The history of communication dates back to prehistory, with significant changes in communication
technologies evolving in tandem with shifts in political and economic systems, and by
extension, systems of power.
Communication can range from very subtle processes of exchange, to full conversations and mass
communication.
Human communication was revolutionized with speech approximately 100,000 years ago.
Symbols were developed about 30,000 years ago, and writing about 5000 years ago.
Symbols
The imperfection of speech, which nonetheless allowed easier dissemination of ideas and
stimulated inventions, eventually resulted in the creation of new forms of communications,
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: a conventional
representation of a concept.
Cave paintings
The oldest known symbols created with the purpose of communication through time are
the cave paintings, a form of rock art, dating to the Upper Paleolithic.
Just as the small child first learns to draw before it masters more complex forms of communication,
so homo sapiens' first attempts at passing information through time took the form of
paintings.
The oldest known cave painting is that of the Chauvet Cave, dating to around 30,000
BC.
Though not well standardized, those paintings contained increasing amounts of information:
Cro-Magnon people may have created the first calendar as far back as 15,000 years ago.
The connection between drawing and writing is further shown by linguistics: in the Ancient
Egypt and Ancient Greece the concepts and words of drawing and writing were one and
the same.
Petroglyphs
The next step in the history of communications is petroglyphs, carvings into a rock surface.
It took about 20,000 years for homo sapiens to move from the first cave paintings to the
first petroglyphs, which are dated to around 10,000BC.
It is possible that the 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
ropes, 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.
Pictograms
A pictogram is a symbol representing a concept, object, activity, place or event by illustration.
Pictography is a form of proto-writing whereby ideas are transmitted through drawing.
Pictographs were the next step in the evolution of communication: the most important difference
between petroglyphs and pictograms is that petroglyphs are simply showing an event, but
pictograms are telling a story about the event, thus they can for example be ordered chronologically.
Pictograms were used by various ancient cultures all over the world since around 9000 BC, when
tokens marked with simple pictures began to be used to label basic farm produce, and become
increasingly popular around 6000-5000 BC.
They were the basis of cuneiform and hieroglyphs, and began to develop into logographic writing
systems around 5000 BC.
Ideograms
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, so that for example
an ideogram of two sticks can mean not only 'legs' but also a verb 'to walk'.
Because some ideas are universal, many different cultures developed similar ideograms.
For example an eye with a tear means 'sadness' in Native American ideograms in California,
as it does for the Aztecs, the early Chinese and the Egyptians.
Ideograms were precursors of logographic writing systems such as Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese
characters.
Examples of ideographical proto-writing systems, thought not to contain language-specific information,
include the Vinca script and the early Indus script.
In both cases there are claims of decipherment of linguistic content, without wide acceptance.
Writing
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; however, all three may be found in any given writing system in varying
proportions, often making it difficult to categorise a system uniquely.
The invention of the first writing systems is roughly contemporary in with the beginning
of the Bronze Age in the late Neolithic of the late 4000 BC.
The first writing system is generally believed to have been invented in pre-historic Sumer
and developed by the late 3000's BC into cuneiform.
Egyptian hieroglyphs, and the undeciphered Proto-Elamite writing system and Indus Valley
script also date to this era, though a few scholars have questioned the Indus Valley
script's status as a writing system.
The original Sumerian writing system was derived from a system of clay tokens used to represent
commodities.
By the end of the 4th millennium BC, this had evolved into a method of keeping accounts,
using a round-shaped stylus impressed into soft clay at different angles for recording
numbers.
This was gradually augmented with pictographic writing using a sharp stylus to indicate what
was being counted.
Round-stylus and sharp-stylus writing was gradually replaced about 2700-2000 BC by writing
using a wedge-shaped stylus, at first only for logograms, but developed to include phonetic
elements by the 2800 BC.
About 2600 BC cuneiform began to represent syllables of spoken Sumerian language.
Finally, cuneiform writing became a general purpose writing system for logograms, syllables,
and numbers.
By the 26th century BC, this script had been adapted to another Mesopotamian language,
Akkadian, and from there to others such as Hurrian, and Hittite.
