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Communication is the sharing of information. People communicate both interpersonally (between individuals) and through communications systems that transmit messages between large numbers of people.

Individuals communicate using many different modes—that is, in many different ways. For example, they may communicate through gestures and facial expressions as well as by speaking and writing. Communications systems, also called media, range from long-used systems, such as books, to new systems, such as the Internet, a worldwide network of computers. Other major media include newspapers and magazines, sound recordings, film, telephone and telegraph networks, radio, and television. Together, the communications media form a vast industry of great social importance.

How people communicate

Interpersonal communication. No one knows how human communication began, but most scholars believe that communication through language began at least 150,000 years ago. The emergence of language was a decisive factor in the growing ability of early human beings to work together to make and use tools, shelters, and other products.

People communicate using not only language, but also other modes, such as gesture and body position, mathematics, and music. Modes of communication also include visual images, such as works of art. They vary in their use from culture to culture and from person to person. Individuals are often better at using one mode than another. Acts of communication often employ more than one mode.

Communication using language requires both a physical component—the central nervous system and muscle coordination—and cultural learning. Beginning early in life, human beings develop a basic understanding of several forms of communication. For example, babies about six months old begin to use hand gestures and distinct syllables simultaneously to express themselves. Face-to-face interaction with other people during the first three years of life is essential for a child to form the ability to communicate.

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Communications systems are widely used in schools, businesses, government agencies, and households. Some communications systems, such as the telephone system, are networks through which users mainly exchange messages one-to-one. Others, such as magazines and radio or television broadcasting operations, transfer messages to many people at once. The Internet is an example of a hybrid system, capable of communicating both one-to-one and one-to-many.

Millions of people around the world work in the communications industry. Many kinds of workers are needed to make a communications system function. The television industry, for example, relies on writers, camera operators, technicians, and on-air talent. It also employs salespeople to sell advertising time, market researchers to study audience habits, and many other specialists.

Communications systems are organized differently in different countries. In the United States, electronic communications systems developed as private businesses whose main goal was to earn profits. In most other countries, they began as government services financed primarily through service revenues and taxes. Most telephone systems originally operated as parts of national postal services. In some countries, government subsidies helped support newspapers.

Economic forces shape and limit communications systems. For example, in many areas, television networks develop programs and services to help advertisers target desired audiences. Telecommunication systems are well developed in wealthy countries, but they have only begun to expand into developing regions.

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The development of communications systems

Prehistoric times. After language developed, people exchanged news chiefly by word of mouth. Runners carried spoken messages over long distances. People also used drumbeats, fires, and smoke signals to communicate with other people who understood the codes they used.

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Early writing systems. Around 8000 B.C., people in southern Mesopotamia began using clay tokens that had different shapes and markings. They probably used these tokens originally for such functions as counting and record keeping. These crude numerical notations gradually combined with pictures. Sometime shortly after about 3300 B.C., this combination emerged as the writing system known as cuneiform, which used wedge-shaped characters. Many scholars believe cuneiform was the first writing system.

Other people probably invented their own writing systems independently, based on other principles and using other materials. For example, early systems of writing developed in Egypt, China, the Indus Valley (now part of India and Pakistan), and Central America.

Over time, early writing systems became increasingly phonetic—that is, they used symbols to represent individual speech sounds instead of objects. They also became increasingly abstract—that is, they used symbols that represented ideas rather than actual objects. Eventually, writing became so abstract that it became alphabetic. Alphabets made it possible to write down any word in the spoken language using comparatively few characters. Nonalphabet writing systems are still used in many parts of the world. In written Chinese, for example, each character stands for a word or part of a word.

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During ancient times, the letter was the main medium for long-distance communication. Couriers carried letters on foot, on horseback, or by ship. They mainly distributed government ordinances and edicts. Military leaders also used homing pigeons to carry messages.

About 500 B.C., the ancient Greeks developed a fast method of sending messages from city to city. The system used a series of brick walls. The walls were close enough together so that each could be seen from the one next to it. Indentations along the top of each wall represented the letters of the alphabet. To send a message, a person lit fires in the appropriate places on the wall. A watcher on the next wall saw the fires and relayed the message. This system of communication is called a visual telegraph.

