A History of Communication Methodologies in the Western World

By Bradley Albert Clements


If someone wanted to communicate with another person in the modern world, how would they do so? There are various methods: one could e-mail them, write them a letter to be delivered by post, travel to their home to speak with them in person, or one could pick up a telephone and call them. Today these are simple methods that are not foreign to most people. However, with the ease of modern communication easily at hand, it is easy to forget that these technologies have been long in the making; growing throughout history upon the shoulders of pre-existing traditions and innovations.
Probably the first and most important of communication innovations was discovered by humanity’s early ancestors: speech. Anthropologists believe that early humans had the ability to communicate by speech 60,000 years ago (World Civilizations: A Comparative Study). Since then, language has been the primary method of inter-human communication. Oral traditions eventually developed the practice of verbally re-telling histories and mythologies. These traditions grew and soon became highly formalized and were often considered very sacred (First Nations Novel Study Module). Perhaps the pinnacle of oral tradition in Europe was the epic poetry and drama of the ancient Greeks - works of such artists as Socrates, Aesculus, Euripides and Homer - which were recited by memory. The popularity of oral tradition reached another high during the Middle Ages through the performances of the troubadours.
The spoken word gave virtually everyone the ability to communicate, but it had its limitations. The use of speech allowed anyone to speak with anyone else within shouting distance, but words could not be conveyed to a distant place or preserved for future reference. While the conventions of oral tradition attempted to perpetuate stories, and messenger were entrusted to the carrying of verbal news across geographical space, neither could be consistently relied upon. And so writing was developed. The idea of writing first emerged in ancient Sumer before 3000 B.C. (http://www.ancientscripts.com/sumerian.html), although visual representations of physical things could be seen in cave paintings as early as 35,000 years before (http://www.citrinitas.com/history_of_viscom/rockandcaves.html). The basic writing that appeared in Sumer were originally pictographs, simplified representations of the things which they stood for. They were used to faithfully record trade agreements, and were thusly generally only striving to represent physical goods such as oxen, arrows, grain and bricks. Soon, however, the vocabulary of writing widened to include abstract and conceptual ideas. As this occurred the complexity of writing increased tremendously, resulting in such sophisticated systems as Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics. As a way of simplifying writing, syllabic systems were developed, in which each symbol stood for a single syllable, the building-blocks of words. Writing was finally fully simplified by the ancient Phoencians in c. 1050 B.C. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet#History) when the alphabet was invented and used to represent individual phonetic sounds. The Phoencians were a seafaring trading people of the ancient Mediterranean and they spread their new alphabet concept to many surrounding cultures, including the Greeks who later influenced the Romans (Lecture, Professor Robert Garland). The Romans used their adaptation of this writing across their Empire, spreading its use throughout Europe and the Mediterranean world.
Writing came to be used for all manner of records, whether economical, historical, personal, religious or communicative. It too, however, had its drawbacks. Illiterate populations vastly outnumbered those who could read throughout most of history, meaning that writing had a very limited audience. Those with the ability to read and write were regarded, at the very least, as notably intelligent, if not as mysterious and mystical. The rampancy of illiteracy was largely because of the shortage and expense of written material. Books were slow and tedious to write and copy by hand, a task that only literate and highly skilled craftsmen were capable of. It is estimated that, during the Middle Ages, it would take an entire year to copy a single Bible (Lecture, Dr. Kwakkel). These problems were minimized by the perfection of the printing press and movable type by Johannes Guttenberg around 1453 A.D. (World Civilizations: A Comparative Study) which made printed material quicker, cheaper, and easier to produce. More people from more social classes gained a reason and ability to read as printed material increased in quantity, accessibility, and reliability and communication became much more reliant on the written word. The ability for average people to communicate from place to place, to publish their ideas to a wide audience and to educate themselves strengthened the rise of democracy and the middle class.
The combined methods of communication which had been developed prior to the 20th Century made communication possible to a remarkable extent, but all of these forms were bound by their physicality. Oral communication was only possible face-to-face, and written material – whether copied or printed – had a physical form which had to be transported to the audience, or which the audience would have to transport themselves to. Innovations in telecommunications, developed in the 20th Century removed many of the physical limitations which had previously posed as barriers. The electric telegraph, first invented in 1809 and refined to usability by Samuel Morse in 1844, paved the way for the ground-breaking inventions to come. The telephone, generally credited to have been invented in 1876 by Alexander Graham Bell (http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/telephone.htm), made it possible to transmit verbal messages unhindered by geographical separation. Around the end of the 19th Century, Guglielmo Marconi (http://inventors.about.com/od/rstartinventions/a/radio.htm) proved and practiced the use of radio waves to transmit wireless messages and sounds through the use of radio waves, a discovery that led to the radio. The television made drama and other forms of oral tradition available to audiences around the world. Audio and audio-visual recordings had the ability to perpetuate oral traditions beyond the capacity that silent letters were capable of. With the development and cultivation of the internet in the 1970’s and 80’s, the ability of the general public to publish uninhibited information to a world-wide audience surpassed the degree that any previous innovation had achieved. New methods of direct communication became possible through the use of the internet, such as e-mail which allowed digital messages to be delivered instantly between any individuals with internet access.
It can be seen that inter-human communications have been developing for as long as they have existed, building upon the foundations of previous innovations. Writing could not have been developed without language, printing could not have come about without the methods of writing which preceded it, and telecommunications and the internet would probably have been impossible without all of the previous breakthroughs. While each consecutive innovation worked on the weaknesses of those which preceded it, no one technology has been universal enough to completely replace another. Whenever someone sends a letter or an e-mail, reads a book or a website, or chats with a friend in person or on the phone, they are tapping into a continually evolving heritage which is older than history itself.

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