ABSTRACT
Mass media and data processing are complementary technologies; they appear together and develop side by side, making modern mass society possible. In the 1890s modern media took another step forward as still photographs were put in motion. The 1890s was the crucial decade not only for the development of media, but also for computing. If individual brains were overwhelmed by the amount of information they had to process, the same was true of corporations and of governments. Moving into the twentieth century, the key year for the history of media and computing is 1936. British mathematician Alan Turing wrote a seminal paper entitled "On Computable Numbers." In a historical loop, the computer has returned to its origins. No longer just an Analytical Engine, suitable only for crunching numbers, it has become J. M. Jacquard's loom—a media synthesizer and manipulator.
