Communication

C

Symbols and Alphabets

Most languages also have a written form. The oldest records of written language are about 5000 years old. However, written communication began much earlier in the form of drawings or marks made to indicate meaningful information about the natural world. The earliest artificially created visual images that have been discovered to date are paintings of bears, mammoths, woolly rhinos, and other Ice Age animals on cave walls near Avignon, France. These paintings are over 30,000 years old. The oldest known animal carving, of a horse made from mammoth ivory, dates from approximately 30,000 years bc and was found in present-day Vogelhard, Germany (see Paleolithic Art). Other ancient symbol-recording systems have been discovered. For example, a 30,000-year-old Cro-Magnon bone plaque discovered in France is engraved with a series of 29 marks; some researchers believe the plaque records phases of the moon. A piece of reindeer antler approximately 15,000 years old was also found in France, carved with both animal images and “counting” marks. The ancient Incas in Peru, who lived from about the 11th century to the 15th century ad, used a system of knotted and colored strings called quipu to keep track of population, food inventories, and the production of gold mines. Perhaps the earliest forerunner of writing is a system of clay counting tokens used in the ancient Middle East. The tokens date from 8000 to 3000 bc and are shaped like disks, cones, spheres and other shapes. They were stored in clay containers marked with an early version of cuneiform writing, to indicate what tokens were inside. Cuneiform was one of the first forms of writing and was pictographic, with symbols representing objects. It developed as a written language in Assyria (an ancient Asian country in present-day Iraq) from 3000 to 1000 bc. Cuneiform eventually acquired ideographic elements—that is, the symbol came to represent not only the object but also ideas and qualities associated with it. The oldest known examples of script-style writing date from about 3000 bc; papyrus sheets (a kind of early paper made from reeds) from about 2700 to 2500 bc have been found in the Nile Delta in Egypt bearing written hieroglyphs, another pictographic-ideographic form of writing. Chinese began as a pictographic-ideographic written language perhaps as early as the 15th century bc. Today written Chinese includes some phonetic elements (symbols indicating pronunciation) as well. The Chinese writing system is called logographic because the full symbols, or characters, each represent a word. Cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyph eventually incorporated phonetic elements. In syllabic systems, such as Japanese and Korean, written symbols stand for spoken syllable sounds. The alphabet, invented in the Middle East, was carried by the Phoenicians (people from a territory on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, located largely in modern Lebanon) to Greece, where vowel sounds were added to it. Alphabet characters stand for phonetic sounds and can be combined in an almost infinite variety of words. Many modern languages, such as English, German, French, and Russian, are alphabetic languages.

III

Interpersonal Communication

In every society, humans have developed spoken and written language as a means of sharing messages and meanings. The most common form of daily communication is interpersonal—that is, face-to-face, at the same time and in the same place.

The most basic form of interpersonal communication is a dyad (an encounter or conversation between two people). Some dyads exist over a long period of time, as in a marriage or partnership. Communicating well in a dyad requires good conversational skills. Communicators must know how to start and end the conversation, how to make themselves understood, how to respond to the partner's statements, how to be sensitive to their partner's concerns, how to take turns, and how to listen. Together, these abilities are called communication competence. Shyness or reluctance to interact is called communication apprehension. Persuasion is the process of convincing others that one's ideas or views are valuable or important.

Communication may also occur in small groups, such as families, clubs, religious groups, friendship groups, or work groups. Most small-group interaction involves fewer than ten people, and the communicators need the same communication skills as in a dyadic conversation. However, additional factors called group dynamics come into play in a small group. A group may try to work toward a consensus, a general sense of understanding or agreement with others in the group. Groupthink may occur, in which a group reaches consensus so quickly that its members mistakenly ignore other good ideas. Small-group members may experience disagreement or even conflict. Some members may be more persuasive than others and form sides, or cliques, within the group.

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A special case of small-group interaction occurs in organizations where there is work to do or a task for the group to perform. Or several small groups may need to interact among each other within a single organization. In these cases, the groups must communicate well, both among themselves and with other groups, so that their members can perform their work effectively and make good decisions. Problems sometimes arise in organizational communication between supervisors and workers, or between different groups of workers who are responsible for different parts of a task. Therefore, small-group communication skills can be as necessary as conversation skills in the workplace or other organizational activities.

Interpersonal communication occurs with larger groups as well, such as when a speaker gives a talk to a large crowd (a political candidate giving a speech at a campaign rally, or a teacher lecturing to a large class). However, the audience can respond in only limited ways (such as with applause, nodding, whistles, boos, or silence). The speaker usually wants to be persuasive or informative, so the words chosen and the style of delivery or performance are very important. A speaker who wants to reach an even larger audience than the people who can physically hear the speech in one place must use communication technology or media to get the message across distance and even time.

IV

Communication at a Distance

From the earliest times, people have needed to communicate across distance or over time. Since the beginnings of writing, communication media have allowed messages to travel over distance and time. A communication medium is a means for recording and transporting a message or information. The word medium comes from the Latin word medius, meaning middle or between. It is a channel or path for sending a message between communicators. A single channel—such as radio, or a book, or the telephone—is called a medium; media is plural, meaning more than one medium.

