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 The contemporary concept of a "poster" - a large piece of paper with a graphic image, intended to attact attention and usually reproduced in quantity, had to wait for advances in printing technology, industrialization, and mass literacy to supplant the human poster - the scribe, town crier, and troubadour - as efficient and versatile advertising for products and events, introducing ideas and influencing opinion (propaganda or education), and art afforable to almost everyone.
 Printing, the technique of reproducing multiple copies of an original text and/or pictorial graphic by pressing the ink coated relief surface to a substrate, usually paper, was first conceived and developed in China as a means of spreading the words of Buddha. The earliest process of duplication, stenciling, has examples stretching from ancient negative hand prints on cave walls around the world, Indonesian batik prints, messages on t-shirts, and fine art serigraphs.
 Woodblock printing, which spread from Asia to Europe through Islamic Egypt, was a vast improvement over the hand copying and illumination (illustrate and gilt an image) by copyists. When Johannes Gutenberg perfected the technology of moveable type and coupled it with a wine press (c 1450), the time and human energy required to produce an original for reproduction and make copies was greatly reduced.
The resulting explosion of information fueled a feedback loop that lead to the technology of steam powered large presses and the chemical process of lithography (Greek, litho=stone, graphy=write).
Now computers give everyone the opportunity to be the "poster" - the dictator (meaning both the person who dictates to a stenographer and the political kind), scribe, artist, typesetter, publisher and distributor of any message through desktop publishing, and digital printing makes it economical to reproduce a single copy on demand. Arthur C. Clarke's 3rd Law of Prediction comes to mind - "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Posters in a classroom can be an effective method of instruction - bringing in reproduction posters from an era such as World War I and World War II, immerses the learners in the time period and the comparisons about recruiting, how enemies are identified and demonized, how the roles of women were evolving, are immediate.
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