ABSTRACT
The one-hundredth anniversary of the National Communication Association provides occasion to explore connections between our organization and the emergence of communication as a fully realized academic area focused on human interaction as variously mediated by speech, writing, print, electronic channels, and culture. What we find is a three-century transformation by which the term communication transitioned from a designator for the purpose underlying various oral-literate media to a high-level disciplinary moniker unifying both channels and socio-cultural processes. This more explicit awareness of the holistic connection between audience and source represents the outcome of five successive, although not always harmonious, turning points. The tale first takes us to the early eighteenth century when the term communication gained currency as part of the project to elevate vernacular English as a purposive vehicle in both spoken and written formats. Somewhat diminishing this early emphasis on source– audience connectivity was a second turn, after the 1820s, by which theorists and teachers separately elaborated the expressive instrumentalities of elocution and composition. A third important transformation point dates to the years after 1915 when proponents of public speaking began to re-emphasize the pivotal role of communicative objectives in expressive speech. Separately, in fin de siècle social science, we find the beginnings of a fourth key turn whereby communication increasingly functioned as a conceptual lever for understanding the societal implications of symbolic exchange. Parallel projects of 1940s wartime scholarship and teaching further advanced this purposive-societal perspective. Here quantitative social scientists undertook studies of mass communication while at the same time teachers of speech and composition joined forces in unified communication courses that integrated speaking, writing, listening, and reading. Finally giving communication study its full disciplinary breadth was a fifth conceptual-disciplinary metamorphosis after the 1960s whereby scholars and teachers expanded the bailiwick of communication study by giving more explicit attention to culture’s role in social interaction.
