essay about history of communication

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1.1 Communication: History and Forms

Learning objectives.

• Define communication.
• Discuss the history of communication from ancient to modern times.
• List the five forms of communication.
• Distinguish among the five forms of communication.
• Review the various career options for students who study communication.

Before we dive into the history of communication, it is important that we have a shared understanding of what we mean by the word communication . For our purposes in this book, we will define communication as the process of generating meaning by sending and receiving verbal and nonverbal symbols and signs that are influenced by multiple contexts. This definition builds on other definitions of communication that have been rephrased and refined over many years. In fact, since the systematic study of communication began in colleges and universities a little over one hundred years ago, there have been more than 126 published definitions of communication (Dance & Larson, 1976). In order to get a context for how communication has been conceptualized and studied, let’s look at a history of the field.

From Aristotle to Obama: A Brief History of Communication

While there are rich areas of study in animal communication and interspecies communication, our focus in this book is on human communication. Even though all animals communicate, as human beings we have a special capacity to use symbols to communicate about things outside our immediate temporal and spatial reality (Dance & Larson). For example, we have the capacity to use abstract symbols, like the word education , to discuss a concept that encapsulates many aspects of teaching and learning. We can also reflect on the past and imagine our future. The ability to think outside our immediate reality is what allows us to create elaborate belief systems, art, philosophy, and academic theories. It’s true that you can teach a gorilla to sign words like food and baby , but its ability to use symbols doesn’t extend to the same level of abstraction as ours. However, humans haven’t always had the sophisticated communication systems that we do today.

Some scholars speculate that humans’ first words were onomatopoetic. You may remember from your English classes that onomatopoeia refers to words that sound like that to which they refer—words like boing , drip , gurgle , swoosh , and whack . Just think about how a prehistoric human could have communicated a lot using these words and hand gestures. He or she could use gurgle to alert others to the presence of water or swoosh and whack to recount what happened on a hunt. In any case, this primitive ability to communicate provided an evolutionary advantage. Those humans who could talk were able to cooperate, share information, make better tools, impress mates, or warn others of danger, which led them to have more offspring who were also more predisposed to communicate (Poe, 2011). This eventually led to the development of a “Talking Culture” during the “Talking Era.” During this 150,000 year period of human existence, ranging from 180,000 BCE to 3500 BCE, talking was the only medium of communication, aside from gestures, that humans had (Poe, 2011).

The beginning of the “Manuscript Era,” around 3500 BCE, marked the turn from oral to written culture. This evolution in communication corresponded with a shift to a more settled, agrarian way of life (Poe, 2011). As hunter-gatherers settled into small villages and began to plan ahead for how to plant, store, protect, and trade or sell their food, they needed accounting systems to keep track of their materials and record transactions. While such transactions were initially tracked with actual objects that symbolized an amount—for example, five pebbles represented five measures of grain—symbols, likely carved into clay, later served as the primary method of record keeping. In this case, five dots might equal five measures of grain.

During this period, villages also developed class systems as more successful farmers turned businessmen prospered and took leadership positions. Religion also became more complex, and a new class of spiritual leaders emerged. Soon, armies were needed to protect the stockpiled resources from others who might want to steal it. The emergence of elite classes and the rise of armies required records and bookkeeping, which furthered the spread of written symbols. As clergy, the ruling elite, and philosophers began to take up writing, the systems became more complex. The turn to writing didn’t threaten the influential place of oral communication, however. During the near 5,000-year period of the “Manuscript Era,” literacy, or the ability to read and write, didn’t spread far beyond the most privileged in society. In fact, it wasn’t until the 1800s that widespread literacy existed in the world.

The end of the “Manuscript Era” marked a shift toward a rapid increase in communication technologies. The “Print Era” extended from 1450 to 1850 and was marked by the invention of the printing press and the ability to mass-produce written texts. This 400-year period gave way to the “Audiovisual Era,” which only lasted 140 years, from 1850 to 1990, and was marked by the invention of radio, telegraph, telephone, and television. Our current period, the “Internet Era,” has only lasted from 1990 until the present. This period has featured the most rapid dispersion of a new method of communication, as the spread of the Internet and the expansion of digital and personal media signaled the beginning of the digital age.

The evolution of communication media, from speaking to digital technology, has also influenced the field of communication studies. To better understand how this field of study developed, we must return to the “Manuscript Era,” which saw the production of the earliest writings about communication. In fact, the oldest essay and book ever found were written about communication (McCroskey, 1984). Although this essay and book predate Aristotle, he is a logical person to start with when tracing the development of the communication scholarship. His writings on communication, although not the oldest, are the most complete and systematic. Ancient Greek philosophers and scholars such as Aristotle theorized about the art of rhetoric , which refers to speaking well and persuasively. Today, we hear the word rhetoric used in negative ways. A politician, for example, may write off his or her opponent’s statements as “just rhetoric.” This leads us to believe that rhetoric refers to misleading, false, or unethical communication, which is not at all in keeping with the usage of the word by ancient or contemporary communication experts. While rhetoric does refer primarily to persuasive communication messages, much of the writing and teaching about rhetoric conveys the importance of being an ethical rhetor , or communicator. So when a communicator, such as a politician, speaks in misleading, vague, or dishonest ways, he or she isn’t using rhetoric; he or she is being an unethical speaker.

The study of rhetoric focused on public communication, primarily oratory used in discussions or debates regarding laws and policy, speeches delivered in courts, and speeches intended to praise or blame another person. The connections among rhetoric, policy making, and legal proceedings show that communication and citizenship have been connected since the study of communication began. Throughout this book, we will continue to make connections between communication, ethics, and civic engagement.

Much of the public speaking in ancient Greece took place in courtrooms or in political contexts.

Karen Neoh – Courtroom – CC BY 2.0.

Ancient Greek rhetoricians like Aristotle were followed by Roman orators like Cicero. Cicero contributed to the field of rhetoric by expanding theories regarding the five canons of rhetoric, which include invention, arrangement, style, delivery, and memory. Invention refers to the use of evidence and arguments to think about things in new ways and is the most studied of the five canons. Arrangement refers to the organization of speech, style refers to the use of language, and delivery refers to the vocal and physical characteristics of a speaker. Memory is the least studied of the five canons and refers to the techniques employed by speakers of that era to retain and then repeat large amounts of information. The Age of Enlightenment in the 1700s marked a societal turn toward scientific discovery and the acquisition of knowledge, which led to an explosion of philosophical and scientific writings on many aspects of human existence. This focus on academic development continued into the 1900s and the establishment of distinct communication studies departments.

Communication studies as a distinct academic discipline with departments at universities and colleges has only existed for a little over one hundred years (Keith, 2008). Although rhetoric has long been a key part of higher education, and colleges and universities have long recognized the importance of speaking, communication departments did not exist. In the early 1900s, professors with training and expertise in communication were often housed in rhetoric or English departments and were sometimes called “professors of speech.” During this time, tension began to build between professors of English who studied rhetoric as the written word and professors of speech who studied rhetoric as the spoken word. In 1914, a group of ten speech teachers who were members of the National Council of Teachers of English broke off from the organization and started the National Association of Academic Teachers of Public Speaking, which eventually evolved into today’s National Communication Association. There was also a distinction of focus and interest among professors of speech. While some focused on the quality of ideas, arguments, and organization, others focused on coaching the performance and delivery aspects of public speaking (Keith, 2008). Instruction in the latter stressed the importance of “oratory” or “elocution,” and this interest in reading and speaking aloud is sustained today in theatre and performance studies and also in oral interpretation classes, which are still taught in many communication departments.

The formalization of speech departments led to an expanded view of the role of communication. Even though Aristotle and other ancient rhetoricians and philosophers had theorized the connection between rhetoric and citizenship, the role of the communicator became the focus instead of solely focusing on the message. James A. Winans, one of the first modern speech teachers and an advocate for teaching communication in higher education, said there were “two motives for learning to speak. Increasing one’s chance to succeed and increasing one’s power to serve” (Keith, 2008). Later, as social psychology began to expand in academic institutions, speech communication scholars saw places for connection to further expand definitions of communication to include social and psychological contexts.

Today, you can find elements of all these various aspects of communication being studied in communication departments. If we use President Obama as a case study, we can see the breadth of the communication field. Within one department, you may have fairly traditional rhetoricians who study the speeches of President Obama in comparison with other presidential rhetoric. Others may study debates between presidential candidates, dissecting the rhetorical strategies used, for example, by Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. Expanding from messages to channels of communication, scholars may study how different media outlets cover presidential politics. At an interpersonal level, scholars may study what sorts of conflicts emerge within families that have liberal and conservative individuals. At a cultural level, communication scholars could study how the election of an African American president creates a narrative of postracial politics. Our tour from Aristotle to Obama was quick, but hopefully instructive. Now let’s turn to a discussion of the five major forms of communication.

Forms of Communication

Forms of communication vary in terms of participants, channels used, and contexts. The five main forms of communication, all of which will be explored in much more detail in this book, are intrapersonal, interpersonal, group, public, and mass communication. This book is designed to introduce you to all these forms of communication. If you find one of these forms particularly interesting, you may be able to take additional courses that focus specifically on it. You may even be able to devise a course of study around one of these forms as a communication major. In the following we will discuss the similarities and differences among each form of communication, including its definition, level of intentionality, goals, and contexts.

Intrapersonal Communication

Intrapersonal communication is communication with oneself using internal vocalization or reflective thinking. Like other forms of communication, intrapersonal communication is triggered by some internal or external stimulus. We may, for example, communicate with our self about what we want to eat due to the internal stimulus of hunger, or we may react intrapersonally to an event we witness. Unlike other forms of communication, intrapersonal communication takes place only inside our heads. The other forms of communication must be perceived by someone else to count as communication. So what is the point of intrapersonal communication if no one else even sees it?

Intrapersonal communication is communication with ourselves that takes place in our heads.

Sarah – Pondering – CC BY 2.0.

Intrapersonal communication serves several social functions. Internal vocalization, or talking to ourselves, can help us achieve or maintain social adjustment (Dance & Larson, 1972). For example, a person may use self-talk to calm himself down in a stressful situation, or a shy person may remind herself to smile during a social event. Intrapersonal communication also helps build and maintain our self-concept. We form an understanding of who we are based on how other people communicate with us and how we process that communication intrapersonally. The shy person in the earlier example probably internalized shyness as a part of her self-concept because other people associated her communication behaviors with shyness and may have even labeled her “shy” before she had a firm grasp on what that meant. We will discuss self-concept much more in Chapter 2 “Communication and Perception” , which focuses on perception. We also use intrapersonal communication or “self-talk” to let off steam, process emotions, think through something, or rehearse what we plan to say or do in the future. As with the other forms of communication, competent intrapersonal communication helps facilitate social interaction and can enhance our well-being. Conversely, the breakdown in the ability of a person to intrapersonally communicate is associated with mental illness (Dance & Larson, 1972).

