With an increase in national brands, marketing, and advertising, commercial organizations were interested in influencing consumer habits.
There were incredible financial implications for using mass media to sell products. Paul Lazarsfeld studied mass communication to understand its commercial implications and was an early pioneer in understanding persuasion and advertising. Take a look at ads on television or in magazines. What makes them effective or ineffective? What advertising messages are most likely to influence you to purchase a product?
These sorts of questions began to be explored in the early part of the 20th century. This line of research is so powerful that Yankelovich Inc.
While this number may seem impossible, think of the radio, TV, movie, billboard, and internet advertisements you encounter everyday. In fact, one of your authors was astounded when he went into a public bathroom and there were advertisements above and actually IN the urinal! While these early communication research areas actually emerged from other academic disciplines sociology, psychology, anthropology, and politics , Communication scholars found it necessary to organize themselves to further advance the field.
World War II played a major role in shaping the direction of Communication study during the s. While this designation may have some gendered undertones to it, it is important to note these men's collective influence to our field. Notably, Kurt Lewin and Carl Hovland studied group dynamics and mass communication. One approach they used to accomplish this was to call for Communication study to be its own field of research at universities.
This served as the big push to create departments of Communication that you are familiar with today. These Communication scholars began forming Communication into its own academic field by creating and adopting a vocabulary specific to the field, writing core subject matter into Communication textbooks, and agreeing to a relatively stable set of communication processes that could be taught in college and university classrooms.
Of course, the continued formal organization of Communication scholars we discussed earlier continued to help strengthen this move. Another notable contributor to the development of the field during this time was Wilbur Schramm. He is often credited as being the modern father of ommunication study. As a result of his work, departments and colleges of Communication and Speech began to form around the country, particularly in the mid-west. Now, departments of Speech, Communication, and Speech Communication exist on colleges and universities both nationally and internationally.
Charles Siepman — is an important, yet relatively little known figure in the history of Communication. Teaching and Learning Communication Now If you are interested in what Communication Scholars do and study, you can always look up Tedx talks that they have given to find out more.
Communication scholars are actively presenting their ideas about their work and the discipline around the country and the world. The National Communication Association has compiled a webpage where you can find examples of Tedx talks by those in Communication.
Click This Link to see them. Following World War II, Communication research also focused on public speaking, instructional communication, communication anxiety, persuasion, group dynamics, and business communication. With this bridging of the old and new schools, Communication departments now have professors who study and teach classical rhetoric, contemporary rhetoric, empirical social science, and qualitative social science.
As each era generated new research, previous knowledge laid the foundation for the innumerable challenges of studying communication in a rapidly changing technological, postmodern world. Since the s, we have seen more technological and world changes than at any other time in history, guiding the ways in which we now study communication. Fortunately, the field of Communication was progressive enough to take on the challenge of responding to these questions and concerns from its own perspective.
Christine de Pisan from the Renaissance was one of those people. Teaching and Learning Communication Now Remember our discussion earlier regarding the overwhelming exclusion of women in education, including Communication study?
In fact, NCA has a page devoted to the Women's Leadership Project that details how women have be instrumental in contributing to the advancement of the discipline. Read more here. Additionally, the Association for Women in Communications is an organization whose purpose it is to unite female communicators across a wide array of disciplines. This includes disciplines such as journalism print and broadcast , photography, graphic design, advertising, marketing, and public relations.
Feminist researchers like Donna Allen, Sandra A. Foss, Karen A. Foss and many others have been instrumental in the formation of a well-established and respected body of research that challenged the status quo of many of our theoretical assumptions and research practices established in past eras. Their research will be discussed in more detail in Part II of the text. Today, many colleges and universities have Communication as part of their curriculum with departments titled with names like Speech, Speech Communication, and Communication.
Likewise, our professional organizations are still active in growing and strengthening the field through teaching and research. Even with the increased recognition, there is still considerable growth, change, and movement taking place in Communication study. Those involved in the field actively and openly debate and discuss various theoretical and methodological approaches for studying human communication. The study of human communication continues to be a wide and diverse field, with each area increasing our understanding of how humans communicate.
As history explains, changes in the world will continue to guide our approaches for understanding and researching communication. We have moved from an industrial age to an information age and have yet to fully understand the communicative implications of this shift. Advances in communication and information technologies are forever changing the ways we research and teach communication in our colleges and universities.
While it is difficult to predict the specific areas and phenomena of study for future Communication research, it is safe to assume that continued global and social changes will shape the development of our field. Communication Ethics is a stand-alone ethics course that has started being offered at many colleges across the country. Even though ethics is normally associated with fields such as philosophy, journalism, mass communication, and advertising, recent research has shown that a communication ethics class can have a positive effect on all students.
