History of communication

The history of communication dates back to prehistoric times, with significant changes in communication technologies (media and appropriate inscription tools) evolving in tandem with shifts in political and economic systems, and by extension, systems of power. Communication can range from very subtle processes of exchange, to full conversations and mass communication. Human communication was revolutionized with speech approximately 500,000 years ago. Symbols were developed about 30,000 years ago, and writing about 5000 years ago.

Symbols

Various religious symbols.

The imperfection of speech, which nonetheless allowed easier dissemination of ideas and stimulated inventions, eventually resulted in the creation of new forms of communications, improving both the range at which people could communicate and the longevity of the information. All of those inventions were based on the key concept of the symbol: a conventional representation of a concept.

Cave paintings

The oldest known symbols created with the purpose of communication through time are the cave paintings, a form of rock art, dating to the Upper Paleolithic. Just as the small child first learns to draw before it masters more complex forms of communication, so Homo sapiens' first attempts at passing information through time took the form of paintings. The oldest known cave painting is that of the Chauvet Cave, dating to around 30,000 BC. Though not well standardized, those paintings contained increasing amounts of information: Cro-Magnon people may have created the first calendar as far back as 15,000 years ago. The connection between drawing and writing is further shown by linguistics: in the Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece the concepts and words of drawing and writing were one and the same (Egyptian: 's-sh', Greek: 'graphein').

Petroglyphs

Petroglyphs from Häljesta, Sweden. Nordic Bronze Age.

The next step in the history of communications is petroglyphs, carvings into a rock surface. It took about 20,000 years for homo sapiens to move from the first cave paintings to the first petroglyphs, which are dated to around 10,000BC.

It is possible that the humans of that time used some other forms of communication, often for mnemonic purposes - specially arranged stones, symbols carved in wood or earth, quipu-like ropes, tattoos, but little other than the most durable carved stones has survived to modern times and we can only speculate about their existence based on our observation of still existing 'hunter-gatherer' cultures such as those of Africa or Oceania.

Pictograms

Pictograph from 1510 telling a story of coming of missionaries to Hispaniola

A pictogram (pictograph) is a symbol representing a concept, object, activity, place or event by illustration. Pictography is a form of proto-writing whereby ideas are transmitted through drawing. Pictographs were the next step in the evolution of communication: the most important difference between petroglyphs and pictograms is that petroglyphs are simply showing an event, but pictograms are telling a story about the event, thus they can for example be ordered chronologically.

Pictograms were used by various ancient cultures all over the world since around 9000 BC, when tokens marked with simple pictures began to be used to label basic farm produce, and become increasingly popular around 6000-5000 BC.

They were the basis of cuneiform and hieroglyphs, and began to develop into logographic writing systems around 5000 BC.

Ideograms

File:Our Father in heaven - Mikmaq hierogl.gif

The beginning of the Lord's Prayer in Míkmaq hieroglyphic writing. The text reads Nujjinen wásóq – "Our father / in heaven"

Pictograms, in turn, evolved into ideograms, graphical symbols that represent an idea. Their ancestors, the pictograms, could represent only something resembling their form: therefore a pictogram of a circle could represent a sun, but not concepts like 'heat', 'light', 'day' or 'Great God of the Sun'. Ideograms, on the other hand, could convey more abstract concepts, so that for example an ideogram of two sticks can mean not only 'legs' but also a verb 'to walk'.

Because some ideas are universal, many different cultures developed similar ideograms. For example, an eye with a tear means 'sadness' in Native American ideograms in California, as it does for the Aztecs, the early Chinese and the Egyptians.

Ideograms were precursors of logographic writing systems such as Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters.

Examples of ideographical proto-writing systems, thought not to contain language-specific information, include the Vinca script (see also Tărtăria tablets) and the early Indus script. In both cases there are claims of decipherment of linguistic content, without wide acceptance.

Writing

26th century BC Sumerian cuneiform script in Sumerian language, listing gifts to the high priestess of Adab on the occasion of her election. One of the earliest examples of human writing.

The oldest-known forms of writing were primarily logographic in nature, based on pictographic and ideographic elements. The earliest known form of writing (mostly made up of runes) is called futhark. Most writing systems can be broadly divided into three categories: logographic, syllabic and alphabetic (or segmental); however, all three may be found in any given writing system in varying proportions, often making it difficult to categorise a system uniquely.

The invention of the first writing systems is roughly contemporary in with the beginning of the Bronze Age in the late Neolithic of the late 4000 BC. The first writing system is generally believed to have been invented in pre-historic Sumer and developed by the late 3000's BC into cuneiform. Egyptian hieroglyphs, and the undeciphered Proto-Elamite writing system and Indus Valley script also date to this era, though a few scholars have questioned the Indus Valley script's status as a writing system.

The original Sumerian writing system was derived from a system of clay tokens used to represent commodities. By the end of the 4th millennium BC, this had evolved into a method of keeping accounts, using a round-shaped stylus impressed into soft clay at different angles for recording numbers. This was gradually augmented with pictographic writing using a sharp stylus to indicate what was being counted. Round-stylus and sharp-stylus writing was gradually replaced about 2700-2000 BC by writing using a wedge-shaped stylus (hence the term cuneiform), at first only for logograms, but developed to include phonetic elements by the 2800 BC. About 2600 BC cuneiform began to represent syllables of spoken Sumerian language.