The ancient Romans got news from a handwritten sheet called Acta Diurna (Daily Events). Government officials made a few copies each day and posted them in public. Often, slaves recopied these sheets and delivered the duplicates to readers throughout the Roman Empire. Using the empire's extensive network of roads, the messengers carried mail over land at a speed of up to 50 miles (80 kilometers) a day.

Throughout the ancient world, use of written communication remained severely restricted. Few people could read and write, and writing materials were costly. The chief writing surfaces were papyrus, made from a plant, and parchment, a kind of treated animal skin. Such materials required expensive, skilled preparation.

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During the Middle Ages, which began in about the A.D. 400's and lasted about 1,000 years, news continued to spread mostly by word of mouth. Town criers walked the streets announcing events of interest. Entertainers, peddlers, wandering preachers, and others who traveled from place to place carried messages and news.

Christianity exerted a powerful influence on communications systems throughout the Middle Ages. Most books and other writings involved religious themes, and most scribes were monks. Scribes often toiled for months to finish a single volume, and so they produced few books. They decorated much of their work with pictures and designs in color or in gold or silver leaf. These illustrated books were luxury items, and they were written mainly in Latin—the language of the church and of scholars. Thus, they had limited distribution.

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The rise of printing. Between the 1300's and the 1600's, several events increased the demand for written materials in Europe. One event was the growth of commercial merchant classes, who needed written materials for advertising and record keeping. Another was the Renaissance, a period of intellectual awakening that stimulated people's interest in books and other literature. Paper, which had appeared in Europe in the 900's, had become cheap and widely available. Hand copying could no longer satisfy the demand for written materials. In the 1400's, printing, which had long been known in East Asia, came to Europe.

The first European printers did not make books. Instead, they made playing cards, which were in great demand. An artist carved a raised image of a card on a block of wood. Then the printer inked the image and pressed a blank card against it. The picture was transferred to the card. Printers soon used this method, called block printing, to make books as well as cards. Printers in China, Japan, and Korea had practiced woodblock printing of texts at least as early as the 700's, but it took a long time to carve the words into the blocks.

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The invention of movable type made printing much faster. This printing system employed carved letters that could be used over and over again. After printing a page, a printer separated the pieces of type and rearranged them. A Chinese printer named Bi Sheng had invented movable type in the 1000's, but Europeans independently developed the technique much later.

Most historians consider Johannes Gutenberg, a German goldsmith, to be the inventor of movable type in Europe. In the mid-1400's, Gutenberg brought together several inventions to create a whole new system of printing. He made separate pieces of metal type, both capitals and small letters, for each letter of the alphabet. He lined up the pieces of type in a frame to form pages. Gutenberg created his own ink from paint, dye, and other substances. Finally, he used a press similar to a wine press to put uniform pressure on the paper. His was the first printing press in Europe.

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The effects of printing. Printing quickly became a vital new medium of communication and soon replaced hand copying. It spurred the production of Bibles and other religious texts in such commonly spoken languages as German, English, and French. As the number of literate people increased, common-language translations satisfied a growing demand for reading material.

Printing stimulated the rise of public opinion as a political and cultural force. Debates over church practices, economic issues, foreign policy, and social problems quickly erupted into print. Many of the materials printed during this period were single sheets called broadsides or pamphlets known as chapbooks. The new medium of print aided the Reformation, which began as an effort to reform the Catholic Church and ended with the establishment of Protestant churches.

By the 1600's, merchants, bankers, and commercial traders had become heavy users of print media. Printed newssheets called corantos appeared in the Netherlands, England, and other trading nations. The corantos reported mostly business news, such as which ships had landed and what goods they carried. The newssheets enabled merchants to learn of conditions affecting prices in distant markets. Corantos also printed advertising. They are considered the first true newspapers.

