In today’s ever changing society, nothing has had more of an impact on civilization than the advent of digital media. The world currently functions and hinges around the use of such means as primary tools for communication, whether it’s used to inform, to educate, or to entertain. Through the extensive use of print, video, and audio, the industry has become very versatile as the technology utilized in the field is evolving. Two components of digital media, video games and the Internet, have become prominent components in the world, resulting in millions of its users to become interconnected.
A massive fixture in today’s digital society is video games, an interactive simulation of artificial images and graphics manipulated by a player’s input of commands. In a publication from the Entertainment Software Association, 155 million Americans play video games with four out of five US households owning a device used to play video games. Almost 50% of citizens in the country are exposed to video games and that statistic is bound to increase over time.
Created by A.S. Douglas, the first video game debuted in 1952. As part of his PhD dissertation at the University of Cambridge, Douglas programmed a tic-tac-toe game called OXO on a basic monitor, complete with input from a player’s controller. Afterwards, early in the 1970s, another college student tried his hand at creating a video game of his own. Nolan Bushnell of MIT created the first coin-operated video game named Computer Space. However, despite it flopping, Bushnell went forward and created his own company, Atari, and then developed the organization’s first arcade game, Pong. It became a massive attraction for arcades and bars that held the game.
During this same time, a system named PLATO emerged, boasting numerous technological innovations that became the basis for multiplayer gaming, which included the capability for more players at separate terminals and for shared memory areas. Created by Rick Blomme, PLATO became the basis for online games connecting more and more players across the world. A few decades later, the video game scene expanded towards home consoles with developers like Nintendo, SEGA, and Sony at the helm. Currently, video games are capable at encompassing multiple age groups and demographics so swiftly that it is difficult to predict the decline of this widespread form of digital media.
Another vein of digital media lies in the creation of the Internet and, by extension, the World Wide Web. This medium uses broadband connections and similar elements to send and to exchange information to users across the globe. According to the International Telecommunications Union, there are an estimated 3.2 billion Internet users around the world, of which 2 billion are from developing countries. This prevalent medium has become a permanent fixture in worldwide communication.
The Internet first began from the creation of ARPANET, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, which was originally designed as, not only a tool for network research, but also a tool for national defense purposes against the impending threat at the time, the Soviet Union. J.C.R. Licklider, a computer scientist, was head of the program in 1962 and he saw great potential in the power of the Internet, saying that an “intergalactic community” would serve as an immense communication between people.
By 1982, as the Internet Protocol Suite, a model for how computers should be networked to each other, became standardized. As a result, many systems across the country became interconnected. By 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a physicist from Oxford University, proposed and created an information management system known as the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee went on to create even more internet assets still in use today, such as HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), which establishes links with documents within a web page, and HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), the basis in how Internet pages are all linked to each other. This form of digital media has become essential to worldwide communication.
Regarding the innovative industry of digital media, it is not just limited to the innovations of video games and the Internet. Through the rise of video games and through pioneers such as A.S. Douglass and Nolan Bushnell, home entertainment became more interactive over time. With the advent of the Internet and the work of technical wizards like Tim Berners-Lee and J.C.R. Licklider, society has witnessed a greater sense of interconnectivity through the use of networked computers.
