Characteristics of the medium

     For this weeks class we had to read about the how the internet compares to other internet mediums, and what problems they faced in distant communication.  The internet is a new and always evolving form of communication.  It hold many characteristics of other forms of communications but is hard to specify the internet into one catagorey of communication. The internet is a sum of many communication tools, it uses interpersonal communication in online chats, public speaking with group e-mail, and mass media when a news station post it information so that many people can view the news. These are not the types of communication the internet use there are many more, so now we have to ask how do we catagorize the internet as a communications medium? 

     Since the internet is always changing it is hard to put an exact term for what it does or how it works, but for now we can use the terms macromedium and metamedium. We can say that the internet is a macromedium because the word macro in sense means "large", and so the internet on a large scale is use to connect people from far distance.     It can also be considered a metamedium because it take the sues of old mediums and combindes them into one functioning unit.  With this you can listen to music while making a video and checking the weather, "it enables us to use both ends of traditional mass media" http://bls.its.albany.edu/webct/cobaltMainFrame.dowebct. 

      There were three main problems the the developers of the internet were concerned about speed, reliability and distribution.  Speed was not the issue at first but once people started to send bigger documents and wanted to send pictures speed became an issue. Developers had to eliminate the the problem of place and space. As they worked on tis speed started to increase and now you can send streaming video with little problems. Reliablility was a major problem, how do you make it so the your message will reach the other end and the other person will understand it? what developers did was put the message in packets so that there was an insurance in a way that the reciver will always have a sense of the message. The last problem was distribution who was using it, where it was being used these were things that had to be solved.  After researching this problem it became apparent that it is almost impossible to figure these things out, but one main conclusion was that the more money a country had the more likely they are using the internet.