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The 1700's. The Industrial Revolution, a period of rapid industrial expansion, began in the United Kingdom in the 1700's. The revolution spread throughout Europe and to North America by the early 1800's, bringing about dramatic changes in the lives and the work of the people. At the same time, a movement toward democratic government swept these regions. A continuing transformation of communications and shifts in the control of communications systems accompanied the economic and political changes. See Industrial Revolution.

The publication of books, magazines, and newspapers, as well as broadsides and chapbooks, made different kinds of information and entertainment available to more and more readers. By the end of the 1700's, European voyages of discovery and conquest had spread printing to many parts of the world.

Nearly from the beginning of the print era, monarchs in each European country granted a few leading printers a legal right, known as a letters patent, to publish and sell particular titles. This allowed kings and queens to censor what was published. During the 1700's, people challenged this system. In 1710, the British Parliament passed the first national copyright law. Many other countries eventually adopted the British version of the modern copyright system or created their own. Copyright laws established clear legal rights to authors and publishers of books and other printed products. They also reduced rulers' influence over the print media. Literary property became increasingly valuable. Publishing surged during the late 1700's. But rulers continued to levy taxes on paper, thus restricting both the availability of printed materials and freedom of expression.

During the 1700's, private operators ran local letter delivery services in some European cities. But royal monopolies operating under exclusive charters granted by the king or queen ran the great postal systems that spanned long distances across kingdoms.

In the late 1700's, the French engineer Claude Chappe developed a visual telegraph similar to that of the ancient Greeks. It consisted of a series of towers between Paris and other European cities. An operator in each tower moved a crossbar and two large, jointed arms on the roof to spell out messages. An observer on the next tower read the messages and passed them on.

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The 1800's brought a significant improvement in printing technology. They also brought the development of photography and of high-speed communication in the form of the telegraph and telephone.

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The increasing impact of printing. In 1811, the German printer Friedrich Konig became the first to use a steam engine to power a press. Although printers continued to set type by hand, they could now print materials hundreds of times faster, and so could produce large numbers of copies cheaply. In 1814, The Times of London became the first newspaper to use Konig's press. By the mid-1800's, wide access to printed materials had led to a rapid increase in literacy in industrialized countries. Literacy was slow to increase in the developing countries of Africa, Latin America, and Asia, which produced only a small fraction of the world's printed materials.

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The invention of photography further aided communication. Many American, British, and French scientists contributed to the development of photography, and no one person can be called its inventor. In 1826, a French physicist named Joseph Nicephore Niepce made the first permanent photograph. Niepce's technique, which he called heliography, involved exposing a metal plate to light for about eight hours. As a result, Niepce could photograph only motionless objects.

The French painter Louis J. M. Daguerre worked as Niepce's partner for several years. In the 1830's, Daguerre developed the daguerreotype, a type of photograph that took only a few minutes to expose. About the same time, the British inventor William Henry Fox Talbot devised a photographic method that used a paper negative. His invention, which he called a talbotype or calotype, was not widely used because it produced less clear pictures than a daguerreotype. But the idea of using a flexible negative became the key to modern photography. The glass or metal plates used in other methods had to be changed after each exposure. With Fox Talbot's method, film could be moved through the camera and used to take a series of pictures.

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Improvements in postal delivery. During the 1800's, the amount of mail delivered increased dramatically. Greater handling efficiency lowered postage rates, and national post offices introduced new services. By the late 1800's, the national post office had become one of the biggest and most important departments of government in many countries. The General Postal Union (now the Universal Postal Union) was established in 1884 to promote the exchange of mail between countries.

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The electric telegraph. High-speed communication began with the invention of the electric telegraph. Inventors in the United Kingdom, Denmark, Germany, and other countries built various telegraphs during the early 1800's. But all these devices lacked a stable source of electric power and were difficult to use.

During the 1830's, the American painter and scientist Samuel F. B. Morse began work on an electric telegraph. After years of experimenting, he and his partner, Alfred Vail, developed a simple telegraph that had a stable current produced by batteries. The device sent messages over a wire at the speed of electric current. It used a code of dots and dashes, which we now call Morse code. Morse patented his invention in 1840. Newspapers started to use his telegraph within a few years. News agencies, including Reuters in the United Kingdom and the Associated Press in the United States, began using telegraphy to centralize and speed up news distribution. The telegraph also enabled the early railroads to safely schedule trains, thus avoiding crashes.

