Technology

telephone

a wholly new word, created from Greek roots meaning “distant” (tele) and “sound” (phone)

posting and mailing

two existing words used in digital contexts were borrowed from the idea of the traditional postal service

printing press

William Caxton - 1476

meant that writing could be duplicated and broadcast to multiple audiences for the first time.

first phone call

Alexander Graham Bell - 1876

Marconi’s first radio transmission from Cornwall to Newfoundland - 1901

Meant that the human voice stopped being something you could only hear is you were within earshot.

Arpanet

The internet was originally a network called Arpanet named after the US military’s Advanced Research Project’s Agency, which developed it in the late 1960s. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that internet service providers offered private households the ability to access online networks.

personal authorship

made possible by many factors coming together, including the development of broadband communication with faster and bigger download possibilities, new templates requiring little skill for the construction of webpages, cheap or free software and the merging of technologies so that material could be both multimedia and mobile.

prosumers

we are constant producers of communication as well as communication. A term coined by Alvin Toffler intended to suggest that new communication technologies were likely to generate a new kind of society where information is bought and sold as much as other kinds of “produce” had been traded in former times.

identities are not fixed

in 2006 Chandler talked of our identities as being constantly “under construction” as we choose, subconsciously or otherwise, how to present ourselves online. So far, the focus has been on the idea of writing as an act of identity-creation, and considering how that might have changed. But the nature of readership - specifically, who we think might be “reading” us - has also changed.

Hall

1996 - rather than neutralising gender, the electronic medium encourages its intensification. In the absence of the physical, network users exaggerate societal notions of femininity and masculinity in an attempt to gender themselves.