Page 289 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| Mob le Med a

America, and Kofi Asiedu Ofori. Reinventing Minority Media for the 21st Century: A
Report of the Aspen Institute Forum on Diversity and the Media. http://www.aspeninsti
tute.org/atf/cf/%7BDEB6F227–659B-4EC8–8F84–8DF23CA704F5%7D/DIVERSITY.
PDF; Wilson, Clint C., Felix Gutierrez, and Lena M. Chao, eds. Racism, Sexism, and the
Media: The Rise of Class Communication in Multicultural America. Thousand Oaks, CA:
Sage Publications, 2003.
Arthur S. Hayes

MoBile Media
Mobile media have been with humanity since we began walking and talking
simultaneously. Today’s technologies give us the capacity to reach anyone at any
time, regardless of where we or they might be. But this means we also are on call,
literally, whether we want to be or not. Mobile communication begins in every
human being. We walk and we talk. The act of being human is an act of mobile
communication.

a BriEF hisTory oF moBiLE mEDia
Technologies entered the process of mobile communication with the inven-
tion of portable writing systems. Carvings on a wall are not mobile. Scribblings
on papyrus, parchment, and paper are—because they can be carried along with
us. Writing implements ranging from brushes to quills and pens of various
shapes and constructions allow us to become producers as well as consumers of
mobile written media.
The end of the nineteenth century brought a burst in both traditional portable
written media and new media that extended the range and content of communi-
cations. Laptops in Victorian times were fold-up, portable desks, not computers,
and the Kodak camera, introduced by George Eastman in 1888, was a camera
that anyone could take anywhere.
Mobility in media progressed only slightly in the first part of the twentieth
century. Radios by Transitone placed in automobiles in 1929 were the rare step
forward. But the transistor, invented in 1948, revolutionized communications,
and embodied Buckminster Fuller’s “dymaxion principle” (Nine Chains to the
Moon, 1939) of technologies getting smaller and smaller and doing more and
more. It did not take long for radios to move from behemoths in the living
room to devices you could hold in your hand and take with you on a walk in
the park.
The ancestors of the cell phone soon followed, but it would be decades before
cell phones would become widespread. In the meantime, portable communica-
tion devices had a vibrant life in fiction, ranging from Dick Tracy’s talking wrist
watch, to car phones in movies such as in the 1951 version of the movie Sabrina,
to Star Trek’s communicators—which many cell phones have come to resemble
in the twenty-first century.