The Handbook of Communication History

Peter Simonson, Janice Peck, Robert T Craig, John Jackson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136514302
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Handbook of Communication History addresses central ideas, social practices, and media of communication as they have developed across time, cultures, and world geographical regions. It attends to both the varieties of communication in world history and the historical investigation of those forms in communication and media studies. The Handbook editors view communication as encompassing patterns, processes, and performances of social interaction, symbolic production, material exchange, institutional formation, social praxis, and discourse. As such, the history of communication cuts across social, cultural, intellectual, political, technological, institutional, and economic history.

The volume examines the history of communication history; the history of ideas of communication; the history of communication media; and the history of the field of communication. Readers will explore the history of the object under consideration (relevant practices, media, and ideas), review its manifestations in different regions and cultures (comparative dimensions), and orient toward current thinking and historical research on the topic (current state of the field). As a whole, the volume gathers disparate strands of communication history into one volume, offering an accessible and panoramic view of the development of communication over time and geographical places, and providing a catalyst to further work in communication history.

Part I
FIELD

1

The History of Communication History

Peter Simonson, Janice Peck, Robert T. Craig and John P. Jackson, Jr.

Communication history is at once a new field and a very old practice. Whether we emphasize the former or the latter depends on how we define “communication history.” On the one hand, if we define it as a fully conceptualized, collectively self-aware field gathered under the sign “communication history,” then we would have to say that it is a formation still coming into being—hope-fully nudged along by this Handbook, which brings together scattered impulses that have been gathering force since the 1970s. On the other hand, we can conceive communication history in more spacious terms, understanding it as written, spoken, or other mediated representations of signifying events and practices in the past. From this perspective, every culture has at least some analogue to communication history—e.g., declarations from the gods or words from the leaders of earlier generations passed down through oral modes and traditions. In traditional societies these acts of remembering were not conceived of as history, nor were the practices understood as “communication,” so the analogy is imperfect. Nonetheless, the scope of communication history potentially reaches out toward the history of humanity writ large.

As a way of narrating the history and pre-history of a self-aware scholarly field still being born, we will rein in the potentially universalizing breadth and focus on a discrete set of tributaries that feed communication history as conceived in this volume. The headwaters for the main streams lie in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when philosophers, professors of rhetoric, historians, philologists, political economists, anthropologists, and sociologists variously cast attention to language and modes of social communication in long historical perspective. Out of their writings, “communication” emerged as an increasingly important idea for making sense of the development and organization of knowledge, society, political life, and individual selves. Referencing a world of both signs and symbols, as well as material technologies and modes of transportation, communication was a spacious term that could do a great deal of theoretical work—and whose history was thought to be both valuable in its own right and capable of revealing important dimensions of the present.

Though it has a long prehistory, as late as 1991 Michael Schudson could declare that the “writing of communication history is woefully underdeveloped” (175). Two decades later, that claim is less true. Historical writing on communication has developed considerably since then in volume and quality, such that a number of areas within it now have a solid and growing corpus of first-rate research. This volume seeks to simultaneously document and contribute to that development.

This chapter traces the history and prehistory of communication history. We understand our subject in four partially overlapping ways as: (1) writing about communication history explicitly named as such—a relatively small body of work that dates back to the 1970s; (2) historical writing about communication thus named, a line of work that runs from speculative philosophical histories of the eighteenth century to the present and ranges in focus from sweeping metanarratives to highly focused empirical studies; (3) historical writing about practices and technologies like rhetoric, journalism, and particular media, not explicitly organized under the sign of communication, but clearly addressing communicative phenomena—a focus that takes us back to the ancient world and reaches out to a heterogeneous family of scholarly literatures; (4) historically informed theoretical writings about communication that have exercised considerable influence on communication studies writ large. The first two are the core foci of this chapter. The third supplements that core and articulates with more extensive discussions in other chapters of the Handbook. And the fourth is intended to draw attention to historicist impulses in the field of communication as a whole, thus bolstering a subsidiary aim of the volume—namely to encourage more historically informed thinking in communication study that is not primarily historical in focus.

The account here proceeds mostly chronologically, calling attention to different traditions, intellectual styles, disciplinary origins, and contemporary families of communication history, and is thus more intellectual than social, cultural, political, institutional, or technological, reflecting our belief in the usefulness of intellectual history as a genealogical and cartographic tool. But we might supplement that story with two additional ways to think about the history of communication history and to emplot our map of the field: via the media used for representing the communicative past and those that dominated the societies from which it emerged; and via the ideological orientations that have guided it. We briefly sketch those plot lines, which we episodically mark in the remainder of our essay.

