Transitions in mediums

After watching Mr. Shirky’s TED talk regarding “How Social Media can make history” I found it thought provoking and insightful into today's world of conversation. His history of the mediums preceding the internet I found accurate in terms of importance to our world.

He suggests that there are only four major medium transitions since the beginning being the printing press, you could argue that before that there was important transitions such as the change of cave drawings being the medium to development of languages.

I difference I see in those 4 vs any others that could be debated as revolutionary is those four changed where the entire worlds (that was provided the luxury of the technology) eyeballs were. Those four took the attention away from the one before it because it provided something that the others could not.

Although I do believe Shirky oversimplifies the evolution of the mediums I attribute that more so to the fact TED talks are only suppose to be 15 minutes long so it forces the speaker to skip over things and get to his main message across. In his talk he does not address the evolution of film and sound driving from vinyl to cassettes and then CDs which although a side ways step allowed for music to be heard and shared more easily.

The one medium revolution Shirky overlooks in his talk is the development of languages and spoken word. This medium I would argue was revolutionary because it allowed for the first time a message to travel and be understood by many. Before this messages didn’t have the ability to travel and were subjected to drawings, this allowed for a message to travel through spoken word and really gave a new sense to story telling.