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15,000 BCE
Painting
Audience are small family groupings and are used for telling stories, sharing important moments. -
5000 BCE
Oral storytelling
The audience was small families or social grouping as main recipients through repetitive telling. This shares beyond the small group by not formally recorded for broad dissemination. Telling stories, sharing important moments – engaging speaking and listening modes. -
2100 BCE
The written word - early days
Composers: Educated scribes, religious scholars
Audience and reach: Very wealthy or elite. -
1440
The written word
Composers: authors, playwrights, journalists - still educated but spread beyond the religious
Audience and reach: Expanding rapidly – individual homes could now own literature and news media could spread
Possibilities offered by the medium: By 1500, printing presses in operation throughout Western Europe had already produced more than twenty million volumes of story. -
The written word - Novels
Composers: from various social levels
Writing for and by females becomes more normal, and stories include themes relevant to all social levels -
Visual image - Camera obscura, daguerreotype, photography
Composers: Scientists, mathematicians
Audience and reach: Very limited initially – an object of wonder for limited use and display. As the technology improves, cameras make their way into every home. They have opened the world and beyond to human eyes: -
Telephone and Radio texts
Initially scientists, military personnel. Later expanded for mass entertainment and communication. Telephone became an important form of communication between homes and businesses. Radio found its way into every home as it was appropriated for the dissemination of news and entertainment to the masses. Both provided opportunity to engage in almost-synchronous audio communication across the globe. -
Film - Moving pictures
Composers: Film-makers
Audience and reach: Audiences travelled to movie-houses from about the beginning of the c.20th to watch silent film.
Possibilities offered by the medium:
This was an exciting innovation for bringing a new mode of entertainment to people’s lives. The films were silent -
Film - Talkies and newsreels
Composers: Film-makers with big budgets – the rise of the movie-moguls
Audience and reach: As an increasingly commercialised product, big movie companies sourced increasingly big audiences.Motion picture with synchronised sound. Commercially available synchronised dialogue from the 1920’s. -
Television
Composers: Film-making companies, news-makers
Audience and reach: Television rapidly appeared in every home. This signified the increasing reach of entertainment, news and politics. Suddenly, the world came into people’s homes in a very effective medium. This also saw an increase in advertising in people’s lives, impacting further on a growing consumer culture. -
The rise of the computer
Computers have given rise to further technologies:
Mobile phones
The internet
Social media
Gaming
Entertainment streaming
Data tracking
Virtual Reality
Artificial Intelligence -
Multimedia
Democratisation of composition Miniscule and Global reach – crossing boundaries of information/ entertainment/ social New possibilities for creation and reception -
The Internet
Composers: Initially, Tim Berners-Lee developed the webbed network called the world wide web.
Audience and reach: Global. Great interconnectedness between technologies across the globe and inside everyone’s lives. -
Social Media
Composers: Everyday people
Audience and reach: Global. Ubiquitous.
Possibilities offered by the medium:
Various forms of social media have enabled global connections and offer synchronous sharing of text, image or video, to a selected audience. It has created new language possibilities .