In fact, a study done by Tammy Swenson-Lepper et. Through surveys of students, both before and after taking these courses, the majority of students came out of these classes with a greater ability to explain the morality behind their reasoning, and a greater confidence in their decision-making.
Food politics is another emerging field in the study of Communication. Irony and Food Politics is an article written by Dr. Michael Bruner and Dr. Laura Hahn, professors at Humboldt State University. They take a closer look at work done by Chef Jamie Oliver in a Virginia school district to further analyze the irony in the health of public school lunches and the USDA standards that they must meet.
These structural forces ultimately resulted in food oppression for the students. Health Communication is a field that focuses on communicating health information interpersonally and to the public. This includes topics such as public health campaigns, health education, and information shared to patients by their health care providers. Environmental Communication studies the role of communication in the large-scale social process of dealing with environmental degradation and climate change.
Environmental communication faces the challenge of changing the mostly false dominant ideology surrounding change. This requires immense amount of reframing regarding how scientific facts are communicated to the public.
This reframing involves figuring out ways of replacing outdated public knowledge with up-to-date scientific fact to increase public consciousness of issues. There is also the issue of making nature relatable to people in cities who may not have the access to public wild spaces.
Our history tells us that men and women from all cultures have been interested in observing and theorizing about the role of communication in multiple contexts—government, politics, law, religion, technology, and education.
The Old School of communication study consisted of four major periods of intellectual development—Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, and Enlightenment.
Plato BCE introduced the concept and practice of the dialectic. Aristotle BCE defined rhetoric and three necessary proofs for persuasion. As the church dominated public life in the Medieval Period CE , there was little intellectual development. Augustine is one who stands out for his continued development of rhetorical theory and its relationship to the church.
The Renaissance CE was a rebirth of sorts as Christine de Pisan and Laura Cereta continued the tradition of Aspasia and Pan Chao in securing educational opportunities for women. Ramus further developed the canons by combining style and delivery while Bacon continued his work following the classical tradition. The New School of communication study brought about more formal academic departments of Communication in the s.
Along with these academic placements came the formation of professional organizations such as NCA and ICA that helped foster greater recognition and development of the study of communication on a national and international scale. As the U. The trend continues as current scholars are driven by the prominent social and technological issues of the day such as technology, health care, social issues, and the environment.
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Despite the breadth of communication studies, there are a few ideas that have traditionally held it together as a discipline. The first is the centrality of symbol use to our own humanity. Philosophically we are firm believers in the power of communication and its central role in both citizenship and personal development. This power has been recognized for centuries. Isocrates noted that. Isocrates, Antidosis. A more contemporary communication scholar offers a similarly compelling reminder of the centrality of communication in the human condition:.
More importantly, there is a revolutionary discovery that communication is, and always has been, far more central to whatever it means to be a human being than had ever before been supposed. Prior to this century, no major analysis of international relations explained inequitable standards of life or power as the result of a particular pattern of communication between nations, but this is a common theme today.
No major analysis of the form of government focused on media and channels of communication, but this is a common orientation today. No interpretation of pathologies of individual or families cited patterns of communication as the causes of problems or the means of their solution.
But this is a unifying concept in half a dozen disciplines today. The strong link between communication studies and personal development is not a new idea. For details on it including licensing , click here.
This book is licensed under a Creative Commons by-nc-sa 3. See the license for more details, but that basically means you can share this book as long as you credit the author but see below , don't make money from it, and do make it available to everyone else under the same terms. This content was accessible as of December 29, , and it was downloaded then by Andy Schmitz in an effort to preserve the availability of this book.
Normally, the author and publisher would be credited here. However, the publisher has asked for the customary Creative Commons attribution to the original publisher, authors, title, and book URI to be removed. Additionally, per the publisher's request, their name has been removed in some passages.
More information is available on this project's attribution page. For more information on the source of this book, or why it is available for free, please see the project's home page. You can browse or download additional books there. To download a. Before we dive into the history of communication, it is important that we have a shared understanding of what we mean by the word communication.
For our purposes in this book, we will define communication The process of generating meaning by sending and receiving verbal and nonverbal symbols and signs that are influenced by multiple contexts. This definition builds on other definitions of communication that have been rephrased and refined over many years.
In fact, since the systematic study of communication began in colleges and universities a little over one hundred years ago, there have been more than published definitions of communication. Frank E. Dance and Carl E. While there are rich areas of study in animal communication and interspecies communication, our focus in this book is on human communication. Even though all animals communicate, as human beings we have a special capacity to use symbols to communicate about things outside our immediate temporal and spatial reality.
