ABSTRACT
This chapter considers some key contributions of humanistic disciplines to media and communication research. Medium theory offers a fertile framework for studying the historical and cultural variations of media and communication; it also represents a middle ground between the textual focus of the humanities and the institutional focus of the social sciences. The chapter examines aspects of the classical legacy, before outlining the main traditions from the history of ideas that entered into the modern humanities – rhetoric, hermeneutics, phenomenology, and semiotics. The close link in classical rhetoric between communication and knowledge was gradually relaxed, as manifested in the development of so many practical manuals on speaking well in public. The practical implications of hermeneutics for doing communication research are suggested by the key concept of a hermeneutic circle. Interrelated with hermeneutics in the history of ideas and as a methodological orientation to collecting and interpreting evidence, phenomenology emerged as a distinctive school of philosophy around 1900.