Sometimes we intrapersonally communicate for the fun of it. I’m sure we have all had the experience of laughing aloud because we thought of something funny. We also communicate intrapersonally to pass time. I bet there is a lot of intrapersonal communication going on in waiting rooms all over the world right now. In both of these cases, intrapersonal communication is usually unplanned and doesn’t include a clearly defined goal (Dance & Larson, 1972). We can, however, engage in more intentional intrapersonal communication. In fact, deliberate self-reflection can help us become more competent communicators as we become more mindful of our own behaviors. For example, your internal voice may praise or scold you based on a thought or action.

Of the forms of communication, intrapersonal communication has received the least amount of formal study. It is rare to find courses devoted to the topic, and it is generally separated from the remaining four types of communication. The main distinction is that intrapersonal communication is not created with the intention that another person will perceive it. In all the other levels, the fact that the communicator anticipates consumption of their message is very important.

Interpersonal Communication

Interpersonal communication is communication between people whose lives mutually influence one another. Interpersonal communication builds, maintains, and ends our relationships, and we spend more time engaged in interpersonal communication than the other forms of communication. Interpersonal communication occurs in various contexts and is addressed in subfields of study within communication studies such as intercultural communication, organizational communication, health communication, and computer-mediated communication. After all, interpersonal relationships exist in all those contexts.

Interpersonal communication can be planned or unplanned, but since it is interactive, it is usually more structured and influenced by social expectations than intrapersonal communication. Interpersonal communication is also more goal oriented than intrapersonal communication and fulfills instrumental and relational needs. In terms of instrumental needs, the goal may be as minor as greeting someone to fulfill a morning ritual or as major as conveying your desire to be in a committed relationship with someone. Interpersonal communication meets relational needs by communicating the uniqueness of a specific relationship. Since this form of communication deals so directly with our personal relationships and is the most common form of communication, instances of miscommunication and communication conflict most frequently occur here (Dance & Larson, 1972). Couples, bosses and employees, and family members all have to engage in complex interpersonal communication, and it doesn’t always go well. In order to be a competent interpersonal communicator, you need conflict management skills and listening skills, among others, to maintain positive relationships.

Group Communication

Group communication is communication among three or more people interacting to achieve a shared goal. You have likely worked in groups in high school and college, and if you’re like most students, you didn’t enjoy it. Even though it can be frustrating, group work in an academic setting provides useful experience and preparation for group work in professional settings. Organizations have been moving toward more team-based work models, and whether we like it or not, groups are an integral part of people’s lives. Therefore the study of group communication is valuable in many contexts.

Since many businesses and organizations are embracing team models, learning about group communication can help these groups be more effective.

RSNY – Team – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Group communication is more intentional and formal than interpersonal communication. Unlike interpersonal relationships, which are voluntary, individuals in a group are often assigned to their position within a group. Additionally, group communication is often task focused, meaning that members of the group work together for an explicit purpose or goal that affects each member of the group. Goal-oriented communication in interpersonal interactions usually relates to one person; for example, I may ask my friend to help me move this weekend. Goal-oriented communication at the group level usually focuses on a task assigned to the whole group; for example, a group of people may be tasked to figure out a plan for moving a business from one office to another.

You know from previous experience working in groups that having more communicators usually leads to more complicated interactions. Some of the challenges of group communication relate to task-oriented interactions, such as deciding who will complete each part of a larger project. But many challenges stem from interpersonal conflict or misunderstandings among group members. Since group members also communicate with and relate to each other interpersonally and may have preexisting relationships or develop them during the course of group interaction, elements of interpersonal communication occur within group communication too. Chapter 13 “Small Group Communication” and Chapter 14 “Leadership, Roles, and Problem Solving in Groups” of this book, which deal with group communication, will help you learn how to be a more effective group communicator by learning about group theories and processes as well as the various roles that contribute to and detract from the functioning of a group.

Public Communication

Public communication is a sender-focused form of communication in which one person is typically responsible for conveying information to an audience. Public speaking is something that many people fear, or at least don’t enjoy. But, just like group communication, public speaking is an important part of our academic, professional, and civic lives. When compared to interpersonal and group communication, public communication is the most consistently intentional, formal, and goal-oriented form of communication we have discussed so far.

Public communication, at least in Western societies, is also more sender focused than interpersonal or group communication. It is precisely this formality and focus on the sender that makes many new and experienced public speakers anxious at the thought of facing an audience. One way to begin to manage anxiety toward public speaking is to begin to see connections between public speaking and other forms of communication with which we are more familiar and comfortable. Despite being formal, public speaking is very similar to the conversations that we have in our daily interactions. For example, although public speakers don’t necessarily develop individual relationships with audience members, they still have the benefit of being face-to-face with them so they can receive verbal and nonverbal feedback. Later in this chapter, you will learn some strategies for managing speaking anxiety, since presentations are undoubtedly a requirement in the course for which you are reading this book. Then, in Chapter 9 “Preparing a Speech” , Chapter 10 “Delivering a Speech” , Chapter 11 “Informative and Persuasive Speaking” , and Chapter 12 “Public Speaking in Various Contexts” , you will learn how to choose an appropriate topic, research and organize your speech, effectively deliver your speech, and evaluate your speeches in order to improve.

Mass Communication

Public communication becomes mass communication when it is transmitted to many people through print or electronic media. Print media such as newspapers and magazines continue to be an important channel for mass communication, although they have suffered much in the past decade due in part to the rise of electronic media. Television, websites, blogs, and social media are mass communication channels that you probably engage with regularly. Radio, podcasts, and books are other examples of mass media. The technology required to send mass communication messages distinguishes it from the other forms of communication. A certain amount of intentionality goes into transmitting a mass communication message since it usually requires one or more extra steps to convey the message. This may involve pressing “Enter” to send a Facebook message or involve an entire crew of camera people, sound engineers, and production assistants to produce a television show. Even though the messages must be intentionally transmitted through technology, the intentionality and goals of the person actually creating the message, such as the writer, television host, or talk show guest, vary greatly. The president’s State of the Union address is a mass communication message that is very formal, goal oriented, and intentional, but a president’s verbal gaffe during a news interview is not.

Technological advances such as the printing press, television, and the more recent digital revolution have made mass communication a prominent feature of our daily lives.

Savannah River Site – Atmospheric Technology – CC BY 2.0.

Mass communication differs from other forms of communication in terms of the personal connection between participants. Even though creating the illusion of a personal connection is often a goal of those who create mass communication messages, the relational aspect of interpersonal and group communication isn’t inherent within this form of communication. Unlike interpersonal, group, and public communication, there is no immediate verbal and nonverbal feedback loop in mass communication. Of course you could write a letter to the editor of a newspaper or send an e-mail to a television or radio broadcaster in response to a story, but the immediate feedback available in face-to-face interactions is not present. With new media technologies like Twitter, blogs, and Facebook, feedback is becoming more immediate. Individuals can now tweet directly “at” (@) someone and use hashtags (#) to direct feedback to mass communication sources. Many radio and television hosts and news organizations specifically invite feedback from viewers/listeners via social media and may even share the feedback on the air.

The technology to mass-produce and distribute communication messages brings with it the power for one voice or a series of voices to reach and affect many people. This power makes mass communication different from the other levels of communication. While there is potential for unethical communication at all the other levels, the potential consequences of unethical mass communication are important to consider. Communication scholars who focus on mass communication and media often take a critical approach in order to examine how media shapes our culture and who is included and excluded in various mediated messages. We will discuss the intersection of media and communication more in Chapter 15 “Media, Technology, and Communication” and Chapter 16 “New Media and Communication” .

“Getting Real”

What Can You Do with a Degree in Communication Studies?

You’re hopefully already beginning to see that communication studies is a diverse and vibrant field of study. The multiple subfields and concentrations within the field allow for exciting opportunities for study in academic contexts but can create confusion and uncertainty when a person considers what they might do for their career after studying communication. It’s important to remember that not every college or university will have courses or concentrations in all the areas discussed next. Look at the communication courses offered at your school to get an idea of where the communication department on your campus fits into the overall field of study. Some departments are more general, offering students a range of courses to provide a well-rounded understanding of communication. Many departments offer concentrations or specializations within the major such as public relations, rhetoric, interpersonal communication, electronic media production, corporate communication. If you are at a community college and plan on transferring to another school, your choice of school may be determined by the course offerings in the department and expertise of the school’s communication faculty. It would be unfortunate for a student interested in public relations to end up in a department that focuses more on rhetoric or broadcasting, so doing your research ahead of time is key.

Since communication studies is a broad field, many students strategically choose a concentration and/or a minor that will give them an advantage in the job market. Specialization can definitely be an advantage, but don’t forget about the general skills you gain as a communication major. This book, for example, should help you build communication competence and skills in interpersonal communication, intercultural communication, group communication, and public speaking, among others. You can also use your school’s career services office to help you learn how to “sell” yourself as a communication major and how to translate what you’ve learned in your classes into useful information to include on your resume or in a job interview.

The main career areas that communication majors go into are business, public relations / advertising, media, nonprofit, government/law, and education. [1] Within each of these areas there are multiple career paths, potential employers, and useful strategies for success. For more detailed information, visit http://whatcanidowiththismajor.com/major/communication-studies .

• Business. Sales, customer service, management, real estate, human resources, training and development.
• Public relations / advertising. Public relations, advertising/marketing, public opinion research, development, event coordination.
• Media. Editing, copywriting, publishing, producing, directing, media sales, broadcasting.
• Nonprofit. Administration, grant writing, fund-raising, public relations, volunteer coordination.
• Government/law. City or town management, community affairs, lobbying, conflict negotiation / mediation.
• Education. High school speech teacher, forensics/debate coach, administration and student support services, graduate school to further communication study.
• Which of the areas listed above are you most interested in studying in school or pursuing as a career? Why?
• What aspect(s) of communication studies does/do the department at your school specialize in? What concentrations/courses are offered?
• Whether or not you are or plan to become a communication major, how do you think you could use what you have learned and will learn in this class to “sell” yourself on the job market?

Key Takeaways

• Getting integrated: Communication is a broad field that draws from many academic disciplines. This interdisciplinary perspective provides useful training and experience for students that can translate into many career fields.
• Communication is the process of generating meaning by sending and receiving symbolic cues that are influenced by multiple contexts.
• Ancient Greeks like Aristotle and Plato started a rich tradition of the study of rhetoric in the Western world more than two thousand years ago. Communication did not become a distinct field of study with academic departments until the 1900s, but it is now a thriving discipline with many subfields of study.

There are five forms of communication: intrapersonal, interpersonal, group, public, and mass communication.

