Page 49 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

COMMUNICATION

to be putting at the centre of the human condition – the media,
advertising and television.
. But on the dark side, governments were interfering with commu-
nication in a major way. Contending ideologies were never more
seriously at odds, both in the Cold War’s ‘mutually assured
destruction’, and in national liberation struggles from Africa to
Vietnam. A serious understanding of howcommunication worked
in practice within and between militarily formidable states seemed
timely.
. Raymond Williams (1968) and others, including Herbert Marcuse
and Hans Magnus Enzensberger (1970), brought to communica-
tions a critical perspective that – whatever the virtue of the argument
advanced by any one theorist – ensured an important and
permanent place for communication on the intellectual and
academic agenda.
. Communication science gained ground enormously after World
War II, when inventions ranging from radar to the ‘Enigma’
code-breaker had shown how important information was in
warfare. The invention and commercialisation of computers took
that national-military energy and redirected it both to business/
government and to imaginative ends: both the IBM 360–50s and
360–65s that sent humanity to the moon and safely back, and
Stanley Kubrick’s not-so-imaginary red-shifted computer ‘Hal’
(‘IBM’ minus one letter of the alphabet spells ‘HAL’) in 2001: A
Space Odyssey, which did not. Science had the imagination and
the means, it seemed, to cause machine-originated communica-
tion to transform human life.
. Communications technologies for mass commercial and residential
uptake proliferated throughout the twentieth century. Several
distinct global industries were sustained by them, including telcos,
and the media content industries.

These different tendencies swirled around each other throughout the
latter part of the twentieth century, sometimes connecting but never
fully integrating. The earlier ambition of finding a unified science of
communication in which they might all cohere was never realised.
Instead, communication has reverted to ‘small c’ status: it is an aspect
of incommensurable work carried out in many specialist areas, as
appropriate to their needs.

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