The Ultimate Communication Medium

Our choice on how we send and receive information has vastly increased over the past century into an endless amount of options. Whether it's watching the latest news events on your television or sending a birthday card via the postal system, information has become more accessible to everyone of this new, information needy world.

What if you need to send that birthday card in one day across the country? As you know that would be impossible due to the restrictions on speed of the postal service medium. Speed is a major restriction of many communication mediums along with the distribution and reliability of the information. The one communication medium that can come closest to satisfying all of these needs is the Internet. In the reading by Adams & Clark, much was discussed on the advantages of the internet and it being the best source for communicating. I agree with this statement as most anyone will. The internet now has the ability to relay real time information via pack switching and the increased speeds brought by digitization of information such as video and pictures. If you want to find out the score of a baseball game you will be able to do this down to seconds delay. The internet also allows interpersonal communication between two people to happen at extreme speeds. With the software being cheap, it is now easy to set up voice over ip chats where you can synchronously chat and see one another over great distances. The internet also allows quick asynchronous chat as well via the email system.

I do believe the internet has some paramount advantages and is by far the most useful communication medium. I mean where else can you control the information you want to see via a hyper textual language. The human is the internet. We are the ones who create what we want to see and know. With these advantages come many constraints that the internet brings to us due to this massive medium of information. The internet is flooded with wrong and biased information. Due to the fact that anyone can be an author on the internet you must be aware and carefully filter the information you are looking for. I would have to say the biggest affordance of the internet is also its biggest constraint. The ease to access information on the internet at great speeds also allows people to discover personal information on you and others via many different methods. By all means the advantages outweigh these minor disadvantages and the internet will remain to be the ultimate communication medium.