• Intrapersonal communication is communication with oneself and occurs only inside our heads.
• Interpersonal communication is communication between people whose lives mutually influence one another and typically occurs in dyads, which means in pairs.
• Group communication occurs when three or more people communicate to achieve a shared goal.
• Public communication is sender focused and typically occurs when one person conveys information to an audience.
• Mass communication occurs when messages are sent to large audiences using print or electronic media.
• Getting integrated: Review the section on the history of communication. Have you learned any of this history or heard of any of these historical figures in previous classes? If so, how was this history relevant to what you were studying in that class?
• Come up with your own definition of communication. How does it differ from the definition in the book? Why did you choose to define communication the way you did?
• Over the course of a day, keep track of the forms of communication that you use. Make a pie chart of how much time you think you spend, on an average day, engaging in each form of communication (intrapersonal, interpersonal, group, public, and mass).

Dance, F. E. X. and Carl E. Larson, The Functions of Human Communication: A Theoretical Approach (New York, NY: Holt, Reinhart, and Winston, 1976), 23.

Keith, W., “On the Origins of Speech as a Discipline: James A. Winans and Public Speaking as Practical Democracy,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 38, no. 3 (2008): 239–58.

McCroskey, J. C., “Communication Competence: The Elusive Construct,” in Competence in Communication: A Multidisciplinary Approach , ed. Robert N. Bostrom (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1984), 260.

Poe, M. T., A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 27.

• What Can I Do with This Major? “Communication Studies,” accessed May 18, 2012, http://whatcanidowiththismajor.com/major/communication-studies ↵

Communication in the Real World Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

The Early History of Communication

• Invention Timelines
• Famous Inventions
• Famous Inventors
• Patents & Trademarks
• Computers & The Internet
• American History
• African American History
• African History
• Ancient History and Culture
• Asian History
• European History
• Latin American History
• Medieval & Renaissance History
• Military History
• The 20th Century
• Women's History

Humans have communicated with one another in some shape or form ever since time immemorial. But to understand the history of communication, all we have to go by are written records that date as far back as ancient Mesopotamia. And while every sentence starts with a letter, back then people began with a picture.

The BCE Years

powerofforever / Getty Images

The Kish tablet, discovered in the ancient Sumerian city of Kish, has inscriptions considered by some experts to be the oldest form of known writing. Dated to 3500 B.C., the stone features proto-cuneiform signs, basically rudimentary symbols that convey meaning through its pictorial resemblance to a physical object. Similar to this early form of writing are the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, which date back to around 3200 B.C.

Written Language

Elsewhere, written language appears to have come about around 1200 B.C. in China and around 600 B.C. in the Americas. Some similarities between the early Mesopotamian language and the one that developed in ancient Egypt suggests that a writing system originated in the Middle East. However, any kind of connection between Chinese characters and these early language systems is less likely since the cultures don’t seem to have had any contact.

Among the first non-glyph writing systems not to use pictorial signs is the phonetic system . With phonetic systems, symbols refer to spoken sounds. If this sounds familiar, it’s because the modern alphabets that many people in the world use today represent a phonetic form of communication. Remnants of such systems first appeared either around 19th century B.C. thanks to an early Canaanite population or 15th century B.C. in connection with a Semitic community that lived in central Egypt. 

Phoenician System

Over time, various forms of the Phoenician system of written communication began to spread and were picked up along the Mediterranean city-states. By the 8th century B.C., the Phoenician system reached Greece, where it was altered and adapted to the Greek oral language. The biggest alterations were the addition of vowel sounds and having the letters read from left to right.

Around that time, long-distance communication had its humble beginnings as the Greeks—for the first time in recorded history—had a messenger pigeon deliver results of the first Olympiad in the year 776 B.C. Another important communication milestone from the Greeks was the establishment of the first library in 530 B.C.

Long-Distance Communication

And as humans neared the end of the B.C. period, systems of long-distance communication started to become more commonplace. A historical entry in the book “Globalization and Everyday Life” noted that around 200 to 100 B.C:

"Human messengers on foot or horseback (were) common in Egypt and China with messenger relay stations built. Sometimes fire messages (were) used from relay station to station instead of humans."

Communication Comes to the Masses

In the year 14, the Romans established the first postal service in the western world. While it’s considered to be the first well-documented mail delivery system, others in India and China had already long been in place. The first legitimate postal service likely originated in ancient Persia around 550 B.C. However, historians feel that in some ways it wasn’t a true postal service because it was used primarily for intelligence gathering and later to relay decisions from the king.

Well-Developed Writing System

Meanwhile, in the Far East, China was making its own progress in opening channels for communication among the masses. With a well-developed writing system and messenger services, the Chinese would be the first to invent paper and papermaking when in 105 an official named Cai Lung submitted a proposal to the emperor in which he, according to a biographical account, suggested using “the bark of trees, remnants of hemp, rags of cloth, and fishing nets” instead of the heavier bamboo or costlier silk material.

First Moveable Type

The Chinese followed that up sometime between 1041 and 1048 with the invention of the first moveable type for printing paper books. Han Chinese inventor Bi Sheng was credited with developing the porcelain device, which was described in statesman Shen Kuo’s book “Dream Pool Essays.” He wrote:

“…he took sticky clay and cut in it characters as thin as the edge of a coin. Each character formed, as it were, a single type. He baked them in the fire to make them hard. He had previously prepared an iron plate and he had covered his plate with a mixture of pine resin, wax, and paper ashes. When he wished to print, he took an iron frame and set it on the iron plate. In this, he placed the types, set close together. When the frame was full, the whole made one solid block of type. He then placed it near the fire to warm it. When the paste [at the back] was slightly melted, he took a smooth board and pressed it over the surface, so that the block of type became as even as a whetstone.”

While the technology underwent other advancements, such as metal movable type, it wasn’t until a German smithy named Johannes Gutenberg built Europe’s first metal movable type system that mass printing would experience a revolution. Gutenberg’s printing press, developed between 1436 and 1450, introduced several key innovations that included oil-based ink, mechanical movable type, and adjustable molds. Altogether, this allowed for a practical system for printing books in a way that was efficient and economical.

World's First Newspaper

Around 1605, a German publisher named Johann Carolus printed and distributed the world’s first newspaper . The paper was called "Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien,” which translated to “Account of all distinguished and commemorable news.” However, some may argue that the honor should be bestowed upon the Dutch “Courante uyt Italien, Duytslandt, &c.” since it was the first to be printed in a broadsheet-sized format. 

Photography, Code, and Sound

Bettmann / Getty Images

By the 19th century, the world was ready to move beyond the printed word. People wanted photographs, except they didn’t know it yet. That was until French inventor Joseph Nicephore Niepce captured the world’s first photographic image in 1822 . The early process he pioneered, called heliography, used a combination of various substances and their reactions to sunlight to copy the image from an engraving.

Color Photographs

Other notable later contributions to the advancement of photography include a technique for producing color photographs called the three-color method, initially put forth by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1855 and the Kodak roll film camera, invented by American George Eastman in 1888.

The foundation for the invention of electric telegraphy was laid by inventors Joseph Henry and Edward Davey. In 1835, both had independently and successfully demonstrated electromagnetic relay, where a weak electrical signal can be amplified and transmitted across long distances.

First Commercial Electric Telegraph System

A few years later, shortly after the invention of the Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph, the first commercial electric telegraph system, an American inventor named Samuel Morse developed a version that sent signals several miles from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore. And soon after, with the help of his assistant Alfred Vail, he devised the Morse code, a system of signal-induced indentations that correlated to numbers, special characters, and letters of the alphabet.

The Telephone

Naturally, the next hurdle was to figure out a way to transmit sound to far off distances. The idea for a “speaking telegraph” was kicked around as early as 1843 when Italian inventor Innocenzo Manzetti began broaching the concept. And while he and others explored the notion of transmitting sound across distances, it was Alexander Graham Bell who ultimately was granted a patent in 1876 for "Improvements in Telegraphy," which laid out the underlying technology for electromagnetic telephones . 

Answering Machine Introduced

But what if someone tried to call and you weren't available? Sure enough, right at the turn of the 20th century, a Danish inventor named Valdemar Poulsen set the tone for the answering machine with the invention of the telegraphone, the first device capable of recording and playing back the magnetic fields produced by sound. The magnetic recordings also became the foundation for mass data storage formats such as audio disc and tape.

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Communication History by Richard B. Kielbowicz LAST REVIEWED: 30 August 2016 LAST MODIFIED: 30 August 2016 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756841-0027

All aspects of communication have historical dimensions. Historians of communication thus have a wide purview, studying the role of technology, institutional developments in the media, the production of messages, the reciprocal influences of communication and society, and much more. These studies—numbering in the tens of thousands—range from antiquarian accounts of single newspapers to expansive investigations of communication’s role in the rise and fall of civilizations. Eclectic in their research approaches, communication historians draw on the concepts and tools used in both the social sciences and the humanities. As social scientists, communication historians investigate broad patterns across time; some findings emphasize change, while others highlight continuity. As a humanistic endeavor, communication history considers unique events, persons, and developments—the contingencies that confound tidy social-scientific generalizations. Although communication history stands as a subdiscipline in its own right, it also serves as a valuable complement to nonhistorical inquiries. Many scholars use history as a backdrop for studies about contemporary issues in communication.

Overviews of the field take many forms. Encyclopedias such as Blanchard 1998 can serve as a good entry point to the literature. Recent studies often use communication networks and technology as their overarching theme. Lubar 1993 provides accessible discussions of each major communication innovation, while Chandler and Cortada 2000 emphasizes the social and especially economic consequences of technologies. Carey 1989 and Czitrom 1982 combine an interest in technology with intellectual and cultural history. Starr 2004 moves political decisions to center stage in analyzing the development of communication. Edited works such as Solomon and McChesney 1993 suggest the varied themes tackled by communication historians.

Blanchard, Margaret A., ed. 1998. History of the mass media in the United States . Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn.

Possibly a first stop when starting a research project, this encyclopedia features nearly five hundred entries on individuals, technologies, businesses, and issues that figured prominently in media history. A thorough index and ample cross-references facilitate use. Each entry lists references for further reading.

Carey, James W. 1989. Communication as culture: Essays on media and society . Boston: Unwin Hyman.

Reprints essays by one of the most insightful and original communication historians. One section focuses on communication as culture; another, following in the tradition of Harold Innis, highlights enduring patterns of media technologies in transforming culture.

Chandler, Alfred D., Jr., and James W. Cortada, eds. 2000. A nation transformed by information: How information has shaped the United States from colonial times to the present . New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

Essays by scholars from several fields emphasize the antecedents of today’s information age. Strong coverage of people’s 19th-century information environments and transformations wrought by computers and communication in the 20th century.

Czitrom, Daniel J. 1982. Media and the American mind: From Morse to McLuhan . Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press.

A clever balance of technological and intellectual history. One part addresses popular reactions to telegraphy, motion pictures, and broadcasting; another analyzes the contributions to understanding communication of John Dewey, Robert Park, Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, and behavioral scientists.

