Presentation Reactions - Blog #6

From Vinyl to Visual: Three Technologies That Rewired How We Experience Media

Long before streaming and smartphones, a handful of inventions quietly reshaped how people listen, watch, and connect. Compact discs, radio, and motion pictures each solved a different problem — and as someone who collects physical media, I've come to appreciate just how much groundwork they laid.

The Compact Disc: A Quiet Revolution

The CD was developed by Philips and Sony, building directly on the technology of records and cassettes that came before it. It offered more data, more durability, and the ability to skip instantly between tracks — features vinyl and tape never allowed.

As someone who owns a sizable collection of both CDs and vinyl records, I find the contrast fascinating. Vinyl has a warmth and ritual to it, but there's no denying the CD's practicality made it the format that carried music into the digital era.

That practicality also made singles commercially viable, since CDs were cheaper to produce than vinyl or cassettes. And because CDs could store any kind of digital data, their real legacy extends well past music into software and gaming.

Radio: A Contested Birth

Radio's origin story is genuinely messy. Even court trials have struggled to settle who truly invented it, given how many people experimented with radio waves throughout the 1890s. Heinrich Hertz reportedly saw no practical use for the technology, while Guglielmo Marconi is the name history remembers as its inventor.

What strikes me most is how radio never really left — it just changed form. I rarely tune into an FM station in my car, but every time I connect Apple CarPlay, I'm relying on the same radio-wave technology Marconi pioneered over a century ago.

Motion Pictures: Nobody's Sole Invention

Film had no single inventor either. It emerged from contributors like Eadweard Muybridge, Thomas Edison, and the Lumière brothers, culminating in the first public film exhibition in 1895.

As a film lover, that collaborative origin resonates with me — movies have always felt like a communal art form, and it seems fitting that its invention was communal too. That 1895 screening didn't just entertain; it created an entirely new visual language still shaping how we understand the world.

AI Disclosure: AI was not used in the research and information for this blog post. All information came from notes that I took while watching the EOTO presentations on the History of Communication Technology. I then prompted Claude AI Chatbot to help me shape my notes into a blog post of between 300-400 words, written in a smooth and professional style. Finally, I added appropriate images and captions to help break up the type and give the blog post a professional look.