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When Jack Kroll and Tessa Namuth wrote, "It's doubtful if the human race will ever be as astounded by a new form of entertainment as it was by the advent of the movies," for the Winter 1997-98 Special Issue of Newsweek magazine, terms like Internet Video, uTube and Podcasting were yet to be invented.

With each advance in communications technology supporters and critic alike have hail each new medium as visionary and made grim predictions for older technology that was suddenly deemed "outdated." In every instance, old and new have found a way to co-exist.

Just as hand written documents were produced by scribes for the eyes of the learned until the 1430s when Johaanes Gutenberg's printing press with moveable type revolutionized the printing industry, the new printing process encouraged new commodities like newsletters, books, magazines and newspapers for the masses to be produced and to flourish.

With the invention of the Radio, the printing industry was thought to be doomed. Why read when a radio announcer can do it for you? The film industry, which had its first public showing of motion pictures on December 28, 1895 in Paris, by Louis and Auguste Lumiere, faced similar predictions when Television came online with its first commercial broadcast at the 1939 World's Fair in New York.

In 1976, Cable TV, formerly known as Community Antenna Television or CATV, was thought to bring about a cataclysmic end to Commercial Television when Home Box Office (HBO) made history by promoting and televising the heavyweight boxing match known as the "Thriller from Manila" to a record number of households. Four years later Satellite Television posed a threat to Cable when in 1980, H. Taylor Howard, a former NASA scientist turned Stanford University Professor along with a group of his peers produced and sold approximately 5,000 satellite systems.

This decade has proven to be the most challenging for traditional media outlets and the most fun for subscribers. Not only has the method of delivery changed with the advent of the Internet, this new technology has spawned web radio, RSS Feeds, Flash Video, Podcasting and other forms of Internet Video with sites like uTube dedicated solely to this end. Not only that, but content has been re-shaped to fit a plethora of new wireless devices such as the Blackberry and iPhone.

The Internet should be considered the single greatest communications development at this time and should be likened to that of the Gutenberg era which moved control of content away from select gatekeepers and into the hands of the people. If time is the test of each new generation of communications technology, the past 500+ years has shown a tendency for the "new" to increasing express the views of the masses in a way that fills the most logical need, while allowing the "outdated" to reinvent itself in order to compete with what the people want, rather than what the industry chose to provide.

Learn more about this author, Barbara Purvis.
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