hist of comm
simonson peck craigh jackson:
its domain includes ideas, practices, processes, institutions, materialities, and events of communicative expression, circulation, and exchange.
...Out of their writings , "communication emerged as an increasingly important idea for making sense of the development and organization of knowledge, society, poliltical life, and individual selves.
1. writing about communication history, 2. historical writing about communication thus named, a line of work..., historical writing about practices and technologies like rhetoric, journalism, and particular media....addressing communicative phenomena, 4. historically informed theoretical writings about communication
(but not consumption)(concerns with the institution of output, not effects of reception)
print was the main home of communication history, which from the seventeenth century forward established itself as a discourse, scholarly endeavor, and eventually, and institutionalizing field of study...
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 epiphenomena 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, .....featured struggle, power, and the social deformations of both past an present as central categories for communication history
communication was a standard term in nineteenth-century political economy, where it typically means transportation and other kinds of material contact an exchange and then Innis_)
Mill;'s principles of political economy (1848) making the case that "transport and commercial commerce were also powerful engines of historical development, the latter making up "the far greater part of the communication which takes place between civilized nations....one of the primary sources of progress."
Hannah Arendt argued in The Human Condition (1958) that the modern world had collapsed the public into the social ( a variation on civic republican communication history, inflected with her teacher Martin Heidegger's foundational insight that language is the house of being.) 27
(HEGEMONY HERE)
L'apparition du Livre (1958) by Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin--an account of the development of print in Europe that wove together economics, politics, technology, sociology and anthropology. Meanwhile the field of "information" developed in France and elsewhere on the Continent in the 1950s, broadly concentrating on the study of "content" and not on the media that carried or "contained" it--a development reflecting the continuing influence of literary and legal studies on the field. (Febrve overthrew the "History as a mere collection of historical facts" concept. ) 29, with wikepedia.
Marxist theory rejected the view that culture (including forms and practices of communication and media) were merely epiphenomenal, and held instead that culture was both historical produced (constituted) and historically productive (constitutive). (dworking 1997; peck 2001).