[Teaching] Introduction to a Brief History of Media

We begin by asking a deceptively simple question: What is media?

At its core, media is any technology that enables the storage, organization, transmission, and dissemination of information.

When we hear the word today, we tend to think of “mass media” — newspapers, television, the internet — technologies that spread information rapidly across wide distances. Commonly, people imagine the story of media beginning with the invention of the electric telegraph in the early 19th century. But is that really where media begins?

To challenge this assumption, I’d like to share a photo I took while hiking in Inner Mongolia in 2017. It shows a signal tower from the Great Wall, built around 200 BC.

This ancient system functioned as a broadcasting technology: semaphoric signals such as black smoke conveyed urgent military information over long distances, faster than any messenger on horseback. The infrastructure was costly, maintained by networks of roads, canals, post stations, forced labor, and the imperial bureaucracy.

Yet semaphoric media never truly disappeared — we still use visual signaling systems today, from mission control centers to lighthouses and medical imaging technologies.

If we zoom out, we see that modern electromechanical and digital media make up less than one percent of the long timeline of media history. For more than four millennia, writing systems carried the heavy load as the dominant medium, but before writing, oral traditions and pictorial expression were the norm.

Cave paintings and small figurines made by Paleolithic peoples are early examples of media before writing. Scholars have debated their purpose: not simply aesthetic decoration, and not convincingly explained by structuralist models of hierarchy. Instead, many anthropologists interpret them through totemism, fetishism, and prescientific magic — symbolic practices tied to hunting, fertility, and communal survival.

Alongside these totemic, prehistoric artifacts, monuments emerged as an early form of public media. Works like Urfa Man in Upper Mesopotamia (c. 9000 BC) or Stonehenge (c. 3000 BC) mark the rise of “megalithic media.” These massive stone constructions stored information immovably across generations, serving as public records of collective memory, social identity, and communal power.

In terms of their materiality, monuments can be described as exceptionally “conservative” or obdurate. their forms remain remarkably consistent across centuries or even millennia. Think of the Luxor obelisks in Egypt, the Roman obelisks erected by Augustus, and the Washington Monument in the United States. 

From the Temple of Hadrian in Rome to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, such monumental forms repeat across time, shaping community memory and projecting political authority.  Even at the height of the Cold War, Fidel Castro’s 1959 wreath-laying at the Lincoln Memorial underscores how monuments continue to function as symbolic sites that anchor collective identity.

Finally, we turn to the birth of writing and print. The Narmer Palette, dated to about 3200 BC, is one of the earliest hieroglyphic artifacts. At once an artwork and a piece of war propaganda, it shows how early writing was fundamentally pictographic: even without knowing the ancient Egyptian language, we can infer its message of conquest and unification.

Writing systems like this would revolutionize human political organization, allowing not just ephemeral signals or immovable monuments, but portable, repeatable, and scalable storage of meaning — a pivotal moment in the long arc of media history.

As we wrap up, I want you to think about how these ancient  media forms — smoke signal towers, cave paintings, stone monuments, and hieroglyphic writings — are not as far removed from our everyday media experiences as they might seem. Social media and streaming services are also ways of storing, organizing, transmitting, and disseminating meaning, often in bite-sized packets, to shape how we collectively remember, imagine, and react to the world.

In other words, the story of media is never merely “entertainment” or neutral “technology.” We must understand media as a potent apparatus of societal governance, shaping our collective memory, identity, and norms.