Finally, cuneiform writing became a general purpose writing system for logograms, syllables, and numbers. By the 26th century BC, this script had been adapted to another Mesopotamian language, Akkadian, and from there to others such as Hurrian, and Hittite. Scripts similar in appearance to this writing system include those for Ugaritic and Old Persian.

The Chinese script may have originated independently of the Middle Eastern scripts, around the 16th century BC (early Shang Dynasty), out of a late neolithic Chinese system of proto-writing dating back to c. 6000 BC. The pre-Columbian writing systems of the Americas, including Olmec and Mayan, are also generally believed to have had independent origins.

Alphabet

A Specimen of typeset fonts and languages, by William Caslon, letter founder; from the 1728 Cyclopaedia.

The first pure alphabets (properly, "abjads", mapping single symbols to single phonemes, but not necessarily each phoneme to a symbol) emerged around 2000 BC in Ancient Egypt, but by then alphabetic principles had already been incorporated into Egyptian hieroglyphs for a millennium (see Middle Bronze Age alphabets).

By 2700 BC Egyptian writing had a set of some 22 hieroglyphs to represent syllables that begin with a single consonant of their language, plus a vowel (or no vowel) to be supplied by the native speaker. These glyphs were used as pronunciation guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names.

However, although seemingly alphabetic in nature, the original Egyptian uniliterals were not a system and were never used by themselves to encode Egyptian speech. In the Middle Bronze Age an apparently "alphabetic" system is thought by some to have been developed in central Egypt around 1700 BC for or by Semitic workers, but we cannot read these early writings and their exact nature remain open to interpretation.

Over the next five centuries this Semitic "alphabet" (really a syllabary like Phoenician writing) seems to have spread north. All subsequent alphabets around the world with the sole exception of Korean Hangul have either descended from it, or been inspired by one of its descendants.

History of telecommunication

The history of telecommunication - the transmission of signals over a distance for the purpose of communication - began thousands of years ago with the use of smoke signals and drums in Africa, America and parts of Asia. In the 1790s the first fixed semaphore systems emerged in Europe however it was not until the 1830s that electrical [telecommunication] systems started to appear.

Distance telecommunications

Visual, auditory and ancillary methods (non-electrical):

• Prehistoric: Fires, Beacons, Smoke signals, Communication drums, Horns
• 6th century BCE: Mail
• 5th century BCE: Pigeon post
• 4th century BCE: Hydraulic semaphores
• 15th century CE: Maritime flag semaphores
• 1672: First experimental acoustic (mechanical) telephone
• 1790: Semaphore lines (optical telegraphs)
• 1867: Signal lamps
• 1877: Acoustic phonograph

Basic electrical signals:

• 1838: Electrical telegraph. See: Telegraph history
• 1858: First trans-Atlantic telegraph cable
• 1876: Telephone. See: Invention of the telephone, History of the telephone, Timeline of the telephone
• 1880: Telephony via lightbeam photophones

Advanced electrical and electronic signals:

• 1893: Wireless telegraphy
• 1896: Radio. See: History of radio.
• 1914: First North American transcontinental telephone calling
• 1927: Television. See: History of television
• 1927: First commercial radio-telephone service, U.K.–U.S.
• 1930: First experimental videophones
• 1934: First commercial radio-telephone service, U.S.–Japan
• 1936: World's first public videophone network
• 1946: Limited capacity Mobile Telephone Service for automobiles
• 1956: Transatlantic telephone cable
• 1962: Commercial telecommunications satellite
• 1964: Fiber optical telecommunications
• 1965: First North American public videophone network
• 1969: Computer networking
• 1973: First modern-era mobile (cellular) phone
• 1979: INMARSAT ship-to-shore satellite communications
• 1981: First mobile (cellular) phone network
• 1982: SMTP email
• 1983: Internet. See: History of Internet
• 1998: Mobile satellite hand-held phones
• 2003: VoIP Internet Telephony
• 2013: Google Glass

See also

• Linguistics and History of linguistics
• Semiotics
• Animal communication

References

• (Polish) Piotr Konieczny, Komunikacja: od mowy do Internetu, Histmag #49

Further reading

• Asante, Molefi Kete, Yoshitaka Miike, and Jing Yin, eds. The global intercultural communication reader (Routledge, 2013)
• Berger, Arthur Asa. Media and communication research methods: An introduction to qualitative and quantitative approaches (SAGE 2013)
• Burke, Peter. A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot (2000)
• Burke, Peter. A Social History of Knowledge II: From the Encyclopaedia to Wikipedia (2012)
• de Mooij, Marieke. "Theories of Mass Communication and Media Effects Across Cultures." in Human and Mediated Communication around the World (Springer 2014) pp 355–393.
• Esser, Frank, and Thomas Hanitzsch, eds. The handbook of comparative communication research (Routledge, 2012)
• Jensen, Klaus Bruhn, ed. A handbook of media and communication research: qualitative and quantitative methodologies (Routledge, 2013)
• Paxson, Peyton. Mass Communications and Media Studies: An Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2010)
• Poe, Marshall T. A History of Communications: Media and Society From the Evolution of Speech to the Internet (Cambridge University Press; 2011) 352 pages; Documents how successive forms of communication are embraced and, in turn, foment change in social institutions.
• Schramm, Wilbur. Mass Communications (1963)
• Schramm, Wilbur, ed. Mass Communications: A Reader (1960)
• Simonson, Peter. Refiguring Mass Communication: A History (2010)