Traditions of Communication Theory

Emergence of Communication Theory as a Field

Although some traditions of communication theory, such as rhetoric and semiotics, are much older, the term communication theory was not widely used until the 1940s, and initially it had little to do with those older theoretical traditions. The term first appeared in electrical engineering, where it referred to mathematical theories of signal coding, transmission, and processing that could be used, for example, to optimize the channel capacity of telephone lines. Despite their rather technical nature, these theories attracted widespread interest among social scientists and others who saw them as a possible basis for a new science of communication with important social applications. Two influential books that contributed to this trend were Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver's The Mathematical Theory of Communication and Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics. Words like information, noise, and feedback, which had precise technical meanings in these theories, were borrowed by other fields and soon entered the common language, albeit with less precise meanings. The interest in these theories reflected a spreading belief, in the wake of World War II, that improvements in human communication were urgently needed to prevent war and address other social problems.

In line with that generally rising concern with communication problems, social scientific communication research was also growing rapidly in the 1940s and beginning to gain recognition as an interdisciplinary field. Research and theoretical writings on communication were scattered across numerous academic disciplines, including not only the engineering theories just mentioned, but also among others, philosophical theories of language and meaning, psychological theories of persuasion and verbal behavior, sociological theories of group and mass communication, and rhetorical theories of public discourse and speech communication. Scholars began referring to this collection of ideas from many disciplines as communication theory, and some argued that communication might eventually become a scientific discipline in its own right by building a new, integrated field of theory on this broad foundation.

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