Communication and the Media

Abstract

Because communication is the fundamental social process, it has attracted the attention of scholars and practitioners in a wide range of disciplines. What is transmitted by the communication process, and the manner in which it is transmitted and received, affect all other societal processes. Consequently, the literature of communication is substantial, widespread, and enormously diverse in its origins. Even in the first decade of the present century we had an intimation of the complex questions involved:

By communication is here meant the mechanism through which human relations exist and develop — all the symbols of the mind, together with the means of conveying them through space and preserving them in time. It includes the expression of the face, attitude and gesture, the tones of the voice, words, writing, printing, railways, telegraphs, telephones, and whatever else may be the latest achievement in the conquest of space and time. All these taken together, in the intricacy of their actual combination, make up an organic whole corresponding to the organic whole of human thought: and everything in the way of mental growth has an external existence therein. The more closely we consider this mechanism, the more intimate will appear its relation to the inner life of mankind, and nothing will more help us to understand the latter than such consideration.¹