ABSTRACT
The relationship between communication and control can perhaps best be explored by looking more closely at the conditions and consequences of the “adaptive” function subserved by communication, and then at the functions subserved by intercommunication. The primary functions subserved by intercommunication in human sociation are those of normative regulation and control, and of the creation, alteration, maintenance, or exploitation of human institutions—which are, in turn, formal or informal “epistemic communities” organized around one or a set of “communicational realities,” or guiding metaphors. Social institutions persist so long as they serve to provide a sufficient relationship between their constituents and their total communicational environments and so long as they are articulable one with the other. Like “communication,” perhaps too much has already been said about “revolution” for the term to retain its usefulness for intellectual purposes. Nonetheless, as with communication, there are certain phenomena still to be accounted for; and these perhaps can still best be indexed by the term “revolution.”.