A

Early Methods

Early societies developed systems for sending simple messages or signals that could be seen or heard over a short distance, such as drumbeats, fire and smoke signals, or lantern beacons. Messages were attached to the legs of carrier pigeons that were released to fly home (this system was used until World War I, which started in 1914). Semaphore systems (visual codes) of flags or flashing lights were employed to send messages over relatively short but difficult-to-cross distances, such as from hilltop to hilltop, or between ships at sea. In the early 1790s the French scientist and engineer Claude Chappe persuaded the French government to install a system of towers that used semaphore signals to send visual telegraphs along approved routes throughout the country. The system was copied in Great Britain and the United States.

Some ancient societies, such as the Roman or Byzantine empires, expanded their territorial control far beyond their original boundaries, and traded with distant neighbors. To hold on to their far-flung territories, they needed two technologies that have remained closely tied ever since: transportation and the ability to record information. Recorded messages had to be carried easily; therefore, lightweight forms of recording (such as papyrus or animal skins) were desirable.

B

Paper and Printing

The first lightweight medium was papyrus, an early form of paper used by the Egyptians that was made from grasses called reeds. Later, in the 2nd century ad, the Chinese wrote on silk fabric instead of wood, and developed paper made from silk fibers. (Today paper made from cotton or linen fibers is still called rag paper.) From as early as the 2nd century bc, Europeans wrote on thin layers of tanned and scraped animal skins called parchment or vellum, with quill pens made from bird feathers. Parchment is not as light as papyrus but is very durable; many parchment manuscripts and books from the Middle Ages still exist. The Arabs brought papermaking to Europe from China in the 11th century ad. Paper gave European merchants, who traveled across the continent, a portable and inexpensive way to keep records.

Until the 1400s in Europe, all documents were handwritten. Copyists and editors called scribes recorded commercial transactions, legal decisions and pronouncements, and manuscript copies of religious books—many scribes were monks working in monasteries. By the 15th century, however, the need arose for an easier way to duplicate documents. In Asia, block printing had already been developed by Buddhist monks in China in about the 8th century (see Prints and Printmaking). A similar technique was later used in the 15th century by Europeans to make illustrations for printed books.

An early version of movable type was first developed in China around 1045, and was independently developed by Koreans in the 13th century ad. In 1450 the German printer Johannes Gutenberg perfected movable metal type and introduced the first reliable system of typesetting, a key invention in the development of printing. With movable type, a raised, reversed image of each letter can be hand-set, word by word, into a frame that holds the pieces together. The raised letters are inked, a sheet of paper laid over them and pressed down on the letters with a screw-driven press, creating a correct image of the text. When enough copies are printed, the letters can be taken apart and reused. The technique made printing numerous copies of textual material much easier, and the number of printing shops grew dramatically over the next century.

As more books became available, more people learned to read. Books were printed in the local, or vernacular, languages as well as classical Greek and Latin. With literacy came exposure to new ideas; some historians believe that the 16th-century Protestant Reformation (a revolution in the Christian church that divided it into factions) might not have occurred if European thought had not been prepared by ideas introduced and circulated in printed books. Printers published other things besides books, including newspapers, pamphlets, and broadsides (sheets of paper printed on one or both sides). These cheaper works helped spread news throughout Europe and, in the 17th and 18th centuries, throughout the British colonies in America (see Journalism).

During the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, printing technologies evolved rapidly. The steam-powered press was invented in Germany in the 19th century, and the rotary press, which prints images onto a continuous sheet of paper from a rotating drum, was introduced in the United States in 1846. The Linotype typesetting machine was patented by the German-born American inventor Ottmar Mergenthaler in 1884. It permitted typesetters to set text by typing on a keyboard rather than hand-setting each letter individually. Together, the Linotype machine and the rotary press transformed the speed of printing. These so-called hot-metal or letterpress printing technologies dominated the industry until the 1950s, when phototypesetting and photo-offset printing were introduced (see Typesetting Equipment).

Photocopying was another technology that made document duplication easier. Invented by American physicist and inventor Edwin Land in the 1950s, photocopying transfers an image from one sheet of paper to another very rapidly (see Office Systems). A more recent advance is computer typesetting and printing. Computers and word-processing and graphics software are used today to set type and compose pages on the screen just as they will look in the final print, in either black and white or color. Page layouts can also be transmitted digitally (numerically coded into electronic pulses) via fax machines, computer modems, telephone networks, and satellite systems to other locations for editing, redesign, or printing.

The spread of computer-based word processing and graphic design has led to the growth of desktop publishing. Today almost anyone can publish newsletters, newspapers, or magazines for medium-sized audiences. Business communication has been transformed by computer and information technologies: letters, memos, reports, or other documents can be transmitted almost anywhere at the speed of light. Early advocates of business computers predicted the paperless office, an office where paper would be made obsolete by computer technology. Experience, however, has shown that the ease of copying, printing, and document transmission made possible by computer technology has produced more demand for paper, not less.

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