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Media Technologies: Review Questions

Midterm Exam

The in-class midterm exam covers the readings and lectures from the first half of the course. Use the review questions and the testable terms below to study for the exam.

As this exam is subjective, your score will be based on how well you explain your response and demonstrate your understanding of the course material, more than providing the “correct answer.”

The exam consists of the following types of questions:

Identification

In two-to-three sentences, identify the term and describe its significance for the media technology in question. Eight questions, five points each.

For example:

What Hath God Wrought?
What Hath God Wrought was the first message transmitted by telegraphy between Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail. The message travelled between Baltimore and Washington in May 1844, and it suggests the wondrous possibilities of this machine.

Short Answer

Answer the question with a one-paragraph response, about four-to-five sentences in length. Three questions, twenty points each.

For example:

Who were the “muckrakers” and what did they do?
The muckrakers were investigative journalists who emerged at the turn of the 20th century. They would write in magazines and newspapers to uncover government and corporate corruption and abuses. An example of a muckracker is Nellie Bly, who went undercover at a New York asylum to expose abuses of patients. The work of muckrakers would lead to the Progressive Era reforms such as electoral reform, housing reform, and food and drug safety laws.

Writing

Review the Lecture Outline

  1. Briefly, why would a literate culture win over an oral culture? How does writing confer power and authority?
  2. How, according to Walter Ong, has writing “transformed human consciousness?”
  3. What are the differences between a logogram, a pictogram, and an ideogram?
  4. Why was Socrates opposed to writing, calling it “inhuman”? Why was we ultimately wrong?
  5. What was the acta diaruna?
  6. What were the literate languages of Europe during the Middle Ages?
  7. What was the state of literacy and education in colonial America?
  8. How are the “knowledge gap” and “the digital divide” forms of illiteracy today?

Testable Terms: Writing

Early Print

Review the Lecture Outline

  1. If Gutenberg did not invent printing or the printing press, what did he actually do?
  2. Compare the various material used for paper in the “early print” era.
  3. Why did print allow for the spread of European vernacular languages?
  4. How did print expand the subjects and specialities of books available?
  5. Why was print an important factor for the sixteenth century Protestant Reformation?
  6. Why was print an important factor for the Renaissance in Western Europe?
  7. Why was print an important factor for the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century?
  8. How did newspapers in colonial America factor in the colonial rebellion against the British in the eighteenth century, more commonly known as the American Revolution?

Testable Terms: Early (Manual) Print

Mass Print

Review the Lecture Outline

  1. How did industrialization, the Civil War, and mandatory public education shape print media in the US during the nineteenth century?
  2. How did the penny press influence American culture?
  3. What is the Yellow Press and how did change journalism in the United States?
  4. How did magazines serve the needs of readers and advertisers in the nineteenth century?
  5. What were some of the significant advances in printing technology throughout the nineteenth century?
  6. Why did the dime novel and paperback book thrive in the mid–19th and early–20th centuries, respectively?
  7. Who were the “muckrakers” and what did they do?
  8. Why did magazines shift their focus from general interest to specialized interests in the mid–20th century?
  9. How did public relations use print to advance its client’s messages?
  10. Why are textbooks, according to Fang, useful for learning about political control over print?

Testable Terms: Mass Print

Photography

Review the Lecture Outline

  1. How did the camera obscura and camera lucida help portrait painters? and ultimately lead to their demise?
  2. How did photosensitive chemicals allow hands-free camera work?
  3. How did the daguerreotype and calotype work?
  4. What were some of the advantages of wet collodion process over the silver processes of Daguerre and Talbot?
  5. What are some kinds of wet collodion processes?
  6. What are magic lantern shows?
  7. Why was war well-suited to photographing?
  8. How did the photography of John Thomson, Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, and the Farm Resettlement Administration document and reform everylife?
  9. How did photo printing technology evolve in the late nineteenth century for newspaper and book publishing?
  10. How did amateur photography grow in the twentieth century?
  11. Why did Kodak invent but not persue digital photography?
  12. What do fake and manipulated photographs do to the truth-telling value of photography, as demonstrated in the first 100 years of photography?

Testable Terms: Photography

Telegraph

Review the Lecture Outline

  1. Who were some of the inventors of the electrical telegraph?
  2. How did the telegraph become a private industry?
  3. How did the telegraph change the nature of writing and transmitting of news?
  4. How did the telegraph connect the United States with the rest of the world?
  5. According to James Carey, how did the telegraph transform the relationship between transportation and communication?
  6. How did the telegraph and wire services standardize language across the United States, according to Carey?
  7. How did the telegraph regulate and standardize the exchange of commodities?
  8. Why did the United States accept railroad time as our standard time and what role did the telegraph play in doing so?
  9. How did the telegraph “annihilate time and space”?
  10. What were some other communication technologies that owe their existence to the telegraph?

Testable Terms: Telegraph

Final Exam

The in-class final exam covers the material covered in second half of the course, after the midterm exam. Use the review questions and the testable terms below to study for the exam.

As this exam is subjective, your score will be based on how well you explain your response and demonstrate your understanding of the course material, more than providing the “correct answer.”

The exam consists of the following types of questions:

Identification

Identify the term and describe its significance for the media technology in question. Eight questions, five points each. For example…

Altair 8800
The Altair was a hobbyist kit computer that used the Intel 8080 microprocessor introduced in 1975. The computer didn’t do much. The user activated some switches (input) and a few lights would come on (output). But the Altair excited hobbyists and that helped usher in the personal computer revolution in the coming decade.

