Media as a glue to the society

The development of society has been and always will be dependent on the nature of communications existing within it's members. As it is natural that social groups rely on some form of communication between it's members for their existence(there is no society without communication). Perhaps the first social groups in humans developed as they developed the early means of communication such as hand gestures and sounds(the first language).

As the media for communication evolved through ages, so has the society evolved around them. The reach of a media system determines how large society it can reach, the production costs determine the range of content producers and thus the range for the content, the acceptance of a media form determines the user group it serves. These three factors combine to affect the shape, size and behaviour of the society.

For our examples let us first consider the elaborate system of town criers that acted as a information highway in the middle ages. The reach of this media was limited with the expansion requiring introduction of more difficult to update and maintain "relays" i.e. town criers, this lead to small kingdoms centred around a capital. The production and transmission costs for the content was high, thus only a single centre for content existed which was the state. And although different media such as flyers or posters existed they were not usable and duplicable respectively. Most people in the middle ages were unable to read and write thus rendering written communication useless. People could understand posters but they were difficult to create and duplicate with hand thus rendering the state controlled media as a singular information highway.   

For the second and rather contrasting example of today's society let us consider the internet. It has a high reach in most of the developed and the developing parts of the world. The production cost for content is negligible for most of the people in most cases(it took me 0$ to write this post) thus leading to multiple centres for content leading to multiple views about a topic being transmitted throughout the world and this media over the years has became extremely user friendly requiring no or little technical expertise to create and access content. This has lead to a global society, including almost all users of the internet and has lead to a widely distributed collective consciousness in which most people hold individual opinions about things and collective movements are rare.

The above examples show how media can effect the society in which it resides .