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Thehistory of communication technologies (media and appropriate inscription tools) have evolved in tandem with shifts in political and economic systems, and by extension, systems of power.Communication can range from very subtle processes of exchange to full conversations and mass communication. The history of communication itself can be traced back since theorigin of speech circa 100,000BCE.^[1] The use of technology in communication may be considered since the first use of symbols about 30,000 years BCE. Among the symbols used, there arecave paintings,petroglyphs,pictograms andideograms.Writing was a major innovation, as well asprinting technology and, more recently,telecommunications and theInternet.

Human communication was initiated with theorigin of speech approximately 100,000 BCE.^[1] Symbols were developed about 30,000 years ago. The imperfection of speech allowed easier dissemination of ideas and eventually resulted in the creation of new forms of communication, improving both the range at which people could communicate and the longevity of the information. All of those inventions were based on the key concept of the symbol.

The oldest known symbols created for communication werecave paintings, a form ofrock art, dating to theUpper Paleolithic age. The oldest known cave painting is located withinChauvet Cave, dated to around 30,000 BCE.^[2] These paintings contained increasing amounts of information: people may have created the firstcalendar as far back as 15,000 years ago.^[3] The connection between drawing and writing is further shown bylinguistics: inAncient Egypt andAncient Greece the concepts and words of drawing and writing were the same (Egyptian: 's-sh', Greek: 'graphein').^[4]

Verbal communication is one of the earliest forms of human communication, the oral tradition of storytelling has dated back to various times in history. The development of communication in its oral form can be based on certain historical periods. Oral history is the method of collecting and preserving primary source testimonies from individuals and groups who lived through those time periods.^[5] The complexity of oral communication has always been reflective based on the circumstance of the time period. Verbal communication was never bound to one specific area, instead, it had and continues to be a globally shared tradition of communication.^[6] People communicated through song, poems, and chants, as some examples. People would gather in groups and pass down stories, myths, and history. Oral poets from Indo-European regions were known as "weavers of words" for their mastery over the spoken word and ability to tell stories.^[7] Nomadic people also had oral traditions that they used to tell stories of the history of their people to pass them on to the next generation.

Nomadic tribes have been the torch bearers of oral storytelling. Nomads of Arabia are one example of the many nomadic tribes that have continued through history to use oral storytelling as a tool to tell their histories and the story of their people. Due to the nature of nomadic life, these individuals were often left without architecture and possessions to call their own, and often left little to no traces of themselves.^[8] The richness of the nomadic life and culture is preserved by early Muslim scholars who collect the poems and stories that are handed down from generation to generation. Poems created by these Arabic nomads are passed down by specialists known assha'ir. These individuals spread the stories and histories of these nomadic tribes, and often in times of war, would strengthen morale within members of given tribes through these stories.^{[citation needed]} Another example of this nomadic lifestyle where the people had no possessions but only passed on stories were the Waldensians, who passed along the word of God to anyone who would listen.^[9]

In its natural form, oral communication was, and has continued to be, one of the best ways for humans to spread their message, history, and traditions to the world.^{[citation needed]} Now, oral history is used to collect people’s life testimonies and experiences, and is used to recover the voices that were once absent from history. It is not meant to capture past events, but it’s meant to reveal the origin of the memories.^[10]

The next advancement in the history of communications came with the production ofpetroglyphs, carvings into a rock surface. It took about 20,000 years forHomo sapiens to move from the first cave paintings to the first petroglyphs, dated to approximately the Neolithic and late Upper Paleolithic boundary, about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. The petroglyphs of the Hawaiian islands were associated with several kinds of symbolism, myths, legends, and art.^[11]

It is possible thatHomo sapiens (humans) of that time used some other forms of communication, often formnemonic purposes - specially arranged stones, symbols carved in wood or earth,quipu-like rocks,tattoos, but little other than the most durable carved stones has survived to modern times and we can only speculate about their existence based on our observation of still existing 'hunter-gatherer' cultures such as those ofAfrica orOceania.^[12]

Apictogram (pictograph) is asymbol representing aconcept,object, activity, place or event byillustration. Pictography is a form ofproto-writing wherebyideas are transmitted throughdrawing. Pictographs were the next step in the evolution of communication: the most important difference between petroglyphs and pictograms is that petroglyphs are simply showing an event, but pictograms are telling a story about the event, thus they can for example be orderedchronologically.

Pictograms were used by various ancientcultures all over the world since around 9000 BCE, when tokens marked with simple pictures began to be used to label basic farm produce and become increasingly popular around 6000–5000 BCE. Another example of this is how the people of the Netherlands used pictograms to portray what was going on at the time.^[13]

They were the basis ofcuneiform^[14] andhieroglyphs and began to develop intologographicwriting systems around 5000 BCE.

Pictograms, in turn, evolved into ideograms, graphical symbols that represent anidea. Their ancestors, the pictograms, could represent only something resembling their form: therefore a pictogram of a circle could represent a sun, but not concepts like 'heat', 'light', 'day' or 'Great God of the Sun'. Ideograms, on the other hand, could convey more abstract concepts.

Because some ideas are universal, many different cultures developed similar ideograms. For example, an eye with a tear means 'sadness' inNative American ideograms inCalifornia, as it does for theAztecs, the earlyChinese and theEgyptians.^{[citation needed]}

Ideograms were precursors oflogographic writing systems.

