The history of communication technologies (media and appropriate inscription tools) have evolved in tandem with shifts in political and economic systems, and by extension, systems of power.
Human communication was initiated with the origin of speech approximately 100,000 BCE.[1] Symbols were developed about 30,000 years ago. The imperfection of speech allowed easier dissemination of ideas and eventually resulted in the creation of new forms of communication, 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.
The oldest known symbols created for communication were
cave paintings, a form of rock art, dating to the Upper Paleolithic age. The oldest known cave painting is located within Chauvet Cave, dated to around 30,000 BCE.[2] These paintings contained increasing amounts of information: people may have created the first calendar as far back as 15,000 years ago.[3] The connection between drawing and writing is further shown by linguistics: in Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece the concepts and words of drawing and writing were the same (Egyptian: 's-sh', Greek: 'graphein').[4]
The next advancement in the history of communications came with the production of
Homo sapiens
to move from the first cave paintings to the first petroglyphs, dated to approximately the Neolithic and late Upper Paleolithic boundary, about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago.
It is possible that
Homo sapiens (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 rocks, 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.[5]
Pictograms
Further information:
Pictograms
A
chronologically
.
Pictograms were used by various ancient cultures all over the world since around 9000 BCE, when tokens marked with simple pictures began to be used to label basic farm produce and become increasingly popular around 6000–5000 BCE.
. 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.
Because some ideas are universal, many different cultures developed similar ideograms. For example, an eye with a tear means 'sadness' in
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
.
Early scripts
The oldest-known forms of writing were primarily logographic in nature, based on pictographic and ideographic elements. 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 categorize a system uniquely.
The invention of the first
Indus Valley
script's status as a writing system.
The original Sumerian writing system was derived from a system of
phonetic elements by 2800 BCE. About 2600 BCE cuneiform began to represent syllables of spoken Sumerian language
.
Finally, cuneiform writing became general-purpose writing system for
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 BCE for or by Semitic
workers, but we cannot read these early writings and their exact nature remains open to interpretation.
Over the next five centuries this Semitic "alphabet" (really a
Phoenician writing) seems to have spread north. All subsequent alphabets around the world[citation needed] with the sole exception of Korean Hangul
have either descended from it, or been inspired by one of its descendants.
Scholars agree that there is a relationship between the West-Semitic alphabet and the creation of the Greek alphabet. There is debate between scholars regarding the earliest uses of the Greek alphabet because of the changes that were made to create the Greek alphabet.[7]
The Greek alphabet had the following characteristics:
The Greek lettering we know of today traces back to the eighth century BCE
Early Greek scripts used the twenty-two West-Semitic letters and included five supplementary letters.
Early Greek was not uniform in structure, and had many local variations.
The Greek lettering was written using a lapidary style of writing.
Scholars believe that at one point in time, early Greek scripts were very close to the West-Semitic alphabet. Over time, the changes that were made to the Greek alphabet were introduced as a result of the need for the Greeks to find a better way to express their spoken language in a more accurate way.[7]
Storytelling
Verbal communication is one of the earliest forms of human communication, the oral tradition of storytelling has dated back to various times in history. The development of communication in its oral form can be based on certain historical periods. The complexity of oral communication has always been reflective based on the circumstance of the time period. Verbal communication was never bound to one specific area, instead, it had and continues to be a globally shared tradition of communication.[8] People communicated through song, poems, and chants, as some examples. People would gather in groups and pass down stories, myths, and history. Oral poets from Indo-European regions were known as "weavers of words" for their mastery over the spoken word and ability to tell stories.[9] Nomadic people also had oral traditions that they used to tell stories of the history of their people to pass them on to the next generation.
Nomadic tribes have been the torch bearers of oral storytelling. Nomads of Arabia are one example of the many nomadic tribes that have continued through history to use oral storytelling as a tool to tell their histories and the story of their people. Due to the nature of nomadic life, these individuals were often left without architecture and possessions to call their own, and often left little to no traces of themselves.[10] The richness of the nomadic life and culture is preserved by early Muslim scholars who collect the poems and stories that are handed down from generation to generation. Poems created by these Arabic nomads are passed down by specialists known as sha'ir. These individuals spread the stories and histories of these nomadic tribes, and often in times of war, would strengthen morale within members of given tribes through these stories.[citation needed]
In its natural form, oral communication was, and has continued to be, one of the best ways for humans to spread their message, history, and traditions to the world.[citation needed]
Timeline of writing technology
30,000 BC – In ice-age Europe, people mark ivory, bone, and stone with patterns to keep track of time, using a lunar calendar.[11]
14,000 BCE – In what is now Mezhirich, Ukraine, the first known artifact with a map on it is made using bone.[11]
Prior to 3500 BC – Communication was carried out through paintings of indigenous tribes.
1965 – Chandros Rypinski, Jr. patents the first multiple channel radio telephone system[15] which was licensed to Bell Labs[16] (patent no. US3173996A).
1981 – Comvik introduces the world's first automatic mobile phone service followed a week later by Nordic Mobile Telephone
1971 – Erna Schneider Hoover invents a computerized switching system for telephone traffic.
1971 –
8-inch floppy disk removable storage medium for computers is introduced.[25]
1973 – Optelecom, Inc. delivers the first operational optical communications system under an ARPA contract to the US Army Missile Command, and the first commercial fiber optic system to Chevron.[26]
1992 – IBM ThinkPad 700C laptop computer created. It was lightweight compared to its predecessors.[27]
Screenshot of NCSA Mosaic browser1993 – Mosaic graphical web browser is launched.[29]
1994 – Internet radio broadcasting is born.
1996 – The first Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (WDM) system was installed by Ciena Corp.[30] WDM subsequently became the common basis of all telecommunications networks[31] and a foundation of the Internet.
1996 – Motorola StarTAC mobile phone introduced. It was significantly smaller than previous cellphones.[27]
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)
