Neil Armstrong said “ A small step for man, a giant leap for mankind”. And boy, was he right. Today, TikTok-ing is a profession, there are courses that teach you how to become an online journalist and Twitter is the new battlefield. We are the digital natives.
But, have you ever stopped to wonder, what came before?
The printing press was inven….wait, this isn’t a history lecture. Let’s switch it up.
13th century: Johannes Gutenberg introduces the printing press to the Western world.
Hmm, not quite far back enough.
8th century: The first known printed text originates in China.
Still too close. There was surely some way of staying updated before there was paper?
In the beginning, there were town criers, people who went from place to place spreading information they learnt.
Then came papyrus, which may sound like paper, but it’s not. It’s kind of like paper’s grandfather, parchment being the father. Next in line was paper itself.
But somewhere in between, there were also Emperor Augustus’s cursus publicus, that strange yet insightful dabbling with pigeon carriers and of course, the one that started it all — smoke signals.
And finally came, the newspaper, bringing the penny press and the greatest name in journalism, Joseph Pulitzer.
Let’s fast forward a few years. A few being 100 or so. Telegraphs, telephones and then the television completely revolutionised the face of journalism. But just when people thought they’d seen it all, BOOM. In came the internet, and the world went upside down. Not for us of course. We love the internet. But for people who saw it first, it was probably a bit of a shock. Over a span of 30 years, they saw news go from a paper on their porch, to a screen in their living room, to a slab in hand in their bedrooms.
This hand held miracle gave birth to the information society, our society.
We’re not asking you to like, share or comment, not yet at least. But this is a part of our daily lives, and we love it. We’re the netizens, born into a networked society and out there is an endless deluge of content just waiting to be liked, shared or commented on. Even as you read this, it’s growing, numbers are climbing and information is evolving.
Researchers at Statista predict that by 2025, global data creation will have reached more than 180 zettabytes. To give you some context, you, yes you alone, created 1.7 MB of data per second last year. (Don’t believe us? Check out what TechJury and Domo have to say.) That’s a little more than 18,000 MB of data in a day, if you spent 3 hours a day on the internet. And let’s be honest, we all spent way more than that. Not to worry though, you’re not alone. There’s literally millions like you. Look out for the next blog to find your comrades. Till then, you guessed it…
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