The telegraph rapidly became the chief means of fast long-distance communication. By the 1860's, telegraph lines linked most major U.S. cities. The first successful transatlantic telegraph cable connected Valentia, Ireland, to Heart's Content, Newfoundland, Canada, in 1866.

People in the world's poorer regions had little access to the telegraph. Even in wealthy countries, telegraphy was a business service used mainly by banks, railroads, newspaper publishers, and merchants. High service rates barred more general use. In most countries, telegraph service became part of the national post office.

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The telephone. Alexander Graham Bell, a Scottish-born teacher of the deaf, patented a kind of telephone in 1876. Telephone exchanges began to form in U.S. cities in 1878, and many of them used Bell's design. In 1879, the National Bell Telephone Company consolidated all the exchanges into a national telephone network. The company, which later became the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), owned many key patents. As a result, it was able to maintain a near-monopoly of telephone service for many years. The company eventually operated a group of subsidiaries, known as the Bell System, that served about 80 percent of U.S. telephones. Telephone services quickly developed in the other industrialized countries. Until the mid-1900's, however, there were more telephones in the United States than in all other countries combined.

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Other inventions of the late 1800's expanded the variety of communications systems. These inventions included the typewriter in 1867, the phonograph in 1877, and motion pictures in the 1890's. By 1900, an international recording industry had developed, and customers bought tens of millions of phonograph records each year. Silent films, based mainly in France, England, Italy, and the United States, had become hugely popular by 1900 as well. Hollywood, California, the center of U.S. moviemaking, began to dominate the global film industry by the 1920's.

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The development of electronics. Near the end of the 1800's, inventors began using a branch of science and engineering called electronics to send communications signals through space instead of along wires. The development of electronics led to the invention of radio, television, and other media of modern communication.

Electronics developed from ideas and experiments of several scientists. In 1864, the British physicist James Clerk Maxwell theorized that electromagnetic waves travel through space at the speed of light. About 1887, the German physicist Heinrich Hertz proved the existence of these waves.

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The invention of radio. In the early 1890's, Nikola Tesla, an American inventor from Austria-Hungary, established theories for wireless communication. By 1893, he had assembled all the components necessary for a radio. In 1895, the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi demonstrated his own device, which he called the wireless telegraph. Marconi's device was widely recognized as the first successful radio. But his patents were later invalidated in favor of Tesla's, which had been issued earlier.

Radio quickly gained an important role in military and commercial ocean navigation. Meanwhile, its technology was improving. At first, wireless devices sent only Morse code signals. Then Reginald A. Fessenden, a Canadian-born physicist, attached a telephone mouthpiece to a wireless telegraph and became one of the first people to transmit speech by radio. On Christmas Eve in 1906, several radio operators picked up Fessenden's first broadcast. They were shocked to hear Christmas music and a Bible reading instead of a Morse code signal.

During the early 1900's, Lee De Forest of the United States and other electrical engineers developed various vacuum tubes, devices that could detect and amplify radio signals. Vacuum tubes played a vital role in the expanding long-distance telephone network. The devices also became a basic component in a new generation of radio broadcasting systems. Experimental radio stations, many connected with engineering schools or universities, appeared as early as 1908.

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The development of the radio industry. In 1919, General Electric Company formed the Radio Corporation of America (now RCA Corporation). The new corporation acquired patents from all U.S. manufacturers of radio equipment. This gave the United States every advantage in developing the world's dominant radio communications system.

New radio stations quickly began operating throughout the United States. Two of the earliest commercial stations were KDKA in Pittsburgh and WWJ in Detroit. Both began regular broadcasts in 1920. In 1922, WEAF in New York City accepted a fee to allow a company selling apartments to advertise on the air. This advertisement was the first radio commercial. Until that time, profits from the sale of radio sets paid for programs. The United States soon developed a system of commercial radio in which most programs are paid for by advertisers. In turn, sponsors profoundly influenced the character of broadcast programs and target audiences. In most other countries, radio networks were government-funded, and advertising was significantly restricted.

