Peter Urquhart - Communication in History: Stone Age Symbols to Social Media

The historiography of communication is undergoing its second important shift. Students of contemporary media and culture are increasingly interested in the long-term environment of human experience that frames modern communication, and that interest is reshaping the study of history in the field. This anthology, with its particular structure, is a crucial and long overdue contribution to that reformulation.

For much of its initial life, communication history was the story of the press, typically rendered as the biographies of great publishers or newspapers or of other specific media institutions and major figures, as in the chronicles of particular networks, media moguls, or film genres. The best such work, although generally in the minority, tended to situate its narratives in a broader social context, examining, for instance, the relationship between the press and changing forms of democracy, between film and socio-cultural experience, or between the electronic media and political economic patterns. The first significant shift in communication historiography was to make such broader considerations of politics, law, economics, and culture much more regular, intimate elements, to weave their threads more tightly into the tapestries of particular journalism and media histories.

If that first major shift was to broaden the horizontal frame of reference, to situate media history in a wider range of social institutions, the second major shift is to extend the frame vertically, to consider the broader story of media institutions against a much deeper chronological backdrop of the whole of human history, to examine the role of communication in the development of the human species and its forms of civilization.

It is in light of that latter shift that this book should be considered. The editors take their clue from the pioneering work of such scholars as Walter Ong, Elizabeth Eisenstein, and Harold Innis. Those communication historians share a keen interest in the deep civilization context of all principal forms of communication technologies, thereby encouraging a much richer understanding of the present, rapidly changing experience.

There are several key principles of this school of communication historiography that are well reflected in this book. First, this approach perceives all contemporary media and communication technologies as extensions of basic, innate human communication capacities. It refuses to abstract contemporary forms of media hardware and uses television cameras, personal computers, and satellites, seeing them instead as part of a long, complex process by which human beings are continuing to work out their particularly strong skills and instincts for creating systems of meaning and symbolic interaction. In this light, modern media technologies are only the latest, albeit highly significant, forms of ancient human communication technologies that include speech, gesture, drama, and social ritual of all kinds.

Second, as those different technologies have variously held sway during different periods of human experience, they have had differential impact on the defining characteristics of the capacities of the species. It appears that the very cognitive structure of the individual human being and the formal patterns of human social relations are intimately linked to the forms or systems of communication that are predominant in given eras. An oral culture, without writing, print, or electronic media, seems to be biased toward a particular pattern of sensory and expository capacity that encourages ways of seeing, hearing, and, indeed, knowing that are remarkably different when other forms of communication are more prominent. Over time those tendencies seem in turn to favor and encourage major changes in social organization, influencing, if not defining, choices among options in political, legal, religious, and economic structures. The whole of human experience, therefore, seems to depend greatly upon the form or forms of communication that are most in ascendancy during any era.