A History of Communications advances a theory of media that explains the origins and impact of different forms of communication - speech, writing, print, electronic devices and the Internet - on human history in the long term. New media are 'pulled' into widespread use by broad historical trends and these media, once in widespread use, 'push' social institutions and beliefs in predictable directions. This view allows us to see for the first time what is truly new about the Internet, what is not, and where it is taking us.

This text addresses the problem of how communication systems, including language, have been designed over the course of evolution. It integrates conceptual issues and empirical results from neurobiology, cognitive and developmental psychology, linguistics, evolutionary biology, and ethology.

A concise introduction to the evolution of communication media, The Evolution of Media is unique in that it treats both mass media and interpersonal media. The first part of the book describes the history and development of media technology. The second and third parts develop a taxonomy for media and compare their technological requirements, applications, and other significant elements. The last section presents a simple methodology to help predict the success of new media products and services. This book is a useful supplement for foundational courses in mass communication and communication history, as well as a primer for anyone interested in the big picture of communication media.

In response to a request from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the committee studied a range of issues to help identify what strategies the Department of Defense might follow to meet its need for flexible, rapidly deployable communications systems. Taking into account the military's particular requirements for security, interoperability, and other capabilities as well as the extent to which commercial technology development can be expected to support these and related needs, the book recommends systems and component research as well as organizational changes to help the DOD field state-of-the-art, cost-effective untethered communications systems. In addition to advising DARPA on where its investment in information technology for mobile wireless communications systems can have the greatest impact, the book explores the evolution of wireless technology, the often fruitful synergy between commercial and military research and development efforts, and the technical challenges still to be overcome in making the dream of "anytime, anywhere" communications a reality.

A leading expert on evolution and communication presents an empirically based theory of the evolutionary origins of human communication that challenges the dominant Chomskian view. Human communication is grounded in fundamentally cooperative, even shared, intentions. In this original and provocative account of the evolutionary origins of human communication, Michael Tomasello connects the fundamentally cooperative structure of human communication (initially discovered by Paul Grice) to the especially cooperative structure of human (as opposed to other primate) social interaction. Tomasello argues that human cooperative communication rests on a psychological infrastructure of shared intentionality (joint attention, common ground), evolved originally for collaboration and culture more generally. The basic motives of the infrastructure are helping and sharing: humans communicate to request help, inform others of things helpfully, and share attitudes as a way of bonding within the cultural group. These cooperative motives each created different functional pressures for conventionalizing grammatical constructions. Requesting help in the immediate you-and-me and here-and-now, for example, required very little grammar, but informing and sharing required increasingly complex grammatical devices. Drawing on empirical research into gestural and vocal communication by great apes and human infants (much of it conducted by his own research team), Tomasello argues further that humans' cooperative communication emerged first in the natural gestures of pointing and pantomiming. Conventional communication, first gestural and then vocal, evolved only after humans already possessed these natural gestures and their shared intentionality infrastructure along with skills of cultural learning for creating and passing along jointly understood communicative conventions. Challenging the Chomskian view that linguistic knowledge is innate, Tomasello proposes instead that the most fundamental aspects of uniquely human communication are biological adaptations for cooperative social interaction in general and that the purely linguistic dimensions of human communication are cultural conventions and constructions created by and passed along within particular cultural groups.