LESSON CONTENT German goldsmith, Johannes Gutenberg, invented the printing press around 1440. This invention was a result of nding a way to improve the manual, tedious, and slow printing methods. A printing press is a device that applies pressure to any inked surface lying on a print medium, such as cloth or paper, to transfer ink. Gutenberg's hand mound printing press led to the creation of metal movable type. Later, the two inventions were combined to make printing methods faster and they drastically reduced the costs of printing documents. Figure 24. The Gutenberg Press h:l1nn nr11.w i.rn ff.hml The beginnings of mass communication can be tracked back to the invention of the printing press. The development of a fast and easy way of disseminating information in print permanently reformed the structure of society. Political and religious authorities who took pride in being learned were threatened by a sudden rise of literacy among people. With the rise of the printing press, the printing revolution occurred which illustrated the tremendous social change brought by the wide circulation of information. The printing press made the mass production of books possible which made books accessible not only to the upper class. As year progressed, calculations became involved in communication due to the rapid developments in the trade sector. Back then, people who compiled actuarial tablets and engineering calculations served as "computers." During World War II, the Allies (U.S., Canada, Britain, France, USSR, Australia, etc.), countries that opposed the Axis powers (Germany, Japan, Italy, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria), were challenged with a serious shortage of human computers for military calculations. When soldiers left for war, the shortage got worse so the United States addressed the problem by creating the Harvard Mark 1, a general purpose electromechanical computer that was 50 feet long and capable of doing calculations in seconds that usually took people hours. At the same time, Britain needed mathematicians to crack the German Navy's Enigma code. The Enigma was an enciphering machine that the German armed forces used to securely send messages. Figure 25: "Enigma M4" Cypher Machine https://www.cryptomuseum.com/crypto/enigma/m4/index.htm Alan Turing, and English mathematicians, was hired in 1936 by the British top-secret Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park to break the Enigma code. His code-breaking methods became an industrial process having 12,000 people working 24/7. To counteract this, the Nazis made the Enigma more complicated having approximately 10114 possible permutations of every encrypted message. Turing, working on the side of the Allies, invented Bombe, an electrochemical machine that enabled the British to decipher encrypted messages of the German Enigma machine. This contribution of Turing along with other cryptologists shortened the war by two years (Munro, 2012). Figure 26: Alan Turing https://www.biography.com/scientist/alan-turing In this paper On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, first published in 1937, Turing presented a theoretical machine called the Turing machine that can solve any problem from simple instructions encoded on a paper tape. He also demonstrated the simulation of the Turing machine to construct a single Universal Machine. This became the foundation of computer science and the invention of a machine later called a computer, which can solve any problem by performing any task from a written program (DeHaan, 2012).In the 1970s, the generation who witnessed the dawn of the computer age was described as the generation with "electronic brains." The people of this generation were the first to be introduce to personal computers (PCs). Back then, the Homebrew Computer Club, an early computer hobbyist group, gathered regularly to trade parts of computer hardware and talked about how to make computer more accessible to everyone. Many members of the APPLE. club ended up being high-profile entrepreneurs, COMPUTER including the founders of Apple Inc. in 1976 Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Inc., developed the 5/23 ... computer made him famous: the Apple I. Wozniak designed the operating system, hardware, and circuit board of the computer all by himself. Steve Jobs, Wozniak's friend, suggested to sell the Apple I as a fully assembled printed circuit board. This jumpstarted their career as founders of Apple Inc. Figure 27: Apple I, also called Apple-1 or Apple Computer 1 https://www.mac-history.net/computer-history/2008-05-25/apple-i-and-apple-ii From 1973 onwards, social media platforms were introduced from variations of multi-user chat rooms; instant-messaging applications (e.g., AOL, Yahoo messenger, MSN messenger, Windows messenger); bulletin-board forum systems, game-based social networking sites (e.g., Facebook, Friendster, Myspace) and business oriented social networking websites (e.g., Xing); messaging, video and voice calling services (e.g., Viber, Skype); blogging platform, image and video hosting websites (e.g., Flicker); discovery and dating-oriented websites (e.g., Tagged, Tinder); video sharing services (e.g., YouTube); real-time social media feed aggregator (e.g., FriendFeed); live-streaming (e.g., Justin.tv, Twitch.tv); photo-video sharing websites (e.g., Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, Keek, Vine);and question-and-answer platforms (e.g., Quora). To date, these social media platforms enable information exchange as its most efficient level. The information age, which progressed from the invention of the printing press to the development of numerous social media platforms, has immediately influenced the lives of the people. The impact of these innovations can be advantageous or disadvantageous depending on the use of these technologies