Lubar, Steven. 1993. InfoCulture: The Smithsonian book of information age inventions . Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Written to accompany a Smithsonian exhibition on the roots of the modern information revolution, this lavishly illustrated book focuses on technologies. Each chapter traces a medium from its origins to modern forms and includes easy-to-understand technical explanations of how it works.

Solomon, William S., and Robert W. McChesney, eds. 1993. Ruthless criticism: New perspectives in U.S. communication history . Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.

Early works by fourteen of today’s most accomplished communication historians. The essays suggest the almost boundless range of the field—public sphere analysis, the local press, labor issues, media for minority audiences, communication policy, television in diplomacy, and more.

Starr, Paul. 2004. The creation of the media: Political origins of modern communications . New York: Basic Books.

Partly responding to recent scholarship that highlights technology as the source of most fundamental changes in communication, Starr instead looks at key political decisions. He ranges over print, telecommunication, film, and broadcasting through World War II and contrasts the American experience with developments in Europe.

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History of communication

by Chris Woodford . Last updated: January 15, 2023.

P icture yourself a cave dweller, half a million years ago. Something exciting has happened—you've just discovered fire—and you want to share it with a friend in Australia or Canada. You whip out your phone to take a selfie but... oh, wait! Selfies haven't been invented. Nor have phones, friends overseas, or even places called "Canada" and "Australia."

It's hard to comprehend just how much the human world has changed since prehistoric times, when nothing bothered people more than finding food and shelter and staying warm. All kinds of inventions and discoveries have radically reshaped the planet we live on, but some of the most dramatic involve communications : recording information in different forms and sharing it with other people. The coming of transportation technologies, such as railroads, cars, and jet engines , meant people could whistle round the world in days, hours, or even minutes. But communication technologies, like the telephone , radio , and fiber optics , shrunk the same world to a point a beam of light could cross in under a second. Even more radically, most forms of communication, from the alphabet to the Internet , let us share thoughts, ideas, and history itself in both space and time: with friends alive now and people far in the future who haven't even been born. How did ancient communications technology become the power behind modern civilization? Let's take a closer look!

Listen instead... or scroll to keep reading

Photo: Movies in a box: Thomas Edison's pioneering movie camera, pictured in his office and library at West Orange, New Jersey. Credit: Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith's America Project in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division .

Writing and printing

Our memories, though amazing, are fragile and fallible. How, then, to record things like land transactions, trade, and taxes? That was how writing came to be invented, in ancient times, some 5,000–10,000 years ago, originally in the form of simple marks pressed in clay or notches carved into sticks and bones. [1]

Photo: Hieroglyphics in a temple in Karnak, Egypt. Photo by Maison Bonfils (Beirut, Lebanon) courtesy US Library of Congress .

Writing materials

Photo: Papyrus fragment from ancient Egypt, c.2030–1640BCE. Photo courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art .

Writing down and sharing thoughts meant not just inventing the idea of languages and alphabets but developing practical ways of recording words that would last longer than human memories. The Egyptians pioneered papyrus (the forerunner of paper, made from the fibrous pith of swamp plants) c.3000BCE. It was widely used by the Greeks and Romans, who also used parchment (and an especially fine version of it, called vellum), made from dried animal hides, which is also believed to date back to the ancient Egyptians. [5] The Greeks and Romans wrote on papyrus scrolls (long rolls of paper or paperlike materials wrapped, like paper kitchen towels, round wooden holders). Later, people tried writing on slabs of wood covered in wax into which marks could be scratched with a stick and rubbed out if necessary. This idea was known as a codex and it gradually evolved into the paper books we have today, which began as parchment sheets (dried sheep and goat hides) crudely stitched together. Early Egyptian writers daubed their papyrus with some of the first inks, made from lampblack (a kind of soot) bound with gum arabic (a simple glue made from things like acacia trees) and water. Ostraca (essentially, bits of broken pottery) was another very common writing material in the ancient world. It was the Chinese who made arguably the greatest leap in writing technology when they developed paper , from crushed tree bark, in 105CE (and, according to some sources, several centuries earlier). The Chinese had developed their own inks, possibly as early as 3000–4000BCE, also based on materials like lampblack and soot from burned pine trees, and something called "stone ink," which may have been based on graphite (soft carbon). [6]

Printing and copying

Photo: Type: The metal keys of an old typewriter make printed letters appear on paper in any order you choose. This idea dates back to ancient China.

Another great Chinese invention (c.600CE) was the idea of printing things by carving pictographs, in reverse, into blocks of wood, coating them with ink, and pressing them against paper. With woodblock printing , as this is known, you could make many copies of the same page and give it to lots of people at once. An even cleverer Chinese idea, which dates from around 700CE (and was first described by scientist Shen Kuo c.1100CE), was to carve individual pictographs into smaller wooden blocks ("type") that could be rearranged on the page to make different messages—an idea we'd now called "movable type." According to T.H. Tsien, writing in Joseph Needham's epic history of Chinese science and technology: "Of all the products from the ancient world, few can compare in significance with the Chinese inventions of paper and printing." [7]

Photo: Printing presses changed the world. This one was used by Benjamin Franklin in the 1730s. Photo from Carol M. Highsmith's America Project in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, courtesy US Library of Congress .

Today, most of us are printers, though we might use old-fashioned things like typewriters (developed from the 1860s onward by Christopher Latham-Sholes, 1819–1890); photocopiers (invented in the 1940s by Chester Carlson, 1906–1968, and pioneered by Xerox); inkjets (pioneered by the Japanese Canon company in the 1980s); laser printers (invented in the 1960s at Xerox by Gary Starkweather, 1938–2019); or publish our words on the World Wide Web (invented in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee, 1955–). Paper is just as important as ever, but we also read our words from things like LCD computer screens and the "electronic ink" displays of ebooks . All these inventions, though ground-breaking in their own way, are built on the earliest and most important human communication technologies: writing, alphabets, type, and printing.

Near and far

Express and semaphore.

Photo: Don't shoot the messenger! Pony Express riders carried messages long distances, on horseback, in the mid-19th century. Photo of a statue by sculptor Thomas Holland in Old Sacramento, California by Carol M. Highsmith. Credit: The Jon B. Lovelace Collection of California Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith's America Project, Library of Congress , Prints and Photographs Division.

All these things suffered the same basic drawbacks. First, even in things like semaphore, messages were essentially being sent mechanically—by clumsy, unnatural devices that were slow to operate. (Imagine wanting to ask someone out on a date and first having to light a large bonfire so you can send them smoke signals.) Second, where messages were physically carried, they could travel no faster than humans or animals could move them. Third, from messenger runners to Pony Express, most of these methods involved getting someone else to send a message on your behalf; you couldn't just do it yourself. This all changed in the 19th century when scientists and inventors learned to harness the power of electricity for practical purposes—so people could, gradually, send long-distance messages all by themselves.

Telegraph and telephone

The telegraph was a kind of "electrical upgrade" of the semaphore—a way of sending coded messages down a length of electric cable instead of as visual signals through the air. It was first proposed in Scotland in 1753 by someone writing in a magazine and signing themselves, anonymously, "C.M." Over the next 80 years, many inventors tried out experimental variations on this theme before the commercially viable Cooke and Wheatstone system was finally developed, in 1837, by British scientist and prolific inventor Sir Charles Wheatstone (1802–1875) and Sir William Cooke (1806–1879). Using six wires (for sending the signal), and five moving pointers (for displaying the message), it was relatively cumbersome. That was largely why it was succeeded by the simpler, more reliable, two-wire Morse telegraph introduced in 1844 by American Samuel Morse (1791–1872), featuring his famous Morse code, which uses dots and dashes (short and long pulses of electricity) to represent the letters of the alphabet. [10]

Artwork: Samuel Morse demonstrates the telegraph. Artwork from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, 1871, courtesy of Library of Congress , Prints and Photographs Division.

Telegraphs transmitted at the speed of electricity—far faster than horses or even steam locomotives could carry messages—but they still suffered the other two drawbacks of classic, long-distance communication: they used clumsy "keys" to send letters and words in coded form, which meant messages could be sent and received only at special offices by trained telegraph operators. Fortunately, the 18th century inspired various inventors to experiment with converting the sound of their own voices into electrical signals that could be sent, in real-time, down electric cables—the basic principle of the telephone . Most of their names are largely forgotten today, including a German named Johann Philip Reis (1834–1874), French engineer Charles Bourseul (1829–1912), Italian Antonio Meucci (1808–1889), and American Elisha Gray (1835–1901). Rightly or wrongly , the name we remember as the telephone's inventor is that of Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922), who patented his version of the technology in 1876. The telegraph and telephone systems eventually evolved into ways of sending entire documents down a wire by telex (a "teleprinting" system developed in Germany in the 1930s) and fax (developed in its familiar, modern, electronic form in the 1960s).

Photo: Fiber optics sends messages in laser light beams. Photo by Greg Vojtko courtesy of US Navy and Wikimedia Commons .

The reach of radio

Radio began life in the mid-19th century as a scientific curiosity. In the 1860s, Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) had figured out the mysterious connection between electricity and magnetism —they were two sides of the same coin—and suggested that both traveled in wave form at the speed of light . Heinrich Hertz, a German physicist, confirmed this in his laboratory in 1888 when he sent the first electromagnetic wave. An English physicist, Sir Oliver Lodge (1851–1940), took things a few steps further, devising some of the basic apparatus for sending and receiving these "Hertzian waves" (as they were originally known) and sending the first radio message at a meeting in Oxford, England in 1894. Nikola Tesla (1856–1943), the great underrated genius of the electrical age, also made important steps forward in sending and receiving "wireless" signals—by radio.

Photo: Radios like this trace their history back to 1888, when Heinrich Hertz made the first electromagnetic wave in his laboratory.

But it was Italian Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937) who made radio a world-beating invention, with the same magical mix of scientific inspiration, entrepreneurial chutzpah, and marketing flair that people like Elon Musk demonstrate today. In December, 1901, in a particularly famous demonstration, Marconi sent a radio transmission from Cornwall, England to Newfoundland, Canada some 2200 miles (3500 km) away. It was such a long distance that many thought it impossible, but Marconi figured (correctly) that the radio waves would bounce off part of Earth's atmosphere (the ionosphere), just like light bounces off a mirror , in effect following Earth's curvature. The theory of how this worked was explained the following year by oddball British physicist Oliver Heaviside, (1850–1925). [13]

Thanks to electronics pioneers like Lee De Forest (1873–1961), who invented the triode amplifying vacuum tube in 1906, and John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley, who invented the transistor , in 1947, radio receivers soon became small enough to power with batteries and carry wherever you went. They were, very crudely speaking, one-way mobile phones!

