Written Assignment #7

1. Discuss the evolution of radio from the 1940s to the present, reflecting on significant

changes that have taken place over this time.

2. What might have happened if radio had developed during the 1930s—the Depression

years—instead of the Roaring Twenties?

Since the beginning of radio in the 1940’s, this form of mass media has gone through many

changes from different programming, to advertising, to broadcast laws, etc. Beginning when the

first radio station, formed in 1920, and soon after was quickly seen as an emerging form of mass

media. By the mid-20’s the radios were more improved and easier to use, and by 1930, were

being purchased by the millions, and continued to grow throughout the great depression. This

would only be the beginning of its journey, Radio, like many other forms of mass media, has

continued to change to meet the ever changing wants and needs of the public.

The 1940’s were a big time for radio. The amount of money spent on radio ads almost doubled

from 1940 to 1945, surpassing the newspaper industry as the main form of advertisement. During

World War II, radio provided people with entertainment and news. Because of a Supreme Court
ruling the NBC sold one of its weaker companies, which soon after became a large competitor

ABC.

The emergence of television ultimately delayed the continuing development of radio and

forced the radio to make some changes in their formats and budget. By the mid-1950’s, stations

focused less on entertainment programs such as soap-operas, detective stories, and comedy

shows, and more on music, talk, and news. Radio began giving increased attention to music and

the recording industry. Soon, local stations were adopting different formats, and developed their

own personalities.

If radio would have been created during the great depression I feel that the course of radio

wouldn’t have altered much from where it already is. Radio during the great depression provided

a social channel for the public during those hard times. People would gather from miles around

to come together to listen to some of the great programs of those days. For radio the 1930’s was

actually the golden age for the form of media, which at the beginning was in over 12 million

households and over 28 million by 1939.

Final Outline

The Internet
 The internet is currently the largest form of mass communications we have today. It

wasn’t even 50 years ago that the newspaper is where we learned of crisis, politics, or sports.

Today in a world of instant pleasure, that is exactly what we have. Whatever you need to know,

view, or even look up is readily available for your entertainment 24/7. Decades before there was

a time when you would have to travel to Paris to see the Mona Lisa or travel to New York to see

the newest Broadway show. Now there are unlimited live streams and pictures that are available

24/7 at your disposal to take you there from the comfort of your own home.

There are several theories on how the internet actually came to fruition .Many people

believe that the Internet began with military computers in the Pentagon called Arpanet in 1969.

Even though we all know that the internet was not invented at the time, history suggests that

these events were the blueprints for the internet. And the many protocols used still today. The

Arpanet project gave delivery to internet protocols sometime during the 70’s and its’ creation

was truly about time-sharing. Time sharing tried to make it possible for researchers to use the

processing power of other institutions computers when they had large calculations to do that

required more power. Arpanet inadvertently failed in its time-sharing purpose, but along the way

made some huge findings that were to result in the creation of the first Internet. These included

email expansions, packet switching applications, and expansion of the (Transport Control

Protocol - Internet Protocol) or TCP/IP.

TCP/IP, it is the primary protocol which methodical people claim is the basis for

determining what the Internet actually is. It was developed in the 1970s in California by Vinton

Cerf, Bob Kahn, Bob Braden, Jon Postal and other members of the Networking Group headed by
Steve Crocker. TCP/IP was conceived to help solve solutions with previous attempts at

communication between computers done by ARPANET.

Bob Kahn visited Stanford in the spring of 1973 and he along with Vinton Cerf argued

the problem of connecting multiple packet networks that weren’t identical. They established the

basic concepts of TCP at that time, and showed it to the newly formed International Networking

Group. This meeting and this expansion discussed is said to have been the beginning of the

Internet.

By 1975 the first prototype was being tested. A few more years were spent on technical

processes, and in 1978 TCP/IPv4 was released. Among those working on this specification were

researchers from Stanford University, several other universities, BBN contractors, Xerox Park

employees, and researchers from the United Kingdom, France and Norway.

There previously was a theory that suggested that AT&T Bell Labs did some of the first

digital transmissions and switching’s in 1962, seven years before the “US Internet” began. When

the Department of Defense (DOD) commissioned the ARPANET to do research into networking,

it was AT&T that provided the necessary tools. In 1969, the year that Arpanet began, AT&T

helped develop UNIX which was the operating system behind the early Internet, and was one of

the key operating systems in the middle and late ARPANET. Between 1969 and 1972, AT&T

also created the C programming language basic which at the time was the main tool of the

Internet software. In 1970, AT&T installed the first cross-country link between the University of

California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and Bolt, Breakneck and Newman (BBN) in Boston. In 1976,

AT&T’s Bell Labs developed Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP), which was distributed with UNIX

one year later.

 Bob Taylor, the person who headed the Arpanet project believed the first internet was

created at Xerox PARC in 1975, when they connected the PUP, the Ethernet with the Arpanet.

PUP (PARC Universal Protocol) was very important later in defining TCP. For the internet to

continue to grow, it also needed a networked personal computer, a graphical user interface with

WYSIWYG properties, modern word processing, and desktop publishing. These, along with the

Ethernet, all came out of his lab at Xerox PARC in the ’70s, and were used on a massive scale

over the next 20 years by Adobe, Apple, Cisco, Microsoft, Novell, Sun and other companies that

were necessary to the development of the Internet.

History shows that the key beginnings were created at the applications level. With the

development of email, the progression from patented databases to Gopher and Ways to and The

World Wide Web, and from newsgroups and conferencing (egg Bitnet and Usenet) through

mailing lists and blogs. One very important trend which gets ignored is the various online

systems, the early Source, CompuServe, Diallo, Prodigy, and AOL and of course APC networks,

Fido net etc. If anything, the history of the use of the Internet, at least from the point of view of

the public, owes more to that stream of development than the more common version initially

created.

All of these theories do have one common denominator. They all take from each other

and, it took most all of the progression to get to where we are today. The history of mass media

goes way back into history. The internet wouldn’t even be a thought or a dream if it weren’t for

the age of transport. At the time they were looking at ways to communicate over long distances.

Some of the early methods were carrier pigeons, smoke signals, and Morse code. Then, as the
age of transport came along the industrial revolution and the beginnings of the information age

came as well