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Evolution and Theories of Communication | 61

these were the writings of Berlo, Newcomb, Dance, Watzlawick, Beavin and
Jackson, and Rogers and Kincaid.
History of communication reveals a number of changes during the
nearly 2,500 year heritage of the field—changes both in the theory of the
communication process and the discipline in which it is studied. The
earliest perspectives in communication were concerned with public speak-
ing with persuasion as the goal. With increasing evidence that the messages
sent and that received seldom equaled one another, that is MS ≠ MR, or
to put it in another way, D ≠ I, that is, data sent are not equal to the infor-
mation received, a movement away from the S>M>R paradigm has taken
place, providing impetus for a broadened view during the 1970s and 1980s,
with the models of Newcomb, Dance, Rogers and Kincaid as presented in
Chapter 5.
Communication is ancient and newly emergent, interdisciplinary in heri-
tage, the home of scholars and professionals, a science and an art, belonging
to the humanities, and is also concerned with technology (Harper 1979).
Body positioning and gestures in particular cultures form a part of the
research in anthropology. These studies laid the down the groundwork for
more general studies of non-verbal communication. In psychology, inter-
est focused on persuasion, social influence, and specifically, attitudes—how
they form, how they change, their impact on behaviour, and the role of
communication in these dynamics.
Sociologists and political scientists studied the nature of mass media in
various political and social activities, voting behaviour, and other facets of life.
In Zoology, communication among animals began to receive considerable
attention among researchers. During the same years, scholars in linguistics,
general semantics, and semiotics—fields that focused on the nature of lan-
guage and its role in human activity—also contributed to the advancement
of communication study. Studies in rhetoric and speech in the late 1940s and
1950s broadened to include oral interpretation, voice, and diction, debate,
and thereafter, physiology of speech, and speech pathology. In journalism and
mass media studies, growth and development were even more dramatic and
spurred on in no small way by the popularity of television and efforts to under-
stand its impact. In a number of classic works in the 1950s the focus on specific
media—newspapers, magazines, radio, and television—began to the replaced
by a more general concern with the nature and effects of mass media and mass
communication.
By the end of the 1950s a number of writings had appeared that paved the
way for the development of more integrated views of communication. It was
during these years that the National Society for the Study of Communication
(now the International Communication Association) was established with
the stated goal of bringing greater unity to the study of communication
by exploring the relationships among speech, language, and media. These

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