From pictures to moving pictures

Freezing the world into still pictures has always been a fundamental part of how people communicate. Think of cave paintings, hieroglyphics, or Chinese pictograms. Think, indeed, of the whole history of human art. But painting takes time and skill. If you have neither of these things, but still want to catch an accurate picture of things you can see you need a camera—another invention that dates back to ancient China. The Chinese developed the ancestor of modern cameras, the camera obscura, and first wrote down details of how it worked around 500BCE, though it's believed to be a much older idea possibly even dating to prehistoric times. [14] In one classic early form, it was a darkened room with drapes drawn across the windows into which a tiny hole was bored. Light rays streamed through the hole, crossed over, and projected an upside-down image of the outside world onto the opposite wall.

Photographs

The Chinese clearly knew the optics of making images, but not how to record them permanently. That invention didn't appear for another two millennia, in the 18th century, when British chemists found that certain silver-based chemicals would change their nature when they were exposed to light. In 1827, Frenchman Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (1765–1833) made the first black-and-white photo using the same science, later inspiring another Frenchman, Louis Daguerre (1787–1851), to take what were effectively the first popular photos, known as daguerreotypes. Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877) discovered how to make better photos using a "negative" (reversed color) image that was then developed into a final "positive" print.

All these early photos took time to capture—Niépce's first photo took eight hours and daguerreotypes needed 10 minutes—but better methods were just around the corner. Another Englishman, Frederick Scott Archer (1813–1857), used glass "plates" coated in silver chemicals to take snapshots in seconds. And the final step, in the development of classic photography, happened in 1883 when an American inventor named George Eastman (1854–1932) discovered how to transform Archer's cumbersome plates into small, cheap, plastic strips called film. Eastman went on to invent easy-to-use, popular film cameras under the Kodak brand name; his rival, Edwin Land (1909–1991), went one step further by inventing Polaroid cameras that could take, develop, and print instant photos. Land's first public demonstration was an instant picture of his own face; in effect, he'd invented the selfie.

The human world is a restless place: nothing stays still for long. Taking photos was a wonderful technological advance, but it didn't solve the problem of how to record things that change before your eyes. Many inventors toyed with the difficulty of turning still images into moving ones in the 19th century. Indeed, the first attempts to do this were, quite literally, toys, such as the phenakistoscope (a disc covered with still pictures that leaped to life when you spun it around) and the zoetrope (which worked in a similar way, except the images were printed on the inside of a spinning cylinder and viewed through a slit).

Following the invention of cameras, others tried to capture movement using a sequence of photos taken one after another. Most famously, in the 1870s, American Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) used rows of cameras to take successive shots of moving people and animals. A few years later, Frenchman Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) developed a camera on a long pointed stick that took photos of fast-moving things in rapid succession. American William Dickson (1860–1937) saw what Muybridge and Marey had done and, working with his boss, Thomas Edison (1847–1931), developed what was effectively the first modern movie camera, the Kinetograph, in 1893. The films it took could be viewed by loading them into a rattling, viewing machine called a Kinetoscope , but only one person could see them at a time (usually after paying a few cents in a "peepshow" booth). The final piece of the puzzle—the invention of what we now call movies—happened in Paris, France in the 1890s when two brothers, Auguste Lumière (1862–1954) and Louis Lumière (1864–1948) invented a better movie-making system that projected its pictures onto a wall, big enough for many people to see at the same time; their first movie theater opened in 1895. The first movies were black and white, but color ones appeared about a decade later when Kinemacolor was invented in 1906 by George Albert Smith (1864–1959). [15]

Photo: An early portable TV from about 1955.

Today, many of us view movies (and other programs) not in movie theaters but in our own living rooms. What made that possible was the invention of television , which was effectively a marriage of radio technology and movies. In theory, it was a relatively small step from radio to television— all you had to do was send pictures through the air as well as sounds. In practice, that meant devising ways to "scan" moving pictures (turn them into "chunks" that could be transmitted), and it took the combined genius of several brilliant electrical pioneers to give us the TV system we know today. In the 1920s, Scotsman John Logie Baird (1888–1946) made a mechanical TV sending and receiving system using a spinning-disc scanner originally invented by a young German named Paul Nipkow (1860–1940). Electronic TVs were perfected by Russian-born Vladimir Zworykin (1888–1982), working in the United States, and Philo Farnsworth (1906–1971), who developed the modern idea of scanning, electronic television. The first TV broadcasts were made in 1927 (by the BBC in London) and 1930 (by RCA and NBC in the United States). Though early broadcasts were made in monochrome (black and white), color TV was soon developed by Hungarian-born Peter Goldmark (1906–1977), working in the United States, also in the 1930s. [16]

The sound of music

So much for pictures, but what of sounds? Let's press the rewind button on history, for a moment, to discover a different, parallel story...

By the mid-16th century, humans had mastered the art of writing down thoughts and ideas and reproducing them in quantity, but sound was a different matter. There was no obvious way to record spoken language, music, or any other kind of sound—and none would come along for at least another 200 years. Indeed, it was not until 1877 that Thomas Edison, who had experimented with telegraphs and made a number of improvements to their design, figured out a crude way of recording sound—in the shape of his "talking machine." It featured cylinders covered with foil on which a metal needle rested loosely. When you spoke into a horn, the vibrations made the needle jump up and down, cutting into the foil, which was slowly rotated to leave a groove and a record of your voice. Running the process in reverse turned the bumps in the groove back into (very crackly) sound that you could hear if you put your ear near the same horn.

Photo: Emile Berliner (1851–1929) pictured around 1927 with one of his gramophones. Photo by Harris & Ewing courtesy of US Library of Congress , Prints and Photographs Division.

Edison's sound-recording machine led to the gramophone , invented by Emile Berliner (1851–1929), who used a similar needle that cut its grooves into wax-covered discs. Gradually, these evolved into vinyl plastic long-playing (LP) records that many music fans still listen to to this day, first introduced by CBS records in 1948. Plastic LPs were cheap and easy to reproduce in their thousands and millions, so ushering in the 20th-century era of mass-produced pop and rock records. But, unlike with Edison's original recorder, you couldn't record your own.

Analog and digital

This left a gap in the market that was filled by magnetic sound-recording technologies. The first of these appeared in 1888, a decade after Edison's original machine, in the shape of magnetically coated cloth tape, invented by another US inventor, Oberlin Smith (1840–1926). A German named Fritz Pfleumer (1897–1945) reinvented essentially the same idea, several decades later, before selling it to the AEG company, who began manufacturing the first tape recorders in the 1930s. Three decades later, in 1964, Philips devised a way of miniaturizing reels of tape and packaging them in convenient plastic , "compact cassettes." With a cassette recorder, you could play back other people's music and record your own sounds too. By the 1980s, thanks to Sony's Akio Morita (1921–1999), the technology was small and light enough to carry in your pocket—in the shape of the company's famous Walkman. [17]

Photo: This typical personal music player from the 1990s could play digital, optical CDs (loaded at the front) or analog, magnetic "compact cassettes" (loaded at the back).

Today, most of these forms of sound recording and playback have been superseded by digital technologies, which store sounds not as bumps in vinyl or magnetized "domains" on long reels of tape but long strings of binary numbers. In the 1960s, James T. Russell (1931–) of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory invented the basic optical technology behind the compact disc (CD) , a fraction the size of an LP, which stores about an hour of sound in digital form, and which later evolved into the DVD (digital video disc) for storing movies. Further developed in the 1970s, it was finally commercialized in the 1980s by Philips and Sony.

Now, in the age of the Internet , even technologies like the CD and DVD seem dated: most of us download books, music, and other forms of information instantly, as and when we need to. Thanks to a cunning technology called streaming , pioneered by Rob Glaser (1962–) of Real Networks (then Progressive Networks) in the late 1990s, you don't even need to download things before you play them. The basic idea of streaming is to play big files (things like movies and TV programs) as they're downloading, so you don't have to wait. This made possible innovations like YouTube, Netflix, the BBC iPlayer, and many similar "on-demand" broadcasting apps.

Communication meets the computer

Photo: A go-anywhere personal communicator—better known as a smartphone.

Scroll back through this article and you'll see that we got from writing to tweeting in about 7,000–12,000 years; and from the alphabet to the Internet in about three and half thousand. Where will communications technology take us in the next two thousand years... two hundred... or even twenty? Watch this space!

If you liked this article...

Don't want to read our articles try listening instead, find out more, on this website.

• Analog versus digital technology
• Digital cameras
• Film cameras and photography
• Cellphones (Mobile phones)
• Fax machines
• Fiber optics
• LP record players
• Microphones
• Photocopiers
• Typewriters
• World Wide Web (WWW)

On other websites

• Communication : Lots of fascinating online exhibits here from London's Science Museum.

For younger readers

• Inventions: A Visual Encyclopedia by John Farndon et al. DK/Smithsonian, 2018. The section on "Communication" (pp.134–177) covers much of the same ground as I do, but in a more visual, photographic style.
• Communications and Computers by Chris Woodford. Facts on File, 2004. One of my books charting the history of communications technology.

For older readers

• Revolutions in Communication: Media History from Gutenberg to the Digital Age by Bill Kovarick, Bloomsbury, 2015. A fascinating look at how endless reinventions of communication technology have prompted all kinds of social changes. Suitable for advanced students, undergraduates, and general adult readers.
• The Worldwide History of Telecommunications by Anton A. Huurdeman, Wiley, 2003. A huge history of modern communications, mainly covering the period 1800–present.
• The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book by James Raven (ed), Oxford, 2020. A collection of essays that chart the fascinating development of books from ancient history to digital modern.
• The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers by Tom Standage, Bloomsbury, 1998/2014. The invention of the telegraph—and how it changed society.

