We are living through the media’s golden age.

When I started using comptuers they were nothing more than ega displays with the large floppy disks and games were text based. As I grew older so the games grew to be more complex, from 2d to 3d and then the quality improved.

The television of my youth was limited to five channels and by the 90’s had expanded to twenty plus channels. By 2000 the number had exploded to several hundred channels and that’s just counting the English ones.

The media have progressed. I am in constant contact with everyone by mobile phone for over a decade. I have had minidisk players, i’ve had phones and I’ve had a television in my room.

Now the mobile phone I have replaces all these devices if I so wish. The ipod replaces the radio and the television, the phone replaces the laptop, the minitel and the fax machine.

I have access to the world’s media within two clicks of a mouse, which is no more than a trackpad on an ibook.

Video editing is far simpler. When I wanted to learn to edit I remember that you’d need to get two player/recorders and a third device to control the two machines. We bought Adobe Premiere and the Miro dc30+ and there it was. I spent a weekend learning to edit with pictures of the Mer des Glaces, a glacier in the French Alpes.

Since then I upgraded through the years and my laptop can do all this seamlessly.

We discussed video on demand years ago and that idea was novel, was something which would be hard to implement. Today video on demand is so easy it’s syndicated via RSS feeds. I get my televisual experience via downloaded streams on a daily basis. Radio on demand is certainly here and doing well.

In this week in media one of the presenters said that in the near future media content would become more valuable than oil. It’s an interesting idea.

Are media studies a mickey mouse course when you’ve got free newspapers, you can watch television whilst commuting to and from work? When you share your pictures with friends around the world and computing is no longer the realm of the computer geek I think we’re in the Golden age of media studies and that it may have been one of the most interesting topics to study with the exponential growth of media outlets.