For example, we have the capacity to use abstract symbols, like the word education , to discuss a concept that encapsulates many aspects of teaching and learning. We can also reflect on the past and imagine our future. The ability to think outside our immediate reality is what allows us to create elaborate belief systems, art, philosophy, and academic theories. You may remember from your English classes that onomatopoeia refers to words that sound like that to which they refer—words like boing , drip , gurgle , swoosh , and whack.
Just think about how a prehistoric human could have communicated a lot using these words and hand gestures. He or she could use gurgle to alert others to the presence of water or swoosh and whack to recount what happened on a hunt.
In any case, this primitive ability to communicate provided an evolutionary advantage. Those humans who could talk were able to cooperate, share information, make better tools, impress mates, or warn others of danger, which led them to have more offspring who were also more predisposed to communicate.
Marshall T. This evolution in communication corresponded with a shift to a more settled, agrarian way of life. As hunter-gatherers settled into small villages and began to plan ahead for how to plant, store, protect, and trade or sell their food, they needed accounting systems to keep track of their materials and record transactions.
While such transactions were initially tracked with actual objects that symbolized an amount—for example, five pebbles represented five measures of grain—symbols, likely carved into clay, later served as the primary method of record keeping.
In this case, five dots might equal five measures of grain. During this period, villages also developed class systems as more successful farmers turned businessmen prospered and took leadership positions. Religion also became more complex, and a new class of spiritual leaders emerged. Soon, armies were needed to protect the stockpiled resources from others who might want to steal it. The emergence of elite classes and the rise of armies required records and bookkeeping, which furthered the spread of written symbols.
As clergy, the ruling elite, and philosophers began to take up writing, the systems became more complex. This period has featured the most rapid dispersion of a new method of communication, as the spread of the Internet and the expansion of digital and personal media signaled the beginning of the digital age.
The evolution of communication media, from speaking to digital technology, has also influenced the field of communication studies. In fact, the oldest essay and book ever found were written about communication. James C. Robert N. Although this essay and book predate Aristotle, he is a logical person to start with when tracing the development of the communication scholarship.
His writings on communication, although not the oldest, are the most complete and systematic. Ancient Greek philosophers and scholars such as Aristotle theorized about the art of rhetoric The art of speaking well and persuasively. Today, we hear the word rhetoric used in negative ways. While rhetoric does refer primarily to persuasive communication messages, much of the writing and teaching about rhetoric conveys the importance of being an ethical rhetor , or communicator.
The study of rhetoric focused on public communication, primarily oratory used in discussions or debates regarding laws and policy, speeches delivered in courts, and speeches intended to praise or blame another person.
The connections among rhetoric, policy making, and legal proceedings show that communication and citizenship have been connected since the study of communication began. Throughout this book, we will continue to make connections between communication, ethics, and civic engagement. Much of the public speaking in ancient Greece took place in courtrooms or in political contexts. Ancient Greek rhetoricians like Aristotle were followed by Roman orators like Cicero.
Cicero contributed to the field of rhetoric by expanding theories regarding the five canons of rhetoric, which include invention, arrangement, style, delivery, and memory. Invention refers to the use of evidence and arguments to think about things in new ways and is the most studied of the five canons.
Arrangement refers to the organization of speech, style refers to the use of language, and delivery refers to the vocal and physical characteristics of a speaker. Memory is the least studied of the five canons and refers to the techniques employed by speakers of that era to retain and then repeat large amounts of information. The Age of Enlightenment in the s marked a societal turn toward scientific discovery and the acquisition of knowledge, which led to an explosion of philosophical and scientific writings on many aspects of human existence.
This focus on academic development continued into the s and the establishment of distinct communication studies departments.
Communication studies as a distinct academic discipline with departments at universities and colleges has only existed for a little over one hundred years. Although rhetoric has long been a key part of higher education, and colleges and universities have long recognized the importance of speaking, communication departments did not exist. There was also a distinction of focus and interest among professors of speech. While some focused on the quality of ideas, arguments, and organization, others focused on coaching the performance and delivery aspects of public speaking.
The formalization of speech departments led to an expanded view of the role of communication. Even though Aristotle and other ancient rhetoricians and philosophers had theorized the connection between rhetoric and citizenship, the role of the communicator became the focus instead of solely focusing on the message.
James A. Later, as social psychology began to expand in academic institutions, speech communication scholars saw places for connection to further expand definitions of communication to include social and psychological contexts. Today, you can find elements of all these various aspects of communication being studied in communication departments.
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