ABSTRACT
Roughly contemporaneous is the interest in the meaning of communication; Alfred Korzybski started on the study of "general semantics", that is, on the meaning of communication, around the turn of the century. It was World War I, however, which made the entire Western world communication-conscious. When the diplomatic documents of 1914 in the German and Russian archives were published, soon after the end of the fighting, it became appallingly clear that the catastrophe had been caused, in large measure, by communications failure despite copious and reliable information. Communications suddenly became, forty to fifty years ago, a consuming interest of scholars as well as of practitioners. Yet communications have proven as elusive as the unicorn. The noise level has gone up so fast that no one can really listen any more to all that babble about communications. But there is clearly less and less communicating.