References ↑    There's no exact date for the invention of writing and even giving an inexact date depends on how we define our terms. Do we mean the first use of recorded symbols (sometimes called "proto-writing"), the first "true" written language, the first use of sophisticated language building blocks like syllables and alphabets...? For a good, clear introduction, see "Chapter 33: Graphology," and the section "The history of writing" in David Crystal's The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language , Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp.196–207 (and later editions). Online, Wikipedia's article about the history of writing is a reasonable place to start. ↑    "There is nothing to support a theory of common origin": The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language by David Crystal, Cambridge University Press, 1987, p.196. ↑    See for example The World's Oldest Writing , Archaeology, May/June 2016 and How to write cuneiform , British Museum, 21 January 2021. For a longer introduction, see the short book Cuneiform by Irving L. Finkel and Jonathan Taylor, British Museum, 2015. ↑    A good overview of what alphabets are and where they come from can be found in The Early Alphabet by John F. Healey, University of California Press, 1990. Online, see The evolution of the alphabet by Ewan Clayton, British Library, 1990. ↑    For a broad overview, see "Chapter 1: Writing Materials in the Ancient World" by Adam Bülow-Jacobsen in The Oxford Handbook of Papyrology by Roger S. Bagnall, Oxford, 2009. 2011 ↑     Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 5, Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part 1, Paper and Printing by Tsien Tsuen-Hsuin / Joseph Needham (ed.). Cambridge University Press, 1985, p.4. "Stone ink" is mentioned on p.234 and p.242. ↑     Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 5, Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part 1, Paper and Printing by Joseph Needham and Tsien Tsuen-Hsuin. Cambridge University Press, 1985, p.2. ↑    See "Chapter 6: Renaissance and Reformation" by James Raven and Goran Proot in The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book by James Raven (ed), Oxford, 2020, p.137. ↑    See Riders of the Pony Express by Ralph Moody, University of Nebraska Press, 1958/2004. ↑    See The Telegraph: How Technology Innovation Caused Social Change by Annteresa Lubrano, Taylor & Francis, 2013. For a quick overview of how the telegraph changed business, see Digital Technology and Institutional Change from the Gilded Age to Modern Times: The Impact of the Telegraph and the Internet by Ronnie J. Phillips, Journal of Economic Issues, Vol. 34, No. 2 (June 2000), pp.266–289. ↑     Alexander Graham Bell: Making Connections by Naomi Pasachoff, Oxford, 1996, p.84. 2011 ↑     City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics by Jeff Hecht. Oxford University Press, 2004. ↑    See Signor Marconi's Magic Box by Gavin Weightman. Da Capo Press, 2003. ↑    This idea is part of an academic field known as archaeo-optics . ↑     Movie History: A Survey by Douglas Gomery and Clara Pafort-Overduin. Routledge, 2011. ↑     The History of Television: 1880–1941 and The History of Television: 1942–2000 by Albert Abramson. McFarland, 2007/2009. ↑     Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music by Greg Milner. Granta, 2018/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009. Please do NOT copy our articles onto blogs and other websites Articles from this website are registered at the US Copyright Office. Copying or otherwise using registered works without permission, removing this or other copyright notices, and/or infringing related rights could make you liable to severe civil or criminal penalties. Text copyright © Chris Woodford 2021. All rights reserved. Full copyright notice and terms of use . Follow us

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What is the history of communication?

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Otávio Daros, What is the history of communication?, Communication Theory , Volume 34, Issue 3, August 2024, Pages 109–117, https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtae009

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Communication History is an expression that proves to be problematic in the light of theoretical and conceptual analysis, as this article clarifies and discusses, when examining the proclamations made by its main spokespersons. Both methodological and empirical works are taken into account, with the purpose of evaluating how this object of knowledge is defined and approached, comparing it with what is effectively presented in the investigations, published by scholars from different generations and contexts. It is argued that there is a tendency to confuse the subject with others, especially Media History . An important exception is the cultural historian Robert Darnton, although a careful examination of his historiographical project with an ethnographic bias ends up revealing that his proposal for communication tends to reorient the field under no less problematic parameters.

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A History of Communication

By Tim Lambert

Communication in Ancient Times

The first means of communication was, of course, the human voice but about 3,200 BC writing was invented in Iraq and Egypt. It was invented about 1,500 BC in China. Other civilizations in Central America like the Mayans also invented systems of writing.

The next big step was the invention of the alphabet in what is now Israel and Lebanon about 1,600 BC.

In the Ancient World, many civilizations including Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Rome, and China had efficient postal systems to deliver messages to parts of their empires using relays of horses.

In the Ancient World, people wrote on papyrus or parchment. However, the Chinese invented paper in about 200 BC. The knowledge of how to make paper passed to the Arabs and in the Middle Ages, it reached Europe.

Communication 1500-1800

The next major improvement in communication was the invention of printing. The Chinese invented printing with blocks in the 6th century AD but the first known printed book was the Diamond Sutra of 686. In Europe, in the mid-15th century, Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, which made books much cheaper and allowed newspapers to be invented. William Caxton introduced the printing press into England in 1476.

The first newspapers were printed in the 17th century. The first newspaper in England was printed in 1641. (However, the word newspaper was not recorded until 1670). The first successful daily newspaper in Britain was printed in 1702.

Meanwhile, European monarchs set up postal services to carry their messages. In France, Louis XI founded one in 1477 and in England, Henry VIII created the Royal Mail in 1512. In 1635 to raise money Charles I allowed private citizens to send messages by Royal Mail, for a fee.

Meanwhile, the pencil was invented in 1564.

Communication in the 19th Century

Communication became far more efficient in the 19th century. In the early 19th century the recipient of a letter had to pay the postage, not the sender. Then in 1840, Rowland Hill invented the Penny Post. From then on the sender of the letter paid. Cheap mail made it much easier for people to keep in touch with loved ones who lived a long way off. In 1874 the Universal Postal Union was formed to coordinate postal services in different countries.

The first post boxes were installed in Paris in 1653. By the 19th century, they were common across France and other countries introduced them. In the Channel Islands, the first post boxes were installed in 1852. In mainland Britain, the first post boxes were installed in 1853. In the USA Albert Potts patented a mailbox designed to fit on a lampost in 1858. Free-standing mailboxes were introduced in 1894.

The telegraph was invented in 1837. A cable was laid across the Channel in 1850 and after 1866 it was possible to send messages across the Atlantic.

Meanwhile, the first fax machine was invented in 1843. A Scot, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876. The first telephone exchange in Britain opened in 1879. The first telephone directory in London was published in 1880. The first telephone line from Paris to Brussels was established in 1887. The first line from London to Paris opened in 1891. The first transatlantic telephone line opened in 1927. In 1930 a telephone link from Britain to Australia was established.

More useful inventions were made in the 19th century. Ralph Wedgwood invented carbon paper in 1806. Bernard Lassimonne invented a pencil sharpener in 1828. Therry des Estwaux invented a better version in 1847. The first successful typewriter went on sale in 1874.

In 1829 Louis Braille invented an embossed typeface for the blind and in 1837 Isaac Pitman invented shorthand. The first successful rotary printing press was invented by Richard M Hoe in 1846.

Communication in The 20th Century

Communication continued to improve in the 20th century. In 1901 Marconi sent a radio message across the Atlantic. Radio broadcasting began in Britain in 1922 when the BBC was formed. By 1933 half the households in Britain had a radio. Following the 1972 Sound Broadcasting Act, independent radio stations were formed. In the 1990s new radio stations included Radio 5 Live (1990) and Classic FM (1991).

Television was invented in 1925 by John Logie Baird and the BBC began regular, high-definition broadcasting in 1936. TV was suspended in Britain during World War II but it began again in 1946. TV first became common in the 1950s. A lot of people bought a TV set to watch the coronation of Elizabeth II and a survey at the end of that year showed that about one-quarter of households had one. By 1959 about two-thirds of homes had a TV. By 1964 the figure had reached 90% and TV had become the main form of entertainment – at the expense of cinema, which declined in popularity.

At first, there was only one TV channel in Britain but between 1955 and 1957 the ITV companies began broadcasting. BBC2 began in 1964 and Channel 4 began in 1982. Channel 5 began in 1997. In Britain, BBC2 began broadcasting in color in 1967, BBC 1, and ITV followed in 1969. Satellite television began in Britain in 1982.

Meanwhile, commercial TV began in the USA in 1941. TV began in Australia in 1956 and in New Zealand in 1960. Meanwhile, in 1960 the first communications satellite, Echo was launched. The laser printer was invented by Gary Starkweather in 1969.

Meanwhile, in Britain, telephones became common in people’s homes in the 1970s. In 1969 only 40% of British households had a phone but by 1979 the figure had reached 69%. Martin Cooper invented the first handheld cell phone in 1973. The first mobile phone call in Britain was made in 1985. The first commercial text was sent in 1992. Mobile phones became common in the 1990s. In Britain, smartphones were introduced in 1996.

Communication in The 21st Century

In the early 21st century the internet became an important form of communication. Today email has become one of the most popular methods of communication. In the 2010s ebook readers became common.

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At the beginning of each section, you will find “learning objectives.” These objectives clarify what you will be assessed on through various activities, reflections, discussions, and quizzes. 

Learning Objectives

• Define communication.
• Discuss the history of communication from ancient to modern times.
• Define Rhetoric
• List the five forms of communication.
• Distinguish among the five forms of communication.

Before we dive into the history of communication, it is important that we have a shared understanding of what we mean by the word communication . For our purposes in this book, we will define communication as the process of creating and sharing meaning through human symbolic interaction.   The key word in this definition is symbolic. As human beings, we create symbols that allow us to communicate with one another.

We create words to represent things, places, and even complex ideas. Symbols come in the form of words but can also take the shape of gestures, clothing, and even our appearance and identity. As human beings, we have always done this. Of course, as we have evolved, so has the system of symbols that we use to create and share meaning.

As human beings, we have a special capacity to use symbols to communicate about things outside our immediate temporal and spatial reality (Dance & Larson). For example, we have the capacity to use abstract symbols, like the word education , to discuss a concept that encapsulates many aspects of teaching and learning. We can also reflect on the past and imagine our future. The ability to think outside our immediate reality is what allows us to create elaborate belief systems, art, philosophy, and academic theories. It’s true that you can teach a gorilla to sign words like food and baby , but its ability to use symbols doesn’t extend to the same level of abstraction as ours. However, humans haven’t always had the sophisticated communication systems that we do today.

Some scholars speculate that humans’ first words were onomatopoetic. You may remember from your English classes that onomatopoeia refers to words that sound like that to which they refer—words like boing , drip , gurgle , swoosh , and whack . Just think about how a prehistoric human could have communicated a lot using these words and hand gestures. He or she could use gurgle to alert others to the presence of water or swoosh and whack to recount what happened on a hunt. In any case, this primitive ability to communicate provided an evolutionary advantage. Those humans who could talk were able to cooperate, share information, make better tools, impress mates, or warn others of danger, which led them to have more offspring who were also more predisposed to communicate (Poe, 2011).

This eventually led to the development of a “Talking Culture” during the “Talking Era.” During this 150,000 year period of human existence, ranging from 180,000 BCE to 3500 BCE, talking was the only medium of communication, aside from gestures, that humans had (Poe, 2011).

The beginning of the “Manuscript Era,” around 3500 BCE, marked the turn from oral to written culture. This evolution in communication corresponded with a shift to a more settled, agrarian way of life (Poe, 2011). As hunter-gatherers settled into small villages and began to plan ahead for how to plant, store, protect, and trade or sell their food, they needed accounting systems to keep track of their materials and record transactions. While such transactions were initially tracked with actual objects that symbolized an amount—for example, five pebbles represented five measures of grain—symbols, likely carved into clay, later served as the primary method of record keeping. In this case, five dots might equal five measures of grain.

The end of the “Manuscript Era” marked a shift toward a rapid increase in communication technologies. The “Print Era” extended from 1450 to 1850 and was marked by the invention of the printing press and the ability to mass-produce written texts.

This 400-year period gave way to the “Audiovisual Era,” which only lasted 140 years, from 1850 to 1990, and was marked by the invention of radio, telegraph, telephone, and television. Our current period, the “Internet Era,” has only lasted from 1990 until the present. This period has featured the most rapid dispersion of a new method of communication, as the spread of the Internet and the expansion of digital and personal media signaled the beginning of the digital age.

