a large geographical area. Social media rides on computer technology and the internet. With mobile phones becoming more powerful and almost similar to computer, they have enabled more people to use the social media sites wherever they are. Smartphone have dramatically increased the use of social media especially for the young people in the society who are fonder of activities such as texting, tweeting and blogging. Quite a number of sites have cropped up to provide social media services. Different companies use different strategies which they protect and patent to maintain uniqueness and recognition. Tweeting has become a common word used by millions almost every day and so is the social site tweeter. Companies such as Facebook, Myspace, GooglePlus have international recognition as the major social networking sites. Each of this companies use a model that allows its users to read other peoples thoughts as well as share their own (Boyd, & Ellison, 2005). Figure 7: Well-known Social Media Sites Marketers are now actively using social media to market products and services due to the great audience that is hooked to these social sites. It is similar to advertising by word of mouth but in this case much easier; all you need to do is to have a following of people interested with contents of your space on the social media and post an advertisement (Leary, 2013). Other than marketing, many news agencies have adopted social sites as a means of fast dissemination of information. It is even faster than airing the news on television and it actually get o more people. Social media also has its down sides; it may be used as a platform to propagated hate speech and content that is harmful to the society. Regulating content on social media has become hard due to the speed at which content is being transferred. This may pose some danger locally and internationally and especially for the generations to come. Conclusion The global community has grown tremendously in terms of technology in the 20th and 21st century. From televisions, computers, phones and many gadgets; what has really helped is the quest for better and more efficient ways of performing tasks. With the increase of information, betters channels have come up to allow passing this information in the cheapest way and to reach the biggest audience. However, we may be still very young in terms of technology and still have a lot of work to do in the advancement of technology. New ideas are still being formed and adopted and maybe in a few years time we may not need to hold a mobile phone but rather it will be implanted into our bodies due to the heavy reliance to it we have developed. Reference Bellis, M. (n.d.). Timeline - The Invention of Television. Inventors. Retrieved April 13, 2013, from http://inventors.about.com/od/tstartinventions/a/Television_Time.htm Boyd D. M, & Ellison, N. B. (2005). Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship. Michigan State University Bubenko, J., & Impagliazzo, J. (2005). History of Nordic Computing IFIP WG9.7 First Working Conference on the History of Nordic Computing (HiNC1), June 16 -18, 2003, Trondheim, Norway. Boston, MA: International Federation for Information Processing. Capron, H. L., & Perron, J. D. (1993). Computers & information systems: tools for an information age (3rd ed.). Redwood City, Calif.: Benjamin/Cummings Pub. Co.. Ceruzzi, P. E. (2003). A history of modern computing (2nd ed.). 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