COURSE GENERAL, and HISTORY of COMMUNICATION, REFERENCES & RESOURCES


This page provides a set of tentative definitions articulating the foundation and interpretative contexts of the courses, and the page opens onto two versions of the history of communication:


I. COMMUNICATION & MEDIA CHRONOLOGIES (work in progress):


CMNS LINKS, is an chronologically ordered set of links (many to Wikipedia) covering many of the key themes, ideas, persons, phenomena and events reasonably covered either by the field of communication, or related to it. We remind ourselves that the study of communication is radically interdisciplinary.


The CMNS TIMELINE is an ongoing synthesis of reading and other timelines encountered on the web. It covers many of the usual topics, although being "under construction" much is still missing. Surfers will find that there are many timelines on the web, and specific ones, such as a "radio" or "TV" timeline, are very detailed, and are probably better resources that the timeline provided here. For my students, this timeline is meant to assist in situating the matters, names, and ideas discussed in class



II. (tentative) DEFINITIONS:


COMMUNICATION is the activation, actuation, and articulation of relation. Human communication is ontogenetic, ontomorphic and ontophanic, creating, changing and revealing human realities.

A MEDIUM is any act (gesture or event), practice, phenomenon or thing affording certain transformative/generative conductivity of attention and/or consciousness. Each medium makes certain resources available to users, usually with a trade-off.

A MEDIA ECOSYSTEM is an identifiable -- although circumstantially and situationally flexible and transitive -- configuration or aggregation of media, messages, formats, channels and transactions, constituting the perceptual, cognitive, interpretive, and relational extensions & horizons of a person, a group, community and/or society. Media ecosystems may be thought as “interactive dynamic environments” for human consciousness and participation; the variety, quality, and competence/control of the configuration of the channels by which participation in the construction and management of shared and personal human reality is made possible.

A RELATIONAL ECOLOGY is any system or network of interrelationships between people and activities, roles, responsibilities, resources, and the others, that make up any aspect of daily life -- among these are family, circles of friends, associates, colleagues and acquaintances, offices, societies and associations, as well as locations, situations, times and places. Wherever people gather and especially abide, we find relational ecologies


A MESSAGE is relation expressed, an externalization of inner, vital and interpersonal states, needs and desires, will and orientation to the exigencies thrown up by the rules, roles, resources and responsibilities afforded or imposed by nature, the Other, society & world.


Last updated: 25, II, 2010