The evolution of communication media, from speaking to digital technology, has also influenced the field of communication studies. To better understand how this field of study developed, we must return to the “Manuscript Era,” which saw the production of the earliest writings about communication. In fact, the oldest essay and book ever found were written about communication (McCroskey, 1984). Although this essay and book predate Aristotle, he is a logical person to start with when tracing the development of communication scholarship. His writings on communication, although not the oldest, are the most complete and systematic. Ancient Greek philosophers and scholars such as Aristotle theorized about the art of rhetoric , which refers to speaking well and persuasively.

Today, we hear the word rhetoric used in negative ways. A politician, for example, may write off his or her opponent’s statements as “just rhetoric.” This leads us to believe that rhetoric refers to misleading, false, or unethical communication, which is not at all in keeping with the usage of the word by ancient or contemporary communication experts.

Today, the study of communication expands far beyond rhetoric. As a student majoring in communication, you can explore a variety of specialized areas such as family communication, public relations, digital communications, journalism, and more! If you have considered majoring in Communication Studies, watch the video below to get an idea of the types of careers this degree will prepare you for!

The formalization of speech departments led to an expanded view of the role of communication and career paths that one can explore. The five main forms of communication, all of which will be explored in much more detail in this book are below.

• Intrapersonal communication is communication with oneself and occurs only inside our heads.
• Interpersonal communication is communication between people whose lives mutually influence one another and typically occurs in dyads, which means in pairs.
• Group communication occurs when three or more people communicate to achieve a shared goal.
• Public communication is sender-focused and typically occurs when one person conveys information to an audience.
• Mass communication occurs when messages are sent to large audiences using print or electronic media.

This book is designed to introduce you to all these forms of communication. If you find one of these forms particularly interesting, you may be able to take additional courses that focus specifically on it and will likely see intersections between this course content and others you are taking, such as psychology or sociology.

Dance, F. E. X. and Carl E. Larson, The Functions of Human Communication: A Theoretical Approach (New York, NY: Holt, Reinhart, and Winston, 1976), 23.

Keith, W., “On the Origins of Speech as a Discipline: James A. Winans and Public Speaking as Practical Democracy,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 38, no. 3 (2008): 239–58.

McCroskey, J. C., “Communication Competence: The Elusive Construct,” in Competence in Communication: A Multidisciplinary Approach , ed. Robert N. Bostrom (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1984), 260.

Poe, M. T., A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 27.

Communication Competence: Developing Skills for Your Personal and Professional Life Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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The Handbook of Communication History

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Related papers

In this article, I take a fresh look at disciplinary histories of American communication study. Specifically, the discussion groups disciplinary histories into 2 different kinds of narratives, referred to as biographical and intellectual histories. The first group has as its method biography, and focuses on the achievement of central individuals and the methodology of their research. It is argued that these accounts constitute rituals of disciplinary affirmation. The second group has as its method intellectual history, and focuses on the theoretical foundations of ideas taken up by communication scholars, tracing the relations among ideology, culture, technology, and communication.These accounts, on the other hand, are read as polite rebellions against received understandings of communication history.

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Routledge Handbook of International Political Sociology, 2017

In The History of the Social Sciences since 1945, 2010

The article focuses on the processes of the founding of German Communication Studies as social science from the 1960s to the 1980s. At the beginning of the 1960s, German “Publizistikwissenschaft” was a discipline on the edge. It suffered from an acute lack of academic staff as well as methodological and theoretical innovations. Therefore, the discipline was no longer supported by German higher education politics. The eventual rescue of the discipline came from outside. The extension of the cognitive identity of “Publizistikwissenschaft” towards empirical socio-scientific communication studies was initiated by career changers and outsiders with more awareness for the need of modern social sciences. In the 1960s, Fritz Eberhard, Gerhard Maletzke, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, Henk Prakke, Otto B. Roegele and others initiated a debate about the redefinition of the discipline’s subject, including empirical methods and sociological theories. Thus, they induced an empirical turn of the discipline and prepared the institutionalization of the socio-scientific paradigm in German Communication Studies in the 1970s and 1980s.

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International Journal of Communication, 2013

History of European Ideas, 1981

Volkmer/The Handbook of Global Media Research, 2012

International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2015

‘Historical Sociology’ (with John Hobson and Justin Rosenberg) in Robert Denemark et al (eds.), The International Studies Encyclopaedia (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).

Histories, 2022

Critical Studies in Media Communication, 2006

Review of Communication, 2011

William Outhwaite and Stephen P. Turner, eds., The SAGE Handbook of Social Science Methodology. (London: SAGE., 2007

International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed., vol. 15, 2015

American Political Science Review, 1982

Sociologica, 2007

Human Relations, 1997

InterDisciplines. Journal of History and Sociology, 2010

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The Power of Photography: a Persuasive Exploration

How it works

Photography’s often seen as just a hobby or a form of art, but it’s actually a lot more important than we usually think. Since its invention, photography has changed how we capture moments and has had a big impact on different parts of society. This essay dives into how powerful photography really is, arguing that it’s a key tool for communication, documenting life, and pushing for social change. By looking at its history, tech improvements, and contributions to society, we’ll see just how crucial photography is today.

• 1 Historical Impact and Evolution
• 2 Photography as a Tool for Communication
• 3 Documentation and Preservation of History
• 4 Photography and Social Change
• 5 Conclusion
• 6 References

Historical Impact and Evolution

Photography’s come a long way since the early 19th century. When Louis Daguerre invented the daguerreotype in 1839, it kicked off the practical use of photography. This invention let people preserve moments with a level of detail never seen before, opening up visual documentation to everyone. By the mid-19th century, photography was already an essential tool for recording big events, like the American Civil War. Photos from that time showed the harsh realities of war, changing public opinion and helping people understand historical events better.

Fast forward to the late 20th century, and digital photography took things to a whole new level. Digital cameras and smartphones made taking and sharing photos super easy, so now everyone can do it. In 2020 alone, over 1.4 trillion photos were taken worldwide (thanks, Statista). This shift from film to digital didn’t just make photography more popular; it also boosted its impact in fields like journalism, advertising, and social media.

Photography as a Tool for Communication

Photography breaks down language barriers, helping us communicate across different cultures and languages. A single photo can express complex feelings and stories that words struggle to convey. In our globalized world, this visual language is super important. Think about iconic images like Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother” or the “Tank Man” from the Tiananmen Square protests. These photos struck a chord worldwide, raising awareness about critical social issues.

In journalism, photography is a powerful storytelling tool. Photojournalism captures real moments, adding visual proof to written stories. According to Pew Research Center in 2018, visual content can really boost how much people engage with and remember information. This shows how important photography is in news reporting, making sure people not only get the facts but also feel connected to the events.

Documentation and Preservation of History

Photography isn’t just about communication; it’s also crucial for documenting and preserving history. Photos capture fleeting moments, creating a visual record that future generations can look back on. This is essential for keeping cultural heritage, personal memories, and historical events alive. For example, documenting indigenous cultures through photography has helped preserve their traditions and way of life, which might otherwise disappear over time.

In science and research, photography is incredibly valuable too. It allows for detailed documentation of experiments, observations, and discoveries, helping with peer review and replication. Using photos in scientific publications boosts the credibility and accuracy of research. Plus, advancements in imaging tech, like electron microscopy and satellite imagery, have opened up new frontiers in science, letting researchers see things at both tiny and huge scales.

Photography and Social Change

One of the most powerful aspects of photography is its ability to drive social change. Photos can raise awareness, evoke empathy, and inspire action. Social documentary photography has been key in highlighting injustices and pushing for change. Photographers like Lewis Hine, who captured child labor conditions in early 20th-century America, helped reform labor laws and improve working conditions.

Today, photography continues to be a force for social movements. Social media has made it easier to spread photos, helping activists rally support and draw attention to important issues. The Black Lives Matter movement, for example, has used photography to document police brutality and racial injustice, sparking global protests and calls for systemic change. The International Journal of Communication in 2020 pointed out how significant visual content is in shaping public perception and driving social movements nowadays.

In the end, photography’s impact on society is huge. From its historical beginnings to its modern uses, photography has become a powerful medium for communication, documentation, and social change. Its ability to go beyond language and cultural barriers, preserve history, and inspire action makes it indispensable in today’s world. As technology keeps advancing, photography’s potential to shape our understanding and drive positive change will only grow. So, we should recognize and harness the power of photography to tackle the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century.

• Rosenblum, N. (2007). A World History of Photography . Abbeville Press.
• Statista. (2021). Number of digital photos taken worldwide from 2010 to 2021. Retrieved from https://www.statista.com/statistics/487786/forecast-of-digital-photos-taken/
• Pew Research Center. (2018). State of the News Media. Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/topics/state-of-the-news-media/
• International Journal of Communication. (2020). The Role of Visual Content in Social Movements.

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Computer Science > Emerging Technologies

Title: semantic communication enabled 6g-ntn framework: a novel denoising and gateway hop integration mechanism.

Abstract: The sixth-generation (6G) non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) are crucial for real-time monitoring in critical applications like disaster relief. However, limited bandwidth, latency, rain attenuation, long propagation delays, and co-channel interference pose challenges to efficient satellite communication. Therefore, semantic communication (SC) has emerged as a promising solution to improve transmission efficiency and address these issues. In this paper, we explore the potential of SC as a bandwidth-efficient, latency-minimizing strategy specifically suited to 6G satellite communications. While existing SC methods have demonstrated efficacy in direct satellite-terrestrial transmissions, they encounter limitations in satellite networks due to distortion accumulation across gateway hop-relays. Additionally, certain ground users (GUs) experience poor signal-to-noise ratios (SNR), making direct satellite communication challenging. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework that optimizes gateway hop-relay selection for GUs with low SNR and integrates gateway-based denoising mechanisms to ensure high-quality-of-service (QoS) in satellite-based SC networks. This approach directly mitigates distortion, leading to significant improvements in satellite service performance by delivering customized services tailored to the unique signal conditions of each GU. Our findings represent a critical advancement in reliable and efficient data transmission from the Earth observation satellites, thereby enabling fast and effective responses to urgent events. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed strategy significantly enhances overall network performance, outperforming conventional methods by offering tailored communication services based on specific GU conditions.

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Manifesting Black history in 3D

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A history of shakespeare at the a.r.t..

Photos courtesy of A.R.T.; photo illustration by Liz Zonarich/Harvard Staff

A.R.T. Communications

‘Romeo and Juliet’ is latest in long line of productions stretching back to theater’s inaugural staging in 1980 of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’

Romeo and Juliet

Macbeth In Stride

Created and performed by Whitney White, “Macbeth in Stride”   examined what it means to be an ambitious Black woman through the lens of one of Shakespeare’s most iconic characters, Lady Macbeth. Directed by Taibi Magar and Tyler Dobrowsky, the groundbreaking world premiere relied upon a wide range of musical genres as a vehicle for exploration. Since 2011, “Macbeth in Stride” has been produced by theaters nationwide including Philadelphia Theater Company and Shakespeare Theatre Company and will perform at Yale Repertory Theater in December.

