Communication between two people is an outgrowth of methods developed over centuries of expression. Gestures, the development of language, and the necessity to engage in joint action all played a part.
A. Communication among animals
Humans are not the only creatures that communicate; many other animals exchange signals and signs that help them find food, migrate, or reproduce. The 19th-century biologist Charles Darwin showed that the ability of a species to exchange information or signals about its environment is an important factor in its biological survival. For example, honey bees dance in specific patterns that tell other members of the hive where to find food. Insects regularly use pheromones, a special kind of hormone, to attract mates. Elephants emit very low-pitched sounds, below the level of human hearing, that call other members of the herd over many miles. Chimpanzees use facial expressions and body language to express dominance or affection with each other. Whales and dolphins make vocal clicks, squeals, or sing songs to exchange information about feeding and migration, and to locate each other.
B. Language
While other animals use a limited range of sounds or signals to communicate, humans have developed complex systems of language that are used to ensure survival, to express ideas and emotions, to tell stories and remember the past, and to negotiate with one another. Oral (spoken) language is a feature of every human society or culture. Anthropologists studying ancient cultures have several theories about how human language began and developed. The earliest language systems probably combined vocal sounds with hand or body signals to express messages. Some words may be imitative of natural sounds. Others may have come from expressions of emotion, such as laughter or crying. Language, some theorists believe, is an outgrowth of group activities, such as working together or dancing.
Over 6000 languages and major dialects are spoken in the world today. As some languages grow, others disappear. Languages that grow also evolve and change due to class, gender, profession, age group, and other social forces. The Latin language is no longer spoken but survives in written form. Hebrew is an ancient language that became extinct, but has now been brought back to life and is spoken today. Others, such as the ancient languages of native peoples in Central and South America, the Pacific Islands, and some of the Native American peoples of North America, which had no written form, have been lost as the speakers died. Today anthropologists are trying to record and preserve ancient languages that are still spoken in remote areas or by the last remaining people in a culture.
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 coloured 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
An overview of the evolution of Mass Media
The mass media system we have today has existed more or less as we know it ever since the 1830s. It is a system that has weathered repeated significant change with the coming of increasingly sophisticated technologies- the penny press newspaper was soon followed by mass market books and mass circulation magazines. As the 1800s became the 1900s, these popular media were joined by motion pictures, radio, and sound recording. A few decades later came television, combining news and entertainment, moving images and sound, all in the home and all, ostensibly, for free. The traditional media found new functions and prospered side by side with television. Then, more recently, came the Internet, World Wide Web, and mobile technologies like smartphones and tablets. Now, because of these new technologies, all the media industries are facing profound alterations in how they are structured and do business, the nature of their content, and how they interact with and respond to their audiences. Naturally, as these changes unfold, so too will the very nature of mass communication and our role in that process.
REFERENCES:
Baran, S. J. (2010): Introduction to Mass Communication, Media Literacy and Culture. 6th Ed. NY; McGraw-Hill Companies.
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