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Custom Writing Services How to Write a Research Paper Research Paper Topics Research Paper Examples Order Communication iResearchNet Custom Writing Services Communication Definitions and Concepts The Latin root of communication” – communicare – means to share” or to be in relation with.” Through Indo-European etymological roots, it further relates to the words common,” commune,” and community,” suggesting an act of bringing together”. The notion of communication has been present and debated in the west from pre-Socratic times. The Hippocratic Corpus, for example, is a list of symptoms and diseases; it discusses ways of bringing together” the signs of a disease or ailment with the disease itself for the purposes of diagnosis and prognosis. Communication as Process and Communication as Product In the west, classic works of Greek philosophy set much of the agenda for understanding communication (Peters 1999, 36 –50). Emerging from a society in the transition from oral to literate modes, these works figured communication as a process bringing together humans to consider a shared reality through the word. Like many societies, early Greece was characterized by orality: communication by means of the voice, without the technology of writing. Oral communication, because it could not store information in the same ways and amounts as writing, evolved mnemonic, often poetic, devices to pass on traditions and cultural practices. Narrative, for example, developed as a form of communication in which facts were figured as stories of human action to be retold in relatively small public gatherings of people. Communication, in this formulation, was necessarily a locally situated process. The development of literate societies involved communication resulting in a product” to be stored, distributed, and used as a reference for scientific analysis, critique, and political organization. Written communication is originally thought to have developed as a means of keeping a record of economic transactions. In other spheres, it allowed the storage of large amounts of information and the recording of abstract, scientific principles. Furthermore, written communication was also to be used for the reification of cultural and religious traditions. Writing wrought a transformation in the experience of space and time: in contrast to oral messages, a communication in writing could be accessed at a later date than its composition; it could also be consumed in private. In tandem with these transformations, written communication facilitated scientific thought and the growth of technology, providing a means of knowledge storage that far surpassed, in its capacity for detail and complexity, that of oral memory. Social Uses of Communication Communication could be understood originally as a repository of tradition. In pre-print Europe, the protection of religious tradition was partnered by the preservation of writing, enshrining the Original Word” for the purposes of instruction. Before Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, writing was the preserve of monasteries, the locations in which scriptures were copied out longhand. Latin writers from Augustine to Aquinas, through exegesis of such manuscripts, also meditated on the relation between signs and referents. Following the introduction of print, communication became a key symbolic resource for social change. In the centuries after 1450, Europe experienced major transformations of social life in which communication played a central role. Print facilitated widespread communication of messages that might be deemed educational or seditious, ultimately enabling confrontation (as in the Reformation) as well as specialization (sciences building on the Renaissance). As a result of a series of legal and constitutional changes across Europe in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, print experienced a boom. Booksellers grew in number; the growth of magazines, periodicals, newspapers, and other printed materials also aided literacy, whether in schools or when taken up privately by the self-taught citizen. Print promoted a more private, individual communication centered on the self. Yet, through its reach to a large audience, it also allowed public life in Europe to prosper. In the modern era, communication served as a common denominator of public life. The activities of public life in Europe developed into what Habermas (1989) calls the (bourgeois) public sphere. This sphere, derived from the meetings of the mercantile class – burghers and others – for talk and debate, was attendant on the eighteenth-century growth of coffee houses in Britain and the German-speaking lands and, in France, of the salons. As Habermas shows, coffee-house talk was driven by the content of printed periodicals and mainly oriented toward questions of literature and culture, even above politics. It was divorced from the family and the intimate sphere, and simultaneously extraneous to the relations of production, commerce, and business. The discourse of the public sphere could be considered political in quite a pure” sense, a rational” communication, enabling self-governance and self-reflection, not simply dictated by, or the epiphenomenon of, the accumulation of capital. Among the educated classes in eighteenth-century Europe, oral communication assumed an importance that arguably surpasses that of the present-day western world of mobile telephony and wireless connection. Just as periodical content fueled oral communication, the content of conversation was frequently, in turn, reproduced and disseminated in periodicals. The public sphere thesis” is important for understanding communication as a socio-historical phenomenon in that it exemplifies, first, the ways in which social entities are brought together (in this case, members of a particular literate class) and, second, the way communication has long been simultaneously interpersonal in the flesh and technologically mediated. Twentieth-Century Concepts of Communication in The West A full-fledged communication theory” emerged in the twentieth century and was, not coincidentally, intimately linked to investigations of togetherness” in a number of different fields. Among these investigations were those of American sociology (the Chicago School) and the written accounts of Anglophone anthropology (especially, Malinowski, Boas, and Sapir), which, along with assessments of the idea of community” (for example, Tönnies), attempted to present a comprehensive vision of how communication is constituted. After these early milestones in the development of the human and social sciences, progress was accelerated in the 1920s by a series of studies into specific aspects of modern communication and communication as a general phenomenon (Peters 1999). New technologies of communication during the period stimulated the broadening of the understanding of communication. Photography, in various forms, had proliferated since 1839; film, from the mid-1890s, had become an important new medium of information and entertainment; and radio, above all, became the defining medium in which communication by one to many – broadcasting, or mass communication – could take place without listeners having to even leave their homes. Radio was an intensely public medium of communication and stimulated worries about its potential uses in bringing people together through propaganda. The period from the 1920s to the late 1940s, a period dominated by the use of radio for propagandizing purposes by the Nazis and the fascists in Europe, featured a renewal and expansion of the understanding of communication by intellectuals. Political scientists and theorists of the public” were aligned with administrative researchers” who carried out industry-funded studies of (usually) media audiences, who were being redefined as key players in public communication. The understanding of communication in this period generally proceeded from the flow of The message...