Scripts similar in appearance to this writing system include those for Ugaritic and Old
Persian.
The Chinese script may have originated independently of the Middle Eastern scripts, around the
16th century BC, out of a late neolithic Chinese system of proto-writing dating back to c.
6000 BC.
The pre-Columbian writing systems of the Americas, including Olmec and Mayan, are also generally
believed to have had independent origins.
Alphabet
The first pure alphabets emerged around 2000 BC in Ancient Egypt, but by then alphabetic
principles had already been incorporated into Egyptian hieroglyphs for a millennium.
By 2700 BC Egyptian writing had a set of some 22 hieroglyphs to represent syllables that
begin with a single consonant of their language, plus a 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 BC for or by Semitic workers, but we cannot read these
early writings and their exact nature remain open to interpretation.
Over the next five centuries this Semitic "alphabet" seems to have spread north.
All subsequent alphabets around the world with the sole exception of Korean Hangul have
either descended from it, or been inspired by one of its descendants.
History of telecommunication
The history of telecommunication - the transmission of signals over a distance for the purpose
of communication - began thousands of years ago with the use of smoke signals and drums
in Africa, America and parts of Asia.
In the 1790s the first fixed semaphore systems emerged in Europe however it was not until
the 1830s that electrical telecommunication systems started to appear.
Distance telecommunications Visual, auditory and ancillary methods:
Prehistoric: Fires, Beacons, Smoke signals, Communication drums, Horns
6th century BCE: Mail 5th century BCE: Pigeon post
4th century BCE: Hydraulic semaphores 15th century CE: Maritime flag semaphores
1672: First experimental acoustic telephone 1790: Semaphore lines
1867: Signal lamps 1877: Acoustic phonograph
Basic electrical signals: 1838: Electrical telegraph.
See: Telegraph history 1858: First trans-Atlantic telegraph cable
1876: Telephone.
See: Invention of the telephone, History of the telephone, Timeline of the telephone
1880: Telephony via lightbeam photophones Advanced electrical and electronic signals:
1893: Wireless telegraphy 1896: Radio.
See: History of radio.
1914: First North American transcontinental telephone calling
1927: Television.
See: History of television 1927: First commercial radio-telephone service,
U.K.–U.S. 1930: First experimental videophones
1934: First commercial radio-telephone service, U.S.–Japan
1936: World's first public videophone network 1946: Limited capacity Mobile Telephone Service
for automobiles 1956: Transatlantic telephone cable
1962: Commercial telecommunications satellite 1964: Fiber optical telecommunications
1965: First North American public videophone network
1969: Computer networking 1973: First modern-era mobile phone
1979: INMARSAT ship-to-shore satellite communications 1981: First mobile phone network
1982: SMTP email 1983: Internet.
See: History of Internet 1998: Mobile satellite hand-held phones
2003: VoIP Internet Telephony
See also Linguistics and History of linguistics
Semiotics Animal communication
References
(Polish) Piotr Konieczny, Komunikacja: od mowy do Internetu, Histmag #49
Further reading Asante, Molefi Kete, Yoshitaka Miike, and
Jing Yin, eds.
The global intercultural communication reader Berger, Arthur Asa.
Media and communication research methods: An introduction to qualitative and quantitative
approaches Burke, Peter.
A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot
Burke, Peter.
A Social History of Knowledge II: From the Encyclopaedia to Wikipedia
de Mooij, Marieke.
"Theories of Mass Communication and Media Effects Across Cultures." in Human and Mediated
Communication around the World pp 355-393.
Esser, Frank, and Thomas Hanitzsch, eds.
The handbook of comparative communication research
Jensen, Klaus Bruhn, ed.
A handbook of media and communication research: qualitative and quantitative methodologies
Paxson, Peyton.
Mass Communications and Media Studies: An Introduction
Poe, Marshall T. A History of Communications: Media and Society From the Evolution of Speech
to the Internet 352 pages; Documents how successive forms of communication are embraced and, in
turn, foment change in social institutions.
Schramm, Wilbur.
Mass Communications Schramm, Wilbur, ed.
Mass Communications: A Reader Simonson, Peter.
Refiguring Mass Communication: A History