The Umbrella Perspective on Communication Technology is designed so that all areas of the umbrella can be examined in a way to help gain an understanding of a technology. To go along with all the levels of the technology there is an extra level of complexity that can be added to each area on the umbrella.
These factors are enabling, limiting, motivating and inhibiting.
Enabling factors “are those that make an application possible. An example of this is “the fact that the coaxial cable used to deliver traditional cable television can carry dozens of channels.” This factor reaches to the hardware level of the technology.

In the late 20th Century, mass media could be classified into eight mass media industries: books, newspapers, magazines, recordings, radio, movies, television and the internet. With the explosion of digital communication technology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the question of what forms of media should be classified as "mass media" has become more prominent. For example, it is controversial whether to include cell phones, video games and computer games in the definition.

1. Print (books, pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, etc.) from the late 15th century
2. Recordings (gramophone records, magnetic tapes, cassettes, cartridges, CDs, DVDs) from the late 19th century
3. Cinema from about 1900
4. Radio from about 1910
5. Television from about 1950
6. Internet from about 1990
7. Mobile phones from about 2000

The Chapter is about the different technologies (print media, telephone, radio, TV, computers and video games) at that period of time.

Communication is the exchange and flow of information and ideas from one person to another; it involves a sender transmitting an idea, information, or feeling to a receiver.

Communication technologies play as big a part in our private lives as they do in commerce and control in society. 

·  Geographic distances are no longer barriers to relationships thanks to the bridging power of communication technologies. 

·  We can also be entertained and informed in ways that were unimaginable a century ago thanks to these technologies and they continue to evolve and change before our eyes.

·  As this book goes to press in mid-2008, Google is the most valuable media company in the world in terms of market capitalization (the total value of all shares of stock held in the company). To understand how Google attained that lofty position, we have to go back to the late 1990s, when commercial applications of the Internet were taking off. 

·  There was no question in the minds of engineers and futurists that the Internet was going to revolutionize the delivery of information, entertainment, and commerce. 

*The technology's improvement create a better communication around the world following different levels of protocols.