How the Internet is a Communication Medium

The internet can satisfy many needs of the person who is using it. Whether it is to download a song, get the news, check your e-mail, or look at a company's website. The internet can fulfill many interpersonal and mass mediums, so it is quite hard to give it one label (Adams & Clark). A combination of satisfying both interpersonal and mass mediums is call macromedium (Adams & Clark). On the other and you also have metamedium which is a smaller scale; "it enables us to operate on both ends of traditional mass media (Adams & Clark)." You can have access to radio, video and telephone through the use of internet at the touch of a finger. As with the invention of new tehcnologies, there are always some difficulties. One in particular is reliability, because receiving the message is only half the struggle. The message also has to be correct and cannot be lost in translation. Formulaic packets allows the massage to be transmitted from one point to the next. "Now it was approaching levels of reliability necessary for the transfer of digital data (Adams & Clark)." The next issue was speed. From the 1970's until 1991 the speed had increased to 45Mbps. At this speed it was possible to transmit thousands pages of texts, hundreds of photos and even half a minute of videos per second (Adams & Clark). Just think of when we were growing up, we had a slow connection of 56K (dial-up), and now we have cable and DSL which allow us to download songs, videos and even movies within seconds or a few minutes. Last but not least is the problem with distribution. Although there over 50 million hosts on the internet, that does not mean there are 50 million people with computers to gain access to their websites. Many people use computers through alternative sources such as schools/colleges and libraries (Adams & Clark). "People living in urban areas have more internet service providers and lower rates than people living in rural areas (Adams & Clark)." So it is hard to say who has access to the internet at all times and who does not, but there is always a way to get your hands on it. The internet has become very multimediated by combining many different sources together. You can get videos, texts, television, video games and even the radio all through the computer. It is amazing to think how one technology can combine so many spearate sources of media that we used through our lives. Hypertexing also plays a key role on the internet. "It is the ability to link any type of content to any other type of content (Adams & Clark)." Just clicking on a word may bring you somewhere just a clicking on a picture might take you somewhere else, you are connected to other sources through your source (Adams & Clark). The internet is very interactive in many different aspects. You can talk to people through AIM, AOL or e-mail, you can create a website for others to view and interact with as well interacting with someone elses. You can subscribe to letters and emails for your interests, it is amazing at how many different ways you can interact with others. Digitalization has also impacted computers greatly. Like the example given in the text, cd's or record players can be affected by a scracth and have to worry about 'wear and tear,' where as digital does not because it does not physically physically come in contact with the medium (Adams & Clark). But digital has to worry about a virus or a corrupt file which can delete or ruin whatever your file consists of (Adams & Clark). It is interesting to see how far computers/internet has come from what it had once been. Communicaiton is much easier and rapid and information is at your fingertips, you can sit glued to your chair for hours and get the same enjoyment of listening music, watching movies, getting the news and updates all from one media source. Speed of the internet is always increasing and getting your hands on anything becomes faster and easier.