Short Answer

Answer the question with a one-paragraph response, about four-to-five sentences in length. Three questions, twenty points each. For example…

Explain two consumer sound recording technologies have emerged since the phonographic (gramophonic) record?
The gramophone record was a long-lasting sound recording technology but there have been many others that have emerged since then. First, magnetic tape came about in the 1940s and allowed recordings to be made on plastic tape that contained metallic particles that would be magnetized. Magnetic tape allowed for sound editing and for multitrack recording and mixing. Second, the compact disc emerged in the 1980s. This plastic disk contained an aluminum sheet that contained encoded bits of digital information. The compact disc supplanted the gramophone record as the preferred medium for recorded music but would eventually be abandoned by digital file formats, such as MP3.

Telephone

Review the Lecture Outline

  1. What did Alexander Graham Bell seek to do when “inventing” the telephone? What about Elisha Gray?
  2. Who were the first customers of the telephone? Why?
  3. Why did Western Union pass on the telephone?
  4. What kinds of social changes did the telephone as a technology and as an industry yield?
  5. What did Alfred Vail do for AT&T?
  6. How did long-distance revolutionize the telephone and its applications?
  7. How did AT&T police new technologies, such as foreign attachments?
  8. How have mobile telephones changed the telephone industry?
  9. How have mobile phones become an essential device for commercial life in the developing world?

Testable Terms

Movies

Review the Lecture Outline

  1. What were some early devices that would form the basis of motion pictures in the late 19th century?
  2. How did Edison’s and Lumiere’s motion picture machines differ?
  3. What was the difference between a kinetograph and a kinetoscope?
  4. How did nickelodeons become the principal way of screening films in the early 20th century?
  5. Why did the motion picture industry relocate to Hollywood?
  6. What kinds of fictional stories dominated early filmmaking, between 1900 and 1920?
  7. How did movie stars become an essential part of filmmaking?
  8. How did sound and color change the making of movies?
  9. What were some of the national traditions that emerged in the twentieth century? How were those films different from those produced by the American studio system?
  10. How did television change the motion picture industry in the 1950s?
  11. How do other “screens” change our notion of moviegoing?

Testable Terms

Sound Recording

Review the Lecture Outline.

  1. What did Edison think his phonograph could do?
  2. How did certain composers, such as John Philip Sousa, regard the invention of the phonograph?
  3. How did the gramophone and the Victrola improve earlier sound recording?
  4. How did CBS and RCA replace the 78 rpm, 10-inch record?
  5. How did the jukebox help the spread of popular music in the mid–20th century?
  6. What was the impact of magnetic tape on sound recording and for video?
  7. What other consumer sound recording technologies have emerged since the phonographic (gramophonic) record?
  8. What effect have MP3s had on the exchange and playback of music in the 21st century?

Testable Terms

Radio

Review the Lecture Outline

  1. How did scientists conceive of electricity and electromagnetism in the early nineteenth century?
  2. How did Marconi commercially exploit the wireless/radio?
  3. How did Fleming, Fesseden, and de Forest help extend radio beyond its initial function as a wireless telegraph?
  4. What role did amateurs play in popularizing radio in the early twentieth century?
  5. How did radio evolve from a point-to-point medium to broadcasting?
  6. How did broadcast radio generate revenue and become the model for US radio?
  7. Why did the FCC regulate radio beginning in the 1927 Act? How did it extend that regulation in 1934?
  8. What was the Golden Age of Radio and why was it so called?
  9. How did the FM differ from earlier radio?

Testable Terms

Television

Review the Lecture Outline

  1. What is the difference between mechanical television and electronic television?
  2. How does scanning work? What is the difference between an iconoscope and a kinescope (not to be confused with a kinetoscope or a kinetograph)
  3. Why did David Sarnoff call television “radio with pictures”?
  4. How did television as an appliance complement postwar suburbanization in the US?
  5. What were some reasons for the FCC freezing new television broadcast licenses in the 1940s?
  6. What advantages did RCA color have over CBS color to be adopted as NTSC color in the 1950s?
  7. Why did the Hollywood studios have a tough time getting in the television game?
  8. What is a kinescope recording?
  9. What were some forms of early TV programming, prior to 1960?
  10. How did satellite cable provide an alternative distribution platform to broadcast television?
  11. How did Ted Turner borrow from commercial broadcast television in launching his TV superstation?

Testable Terms

Computers

Review the Lecture Outline

  1. Compare the difference between hardware and software.
  2. What is input and output in computers?
  3. How did Charles Babbage’s analytical engine borrow from Joseph-Marie Jaqcuard’s mechanical loom
  4. What is a bit? How is different from a byte?
  5. Why were the earliest digital computers—those using diodes—so big? What purpose did they serve?
  6. How did the transistor make computers smaller, beginning in the late 1940s? Who were those customers?
  7. How did the Altair 8800, using a microprocessor developed by Intel, inaugurate the personal computer revolution?
  8. How did the Xerox Alto influence the development of personal computers as we know them?
  9. How does digital media—the union of images, motion pictures, and recorded sound into computable data—make possible desktop publishing and desktop video editing?

Testable Terms

Internet

Review the Lecture Outline. Watch The Computer Chronicles explain The Internet before the web.

  1. Why can we regard the Internet as the killer app of personal computing?
  2. What is the difference between a LAN and a WAN?
  3. Why did the US government start ARPA?
  4. How did ARPANET start?
  5. Why was ARPANET designed as a node-to-node and packet-switched network?
  6. Who was connected to ARPANET?
  7. What was USENET? What was the significance of this network?
  8. What was the WorldWideWeb, and who and when was it developed?
  9. How did search engines try to tame the web?
  10. How did email begin?
  11. Does the Internet reduce the time people spend reading?
  12. What is web 2.0 and how is a wiki an example of a web 2.0 platform?
  13. How do social networks “supercharge” our desire to share, copy, and recommend with our friends?
  14. How do walled gardens threaten the open and universal structure of the Internet?

Testable Terms