We can talk about oral, chirographic (handwritten), print, broadcast, and digital eras and traditions of communication history. To operate with a broad brush, ancient and traditional oral societies pass on sayings, speeches, and communicative events from the ancestors and gods, and in so doing variably make those words and events timelessly present or narrate a collective past that morally orients the group. Religious and humanistic handwriting cultures then gave the communicative past a new kind of durability and, in some cases, permanence, providing the basis for what a later era would deem “civilization” as against the mere “culture” of peoples without literatures. The great religions of the world—Confucianism, Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, and Islam—all include sacred or central texts that originated and flourished in scribal cultures and that contain representations of the communicative past that we can call proto-communication history. The speeches of notable Greek and Roman orators were also represented and preserved through scroll, parchment, and other technologies, thus establishing the foundation for the classic stream of humanist communication history. From the Renaissance through the twentieth century, print was the main home for communication history, which from the seventeenth century forward established itself as a discourse, scholarly endeavor, and, eventually, an institutionalizing field of study. Operating under a number of different names and disciplinary formations, communication history accelerated as a practice during the nationally-based broadcast age, from the 1920s into the 1980s, when print remained the dominant medium for representing and disseminating communication history, and print-based archives (supplemented by celluloid and tape-recorded programming) were its gold-standard evidentiary base. The digital entered the scene in the 1980s and ‘90s, as the broadcast age gave way to media segmentation, globalization, and the Internet. In this latest epoch, communication history has begun to organize itself as a collectively self-conscious field, communication history has been composed and disseminated through electronic means, and digital archives have created what Andreas Fickers (chapter 13, this volume) aptly calls an “age of abundance” for doing communication history.

Overlaying the media-based story, and working with equally broad strokes, the ideological metanarrative of communication history runs something like this. The proto-communication histories of traditional oral and chirographic cultures were inseparable from the metaphysical cosmologies from which they drew sustenance and legitimacy—something that remains true in the print and digital scriptures of the world’s great religions. Civic humanism, meanwhile, underwrote communication history in the oratorical-rhetorical tradition that stretched from Greek antiquity into the twentieth century, where great speakers and speeches from the past were taken as templates for civic virtue, citizenship, and the oratorical eloquence through which they were expressed. For civic humanist communication history, the past is paradigmatically cast as a moral touchstone for a society that has fallen away from its virtues and civic community. Civic humanist sensibilities often informed the liberal histories that began emerging in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and dominated the age of print-based communication history. If civic humanists were susceptible to narratives of decline, liberal communication history has been marked by tales of progress—often with communication and media as engines for progressive social and political change. One strand of it has been criticized as “Whig history,” emphasizing inevitable progress based on heroic individual efforts and effectively feeding the conceits of the present. In contrast, the critical tradition since Marx—when it has managed to overcome its suspicion that communication is a mere epiphenomenon to the real material processes of society—has rejected both the civic humanist valorization of a virtuous past and the liberal tale of Whiggish progress, while maintaining hopes for a better future. It has featured struggle, power, and the social deformations of both past and present as central categories for communication history, paradigmatically cast as critical social praxis that can orient present and future struggles for justice. Conservatism comes in several varieties, but in its anti-modern guise it can result in communication histories that look back more or less nostalgically to oral cultures and the spoken word (a sensibility also found in romantically-inflected communication history). Finally, over the last several decades, feminist, postcolonial, critical race, and queer politics have shaped the writing of communication history, variably driven by efforts to recover previously marginalized voices and experiences from the past; to critically interrogate their exclusion, domination, and resistance; and to work toward emancipation, empowerment, and continuing critical intervention in the present (compare the ideological mapping in Curran 2002, 2009).

Before proceeding, a few caveats are in order. Although our chapter includes a great deal, it leaves out even more. After a global feint toward ancient traditions of proto-communication history, the focus narrows to Europe and North America. Overall in the chapter, the United States, Great Britain, Germany, France, and Canada receive the vast majority of our attention, with the Anglophone world overrepresented. Histories from other regions of the world receive far less coverage, though we have tried to include a few landmark historical works as a promissory note toward future versions of this chapter that would go further in narrating the global trajectory of communication history. While we call attention to professional disciplines, schools, and professors and their students, we could have gone further in those sociological directions. And we have not included in this chapter historical work on film and music, which are well-covered in their own literatures.

We have organized our story chronologically, reaching across national borders as much as we can, and cutting across general (or what Schudson [1991] called “macro”) histories of communication and literature focusing on more specific topics, media, and social practices. We begin with a brief glance toward the proto-communication history manifest in the European rhetorical tradition and ancient religious texts from around the world before turning to the discovery of “communication” in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and France and the dawn of historical writing on the subject. From there, we move through nineteenth-century political economy, sociology, anthropology, and newspaper science (Zeitungwissenschaft) in Germany, France, the UK, and the United States. The story lines multiply in the twentieth century across the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, journalism, history, political science, literature, classics, and—starting in the 1940s—the new field of communication. The final sections of the chapter map some of the explosion of historical work since the 1970s and the institutionalization of communicati...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Field
• 1 The History of Communication History
• 2 Media
• 3 Communication Research
• Part II: Modes
• 4 Audiences Publics, Crowds, Mass
• 5 Rhetoric in Cross-Cultural Perspectives
• 6 Conversation
• 7 Visual Communication
• 8 Communication in Music
• Part III: Media
• 9 Print Culture
• 10 Journalism
• 11 Telecommunications
• 12 Radio Broadcasting
• 13 Television
• 14 New Media
• Part IV: Society
• 15 The City
• 16 Science Communication
• 17 Politics
• 18 Labor
• 19 War
• 20 Gender and Media A Very Short Herstory
• 21 Race
• 22 Organizing
• Part V: World
• 23 Rhetoric in Latin America
• 24 “Cultural Imperialism” Revisited Broadcasting in Latin America, India, and China
• 25 Communication in Colonial and Post-Colonial Southern Africa
• 26 Islam, Mediation, and Technology
• 27 Jewish Media and Communication in the Modern Age
• 28 East Asian Communication Studies
• Epilogue The Futures of Communication
• Index