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The development of television. Television originated from the research and thinking of many people. Attempts to send pictures through space date back to the 1800's. Telecasting based on electronic scanning began in the United Kingdom, Germany, and several U.S. cities during the late 1930's. Electronic components developed during World War II (1939-1945), when parts for weapons and communications systems greatly contributed to the improvement of television technology.

The United States and other countries suspended television programming during the war, but broadcasting resumed just afterward. During the late 1940's, TV stations began operating all across the United States. Television broadcasters set up networks of several stations that shared some programming. Hollywood film studios supplemented their moviemaking profits by supplying the networks with an increasing share of TV programs. Cable television began about 1950 as a way to extend the reception of broadcast signals to rural communities. Videotape recorders that stored broadcast-quality pictures and sound on magnetic tape were first used by the television industry in the 1950's.

By the mid-1960's, more than 90 countries had television stations. U.S. film and television companies profited by selling programs to foreign broadcasters. They also worked to ensure that foreign television systems would accept commercial advertising. This effort succeeded in several countries, including Japan and the United Kingdom. The United States was becoming the center of an increasingly global commercial television industry. In the 1960's, communications satellites began to extend the overseas reach of the U.S. television industry. But U.S. broadcasters bought few foreign programs to air in the United States. Many nations opposed such an imbalance in the industry, and they tried to impose limits on imports of American programs and on satellite services.

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The digital age. During the late 1900's, computer technology advanced rapidly. As a result, the communications industry created and distributed more and more media content in digital (numeric) form.

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In publishing. During the 1970's, newspapers and other print publications began to use computerized editing and typesetting systems. With these systems, writers and editors could type articles on computer keyboards and see the words displayed on a computer screen. The articles were stored in a computer as digital files that could then be used in many ways. For example, a device called a photocomposition machine could use a stored file to set an article in type on photographic film.

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In the telephone industry, companies first used digital technology in the switches that set up and open circuits between callers. By the late 1970's, a branch of physics called fiber optics had made it possible for telephone companies to use light to send far more messages at one time than could be done with electric current or radio waves. In fiber-optic communication, a laser or light-emitting diode (LED) translates the electric signals of a telephone call or TV picture into light impulses. The light is aimed into one end of an optical fiber, a hair-thin strand of transparent glass or plastic. The light can travel great distances through the fiber without diminishing significantly in intensity. At the opposite end, a device reads the patterns of impulses and changes them into a duplicate of the original sounds and pictures.

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In recording. Record companies introduced the compact disc (CD), a digital audio recording medium, in 1982. It quickly replaced the vinyl phonograph record and cut deeply into sales of audio cassette tapes. Digital video recording achieved its greatest success with a disk format called DVD, introduced in the late 1990's. Digital cameras also arrived in the late 1990's.

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In television. Broadcast engineers invented digital television systems about 1990, and commercial digital broadcasts began in the late 1990's. Traditional over-the-air, cable, and satellite television services upgraded their systems to use the emerging digital technology.

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The development of the Internet. By the 1980's, many businesses operated their own computer networks. These networks supported a host of functions, such as word processing, inventory control, research and development, and accounting. Many of these networks eventually joined the Internet, a worldwide computer network. The U.S. government had created it during the 1960's as a military network. The Internet grew to include tens of thousands of smaller networks and hundreds of millions of computers. E-mail (electronic mail) quickly emerged as the leading Internet service.

During the 1990's, a series of innovations transformed the Internet into a significant communications medium. In 1991, the World Wide Web came into being. The Web opened the Internet to a combination of media called multimedia, enabling it to display pictures, sound, and moving pictures as well as text. The development of a linking technique called hypertext enabled a user to jump between Web pages, screens of information available on the Web. Computer programs called browsers made it easier for people to use the Internet.

The Internet employs an efficient form of message distribution called packet switching. Individual messages are broken down into packets of data and sent out separately over the network. They are reassembled at their destination. For most messages, this process takes only a fraction of a second.

