image by Erin Pfeifer

Remember When?

Adapting to technology throughout the years

written and reported by Christie Succop

E-mail, social networking, texting—we’ve adapted and come a long way as journalists from the printed, written word. We all know print products become more and more outdated every day. But isn’t it fun to go back and remember what used to be?

One of Greg Van Pelt’s (BSJ ’70) favorite courses when he was a JSchool student was handset type. Handset type is when individual metal letters are set by hand in order to be printed by a printing press. After the type is set, it is covered in ink, and then the paper is run through the press.

“It was interesting although antiquated,” Van Pelt says. “I probably spent all my career pursuing the control of that process.”

Little did Van Pelt know that he was using a technique originally created by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-1400s. Printed text revolutionized the world. We take printing for granted these days, but imagine what your day-to-day life would be like if you didn’t have any printed words: no menus, no road signs and definitely no printed T-shirts.

During Van Pelt’s time, newspapers were the most commonly turned to medium for news. They were a household staple. Radio and television were becoming more and more popular, but they weren’t universal just yet.

When radio came along, it changed the way news was conveyed. The radio came about after Heinrich Hertz proved the subsistence of radio waves in 1888. Forty years later, another revolution occurred in the ways news was obtained: television. In 1928 television programming began when TV sets were put in three American homes.

Computers soon followed in the technology chain, and they took over the role of the printing press. In 1967 newspapers instituted computers into their routines, and in 1979 news organizations entered the World Wide Web. By 1994, 2 million computers were hooked up to the Internet, which allowed news to be at the consumer’s fingertips and accessible 24/7.

Mary Mitchell (MSJ ’88) was a JSchool graduate student at the beginning of the online transformation. At the urging of her adviser, Byron Scott, she took a videotex class during her last quarter at OU, fall 1983. She fell in love with online journalism and has been working with it ever since.

Before finishing her thesis in 1988, Mitchell took a job with CompuServe in 1984, where she familiarized herself with the latest online technology. At her first job she frequently communicated with people via e-mail, and the majority of her work was done online.

“When I started working at CompuServe, no one knew what I did,” Mitchell says. “No one knew what a modem was or how to get online. Now it has mass appeal. Everyone’s online now.”

“People didn’t know I was 24 [years old],” Mitchell says.

As of 2008 only 25 percent of Americans were not online. That means the other 75 percent was adapting by sending e-mails, communicating in chat rooms, surfing the ’Net and downloading items (legally and illegally). Now Mitchell does readership research at Consumer Reports, and she works with both online and print mediums.

Although he now is a labor arbitrator, Van Pelt began work as a freelance journalist, and he says his most-used technology still is the written word.

“It’s so foundational, so fundamental to what I do,” Van Pelt says. “It’s what lawyers do. It’s what journalists do. You use it the most often, even with the Internet. And with the cellular technology and texting.”

Both Van Pelt and Mitchell have seen a variety of technologies throughout their lifetimes and careers, and both successfully acclimated to the changes presented to them. This is only the beginning. They and the rest of the media practitioners only will have more modifications to get used to, and in the media world, adaptation is essential.