wrong battle instructions. The problem was compounded when a message was to be sent over a long distance. Napoleon established a network of 224 line-of-sight semaphore stations, spanning over 1,000 miles. The coded message had to be repeated accurately at each station for a correct message to get through. The chance of an error was quite high. In addition, these vehicles for transporting messages were single-channel systems. They lacked the multichannel reinforcement of most face-to-face interactions (i.e., in face-to-face encounters we see and hear a person simultaneously; both channels are likely to support the meaning he intends to communicate).
As Western culture developed more complex economic and social structures, the quick and accurate movement of information became more critical. Wars were often prolonged, and sometimes initiated, because of a breakdown in the transportation of messages. Similarly, fortunes were made and lost when one party gained a slight advantage in the time required to send and receive messages across an ocean or continent. An English merchant who discovered that the cotton crop in America was highly successful could undercut his competitors if he alone possessed this information.
As a result of these transportation problems, we came to understand communication as the movement of information across space, over a period of time. We generalized the problem area of communication as synonymous with the process itself. A transportation theory of communication is useful when the movement of information is a central problem, but such issues are only a small area in the total communication process.
When someone is overloaded with information, the transportation theory ceases to be meaningful. In addition, transportation theory looks at communication from a “message” point of view. It asks: How are messages created? How do they move? How are they received? Most human communication, however, involves the exchange of so much information at any moment that it cannot be isolated as message units. The transportation theory is thus inadequate in describing the human learning process, or accounting for the dissemination and flow of information in our society. Information flow is a much more complex process than the mere transportation of messages.
The transportation theory of communication is the basis of many formal models of communication as well as our everyday conception of “sending messages.” The way we use a postal service to send a letter comes very close to our commonplace analogy for all communication. We assume that communication is difficult to achieve, and that a message encounters resistance at each step along the way. This commonplace conception of communication is so basic to our thinking that we have used the new electronic media almost exclusively as message-sending devices. In my childhood, for example, the telephone was used as a surrogate for a telegram or letter, not as a new medium. If our family was planning to visit relatives in New Jersey, my mother would call long distance from New York to New Jersey to tell them when we expected to arrive. Her messages were short, loudly spoken, and to the point. She used the phone as a vehicle for sending a message across a space. Even when the line between New York and New Jersey was clear, she spoke louder than necessary—conscious of the space between them and using the phone as if it were a tunnel through a chasm. She believed that the phone, like a letter, was a low-efficiency vehicle for communicating, and she was pushing to get her message across. Today, my daughter often calls her friends to exchange giggles. They relate bits of news, giggle back and forth a few minutes, then say goodbye. My daughter accepts the telephone as a communication system with no resistance and no transformation. Communication for her is what happens when you use a telephone, not something that may occur if your message gets through.
Part of an ad for Seventeen magazine
Our misconception of communication as transportation interacts with another deep-rooted bias: the identification of print with “meaning.” Only a tiny fraction of all communication takes place through print (the U.S. national average for book purchases is 0.3 books per year, and this represents an all-time high in Western culture), yet it remains an idealized form of communicating the most important information: “I’ll believe that when I see it in writing.” More significant, print has helped foster a narrow conception of communication that accepts perceptual information as meaningful only to the extent that it conforms to the patterning inherent in print communication. One cannot approach a viable theory of communication until he exorcises the “spirit of print” that has controlled our terms for learning, understanding, and communicating.
The End of the Line
Print has dominated our non-face-to-face communications environment for the past five hundred years. During this period, the information most valued by Western societies was communicated in a fixed form, with words following one after another, left to right, on lines that proceeded down a page. All preserved knowledge, as well as those pieces of information that achieved high status throughout the society (e.g., laws) were recorded in print. The linear process, by which information was translated into print, took on a status unto itself. As a result, the linear process came to be valued in many areas of people’s lives. Our language, for example, shows a marked dependence on linearity in the terms we use for clear thinking and proper behavior. A child growing up in our culture is taught to “toe the line…keep in line…walk the straight and narrow…don’t make waves.” Similarly, he is told that a good student is one who “follows a clear line of thought.” And if someone really understands another person, we say he can “read him like a book.” Our logic has been the logic of print, where one idea follows another. “Circular reasoning” is synonymous with unacceptable logic. And we know that you never accomplish anything by “running around in circles.”
The linearity in our language is accompanied by a strong dependence on visual analogies to represent truth, knowledge, and understanding. Do you see what I mean? A really bright person—i.e. someone with hindsight, foresight, and insight—will see eye to eye with me. But a dull person, one who hasn’t seen the light, won’t agree with my point of view. Why, it’s as clear as ABC.
If seeing was believing, listening and speaking were undependable elements in the communication process. It was a common view that children should be seen and not heard. If you played it by ear, you were not very sure of yourself. And to be recognized as a trained musician, you had to be able to read a score and write notes on paper. In the courtroom, unreliable evidence, whether of a written or spoken variety, may be discarded on the grounds that it is “hearsay.” Similarly, a scholar could look back on history, and a prophet could see into the future; but if someone crudely imitated another performer, we said he was a weak echo or that he was mouthing something that had been done better. Even the early radio operators indicated that they were receiving a strong signal by saying, “Read you loud and clear.”
Even after we recognize the predominance of linear analogies in our language, it becomes important only when we understand that many non-linear patterns in our present communication structure are described and analyzed as linear patterns. Our linear bias also prevents us from understanding preliterate auditory cultures. Few readers of the passage in Genesis, “In the beginning was the Word,” recognize that it refers to a spoken word. Jesus said, “It is written but I say unto you” to assert a new world order based on his spoken words. Linearity and a strong visual orientation are not endemic to all cultures. A society that depends on auditory communication for the exchange of messages will organize their “world” in a very different way from our own. Space, time, the concept of self, etc., take on very different meanings when auditory patterns replace a linear, visual orientation.
You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round. In the old days when we were a strong and happy people, all our power came to us from the sacred hoop of the nation and so long as the hoop was unbroken the people flourished… . Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The Sky is round and I have heard that the earth is round like a bail and so are all the stars. The Wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same