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Growth and consolidation of the communications industry. During the late 1900's, many companies invested heavily in digital communications systems, leading to extraordinary growth in access to communications. Much of that growth occurred in developing countries, mainly in Asia and Latin America. But this expansion still did not bring electronic communication to all people. In fact, by 2000, at least a third of the world's people had never used a telephone. People in some regions, such as sub-Saharan Africa, had little or no access to television broadcasts.

During the late 1900's and early 2000's, many previously independent newspaper groups, telephone companies, motion-picture studios, and television networks merged to form giant information and entertainment conglomerates. At the same time, several major communications companies began to expand their operations into other nations. The national broadcast systems of many countries began to accept commercial advertising for the first time. Corporate-owned broadcasting and telecommunications systems were established in most countries, often with foreign backers. As a result, noncommercial (also called public service) broadcast systems declined while commercial systems grew rapidly.

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The study of communication

The two oldest areas of systematic investigation into human communication are linguistics (the scientific study of language) and nonverbal communication. Linguists began their studies during the late 1700's, when scholars first compared the world's languages and found similarities among them. The study of nonverbal communication dates from at least the 1800's, when teachers of acting and pantomime analyzed how facial and body movements convey emotion.

The modern study of nonverbal communication—sometimes called body language—includes both kinesics  «kih NEE sihks» and proxemics «prok SEE mihks». Kinesics is the study of the body and facial movements that accompany speech. The American anthropologist Ray L. Birdwhistell developed kinesics. Birdwhistell used slow-motion films of speakers to analyze their gestures and expressions. Another American anthropologist, Edward T. Hall, developed proxemics. Hall studied how people in different cultures use gestures, posture, speaking distance, and other nonverbal signs to communicate their feelings and social status. People would feel uncomfortable putting most such feelings into words. But proxemics enables people to send and receive messages without the use of words.

The study of communication emerged as a special field of research in the United States from the late 1930's through the 1950's. Scholars who made contributions to communication focused principally on critical issues associated with emerging new media systems.

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The effects of the media. The growth of film, radio, and television in the 1900's raised cultural questions. For example, some people became concerned about the impact of media violence on children and adolescents. First radio, then television, gained a prominent role in politics and elections. As a result, American social psychologists, especially Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Frank N. Stanton, began to study the effects of media on the public. Investigations by other U.S. researchers included those of the social psychologists Hadley Cantril, Carl I. Hovland, and Robert K. Merton. The research of these scholars inspired that of American social psychologist Bernard Berelson, sociologist Joseph T. Klapper, and educator Elihu Katz. Research on audience behavior and use of media by individuals continues today.

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Communication and politics. Governments and other communicators have conducted extensive propaganda operations, mainly using newspapers, at least since World War I (1914-1918). During World War II, the warring nations added radio and other new media to their propaganda operations. Political scientists, most notably Harold D. Lasswell, began to study propaganda and its role in the formation of public opinion. Such study continued as the theory and practice of modern media propaganda carried over into the Cold War, a period of intense hostility between Communist and non-Communist nations following World War II.

Beginning in the late 1940's, researchers started to study the potential contributions of radio and television services to national economic development, especially for developing nations. The U.S. analysts Wilbur L. Schramm and Daniel Lerner studied how modern media could be used in such countries to spread information about farming and crops, medical care, and education.

Dallas W. Smythe of Canada, Herbert I. Schiller of the United States, and other scholars studied the political economy of communication. The political economy approach suggests that owners of communications systems can use them to exert control over cultural expression. Control of international communications systems can have an especially significant impact on social development throughout the world.

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Communication and culture. During the late 1900's and early 2000's, the concept of culture became a focus of study in many academic disciplines, including that of communication. To social scientists, culture means a people's customary way of life, including arts, beliefs, customs, inventions, and technology. Cultural studies of communication began attracting interest in Europe in the 1960's and 1970's and soon gained supporters worldwide. Cultural critics Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, and other scholars in the United Kingdom developed this approach. Such study focuses on how the contemporary communications media shape people's understanding and action.

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