The Tempest

“The Tempest”   is thought to be one of Shakespeare’s last plays and his farewell to the stage. A.R.T’s 2014 production featured a Dust Bowl-circus-inspired setting and stage magic developed by Teller (of the legendary duo Penn & Teller). From the simulated storm to spectacular illusions, A.R.T.’s production brought the magic and wizardry of the play   to a whole new level. Co-produced with the Smith Center for the Performing Arts in Nevada, “The Tempest”   opened in Las Vegas on April 1, 2014, then began at A.R.T. on May 10, 2014. 

Shakespeare Exploded: The Donkey Show, Sleep No More, Best of Both Worlds

Terrie and Bradley Bloom Artistic Director Diane Paulus kicked off her inaugural season at A.R.T. with the “Shakespeare Exploded” festival, which featured some of the A.R.T.’s most notable Shakespeare adaptations: “The Donkey Show,” an immersive disco experience inspired by “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” that closed at A.R.T. in 2019 after over 850 performances to over 150,000 audience members, and “Sleep No More,” a unique immersive theatrical adventure that combined the worlds of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”   with Hitchcock’s thrillers .  “Best of Both Worlds”   was an R&B infused adaptation of “The Winter’s Tale,” featuring a roster of Boston’s most celebrated gospel choirs.

An adaptation of a lost play thought to have been co-written by Shakespeare, “Cardenio”   was a collaboration between renowned scholar Stephen Greenblatt and playwright Charles L. Mee. Performed only twice in Shakespeare’s lifetime and never published, the 17 th -century romantic comedy was almost certainly based on a section of Miguel de Cervantes’ novel “Don Quixote.” Greenblatt commissioned theater companies from around the world to create their own culturally specific adaptations by combining the Cervantes novel with the surviving fragments of the 17 th -century play. 

Julius Caesar

The Winter’s Tale

Originally considered among Shakespeare’s comedies, scholars later classified “The Winter’s Tale” as a late romance, one that is preoccupied with themes of redemption and forgiveness. A.R.T.’s production in 2000, which was staged by Macedonian director Slobodan Unkovski, distinguished the two worlds of the play, Sicily and Bohemia, through bold, colorful costume and set design. 

The Merchant of Venice

Director Andrei Serban staged some of the A.R.T.’s most notable productions from its first decade. After an eight-year absence, Serban returned to A.R.T. to mount “The Taming of the Shrew” and “The Merchant of Venice” in back-to-back seasons. Serban’s production began with a drunken tinker who dreamt that the A.R.T. company was touring in a full-sized van that opened to become a playing area; his staging had Kate and Petruchio first meet in a boxing ring. Audiences raved about the production’s exuberant energy, invention, and eclectic costume design. For his production of “The Merchant of Venice,” one of Shakespeare’s most provocative and controversial plays, Serban’s frequent collaborator Elizabeth Swados composed a new score for the production. 

The Taming of the Shrew

Director Ron Daniels’ productions of   “Henry IV Part 1,” “Henry IV Part 2,” and “Henry V” translated the action into a series of startling images featuring bright colors and bold costumes.  The series, which regularly filled the theater with standing-room-only audiences, featured celebrated actor Bill Camp. Founding Director Robert Brustein adapted “Henry IV Part 1” and “Henry IV Part 2.” 

In director Ron Daniels’ new interpretation of “Hamlet” to Cambridge, Mark Rylance, who later became the Founding Artistic Director of the Globe in London, starred as a distinctive, modern Hamlet who was clinically depressed. The production ran in repertory with a production of Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” in which Rylance also portrayed Konstantin.

Twelfth Night

Director Andrei Serban married the humor of Shakespeare’s popular comedy with darker elements of the play, leaning into its eroticism and featuring visual imagery that rejected conventions of time and place. Serban reimagined many aspects of the play, ignoring gendered boundaries and reconcontextualizing the traditionally happy ending. Celebrated performer Cherry Jones starred as Viola/Cesario.

Love’s Labour’s Lost

Measure for measure, boys from syracuse, as you like it.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

A.R.T.’s inaugural production was “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,”   Shakespeare’s most frequently staged play. The show incorporated music from “The Fairy Queen,” a semi-opera by Henry Purcell, and featured a production design that created a world of mystery, rather than romance. A.R.T. Founding Director, Robert Brustein, starred as Theseus in this production that was broadcast by Boston’s public television station, WGBH, in May and August of 1981. The production set the stage for a long history of producing and reimagining Shakespeare’s plays.

Plotkins, Marilyn J.  The American Repertory Theatre Reference Book: The Brustein Years.  Praeger, 2005.

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George M. Johnson’s “Flamboyants” uncovers the heroes of Black queer history

Beyoncé’s “Welcome to the Renaissance”—which opened every show of her $579.8 million-grossing, 39-city concert tour of 2023—was an invitation to step into a brave world celebrating Black creativity, intersectionality and multi-faceted expressions of sexual identity. It looked back at one of the most impactful moments of intellectualism, social consciousness, and artistic expression in Black History, The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, to help create a better future.

Into this august territory steps author George M. Johnson with his new book  Flamboyants: The Queer Harlem Renaissance I Wish I’d Known , a celebration of “writers, performers, and activists from 1920s Black America whose sexualities have been obscured throughout history.” Through 14 essays, Johnson reveals how American culture has been shaped by icons who are both Black and Queer—and whose stories deserve to be retold, celebrated and remembered.

Do you want more? Subscribe to Native Son’s newsletter for more news, information, and conversations about Black gay and queer everything.

Johnson, whose  Ne w York Times Best Selling memoir  All Boys Aren’t Blue  is one of the most banned books in the United States, is at the forefront of the cultural zeitgeist. Flamboyants explores the expansive and intersectional existence of Black queer life from the past to create space for the future.

Native Son asked Johnson five questions about Flamboyants , the Harlem Renaissance, and which historical figure inspires. 

Native Son: What is the origin story of Flamboyants ? 

View this post on Instagram A post shared by George M Johnson (@iamgmjohnson)

George M. Johnson: Flamboyants is interesting in the sense that we originally wanted to do this on television or in film. I worked with Twiggy Pucci Garçon, my sister, my best friend. We own a production company together called No Shade. And during the pandemic, after All Boys Aren’t Blue was optioned by Gabrielle Union, we were like, Oh, we wanna create more stories and renaissance-like periods of queerness where the stories have been told either incorrectly or not given the full Black experience . So we were pitching, having general meetings, but the industry was just in a weird place.

I already have two books out. I’m doing great in the Young Adult Space and I live by Tony Morrison’s words: If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it. And it’s like, baby, I should write the book . Originally the book was gonna be more biographical, but it charnged with the illustrations, with the poetry.

Native Son: The Harlem Renaissance was a vibrant, creative, and politically charged era where Black folks thrived. What inspires you most about it? 

George M. Johnson: I think the thing that inspired me the most about the Harlem Renaissance was the societal standards. And I mean that in the sense of the Great Depression what was happening in 1929. It was a period of resiliency, period. Just the fact that you have the Women’s Rights Movement, the Women’s Suffrage Movement—there were so many other movements happening at the same time, and mind you, this is still the Harlem Renaissance prior to the actual civil rights movement in the ‘60s. This was a period of amazing Black expansion. This was a period where we really had to go hard in the late 1800s. We started getting our first political offices with the ability to even be able to vote as Black men ’cause Black women were not able to vote. 

We were going to expand in every area. We are going to expand arts and culture and Black Wall Street, and all of these things. But for all intents and purposes of this book, it was the beauty of watching pivotal figures—people like Zora Neale Hurston who helped us understand accents, dialect, and Southern culture. I feel like that’s what the Harlem Renaissance was. This was our first inkling of Diasporic work to the masses where you have Josephine Baker. There were just so many of them who traveled overseas and our work expanded beyond what the notion of an African American was. That’s what I love most about this period and the expansiveness of us. Even ballroom culture was also involved. It’s like everything that we have today we touched on in that period. 

Native Son: So we’re kind of in that same time period now—where it’s really dark. There are all these movements. It’s expansive. So why is this book perfect for today? 

George M. Johnson: The book is perfect for today because when I think about Alaine Locke and The New Negro, it was the African American Bible. And so we’re almost a hundred years later now. And this was not planned in that way. But I was inspired to learn about these figures. To learn about Alaine and so many other people. Almost a hundred years later I’m putting something into the world that was put into the world a hundred years ago. It felt like my ancestors put this together. Alaine put together artists, speakers, orators, and writers. I’m grateful for the fact that not only did I have an understanding because was able read about so many of these people, but that a hundred years later I get to kind of re-share these people with the world.

Native Son: Your books focuse on educating young LGBTQ folks and normalizing their experiences, normalizing their existence. What do you want young people to learn from Flamboyance and the Harlem Renaissance? 

George M. Johnson: Yes. The takeaway from Flamboyants and the Harlem Renaissance is: You’ve been here before. A person like you has existed before. A person like you has had to navigate this before . That was the ultimate premise. In the introduction chapter I talk about how my heroes were hidden from me, my heroes have been stolen from me. I grew up as a Black kid not knowing what queerness was, not fully understanding what it was, but there were people who also grew up like me and I should have been able to learn about them. They had some of the similar identity struggles that I had. And that’s what’s been most unfortunate. The fact that I grew up not knowing who Zora Neale Hurston was and Josephine Baker and Ma Rainey and Bessy Smith and Langston Hughes, the list goes on. The biggest piece is letting people know that people existed like you before you, who have fought this fight for you. So continue to fight the fight, but also know you have heroes who came before you, too. 

Native Son: Who’s your favorite figure from the Harlem Renaissance and why? 

George M. Johnson: Okay. Okay. Very, very good question. It is hard. It is between Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. I feel like Langston Hughes would’ve been the Wendy Williams of our era. I’m screaming because he knew everybody and knew everybody’s business and that’s probably why he had fallouts with Lorraine Hansberry and everybody else. Because Langston Hughes knew the tea. The person I related to most was Countee Cullen. He was really the one with the biggest juxtaposition of his identity versus his societal stance. He married W.E.B. Du Bois’s daughter and was bisexual. The fact of the matter is that he had the biggest Black wedding probably ever recorded—over 3000 people showed up. All of the Black intelligentsia showed up, but also all of the Black radicals. I think I was able to relate to him the most because I think that is the part of identity we struggle with, having to fit into multiple communities when we’re a leader. And he was leader—his poetry was amazing, his thinking was amazing, but also can we really be led by a single person? And that is something that a hundred years later we still grapple with.

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