The oldest-known forms of writing were primarilylogographic in nature, based onpictographic andideographic elements. Most writing systems can be broadly divided into three categories:logographic,syllabic andalphabetic (orsegmental); however, all three may be found in any given writing system in varying proportions, often making it difficult to categorize a system uniquely.

The invention of the firstwriting systems is roughly contemporary with the beginning of theBronze Age in the lateNeolithic of the late 5th millennium BCE. The first writing system is generally believed to have been invented in prehistoricSumer and developed by the late 4th millennium BCE intocuneiform.Egyptian hieroglyphs, and the undecipheredProto-Elamite writing system andIndus Valley script, also date to this era, though a few scholars have questioned theIndus Valley script's status as a writing system.

By the end of the 4th millennium BCE, this had evolved into a method of keepingaccounts, using a round shapedstylus impressed into soft clay at different angles for recording numbers. This was gradually augmented with pictographic writing using a sharp stylus to indicate what was being counted. Round-stylus and sharp-stylus writing was gradually replaced about 2700–2000 BC by writing using a wedge-shaped stylus (hence the termcuneiform), at first only forlogograms, but developed to includephonetic elements by 2800 BCE. About 2600 BCE cuneiform began to represent syllables of spokenSumerian language.

Finally, cuneiform writing became general-purpose writing system forlogograms,syllables, and numbers. By the 26th century; BCE, this script had been adapted to another Mesopotamian language,Akkadian, and from that to others such asHurrian, andHittite. Scripts similar in appearance to this writing system include those forUgaritic andOld Persian.

TheChinese script may have originated independently of the Middle Eastern scripts, around the 16th century BCE (earlyShang dynasty), out of a late neolithic Chinese system of proto-writing dating back to c. 6000 BCE. The inspiration of Chinese script originally came from bird and animal tracks and how they are so distinct.^[15] The pre-Columbian writing systems of theAmericas, includingOlmec andMayan, are also generally believed to have had independent origins.

The first purealphabets (properly, "abjads", mapping single symbols to single phonemes, but not necessarily eachphoneme to a symbol) emerged around 2000 BCE inAncient Egypt, but by then alphabetic principles had already been incorporated intoEgyptian hieroglyphs for a millennium (seeMiddle Bronze Age alphabets). For example, the letter F is a phonetic variant of the first letter of the Hebrew word "vav", meaning nail.

By 2700 BCE, Egyptian writing had a set of some22 hieroglyphs to represent syllables that begin with a singleconsonant of their language, plus a vowel (or no vowel) to be supplied by the native speaker. Theseglyphs were used as pronunciation guides forlogograms, to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names.

However, although seemingly alphabetic in nature, the original Egyptian uniliterals were not a system and were never used by themselves to encode Egyptian speech. In theMiddle Bronze Age an apparently "alphabetic" system is thought by some to have been developed in centralEgypt around 1700 BCE for or bySemitic workers, but we cannot read these early writings and their exact nature remains open to interpretation.

Over the next five centuries this Semitic "alphabet" (really asyllabary likePhoenician writing) seems to have spread north. All subsequent alphabets around the world^{[citation needed]} with the sole exception of KoreanHangul have either descended from it, or been inspired by one of its descendants.

Scholars agree that there is a relationship between the West-Semitic alphabet and the creation of the Greek alphabet. There is debate between scholars regarding the earliest uses of the Greek alphabet because of the changes that were made to create the Greek alphabet.^[16]

The Greek alphabet had the following characteristics:

1. The Greek lettering we know of today traces back to the eighth century BCE
2. Early Greek scripts used the twenty-two West-Semitic letters and included five supplementary letters.
3. Early Greek was not uniform in structure, and had many local variations.
4. The Greek lettering was written using a lapidary style of writing.
5. Greek was written in aboustrophedon style.

Scholars believe that at one point in time, early Greek scripts were very close to the West-Semitic alphabet. Over time, the changes that were made to the Greek alphabet were introduced as a result of the need for the Greeks to find a better way to express their spoken language in a more accurate way.^[16]

• 30,000 BCE – In ice-age Europe, people mark ivory, bone, and stone with patterns to keep track of time, using a lunar calendar.^[17]
• 14,000 BCE – In what is now Mezhirich, Ukraine, the first known artifact with a map on it is made using bone.^[17]
• Prior to 3500 BCE – Communication was carried out through paintings of indigenous tribes.
• 3500s BCE – TheSumerians developcuneiform writing and theEgyptians develophieroglyphic writing.
• 16th century BCE – ThePhoenicians develop analphabet.
• 105 –Cai Lun inventspaper.
• 7th century –Hindu-Malayan empires write legal documents oncopper platescrolls, and write other documents on more perishable media.
• 751 – Paper is introduced to theMuslim world after theBattle of Talas.
• 1250 – Thequill is used for writing.^[17]
• 1795 –Nicolas-Jacques Conté invents thepencil.
• 1888 –John J. Loud invents theballpoint pen.
• 1938 –László Bíró invents the first commercially-successfulballpoint pen.

The study of Urban Communication is an interdisciplinary field that examines how communication is shaped by urban life and addresses the urban city experience with cities as communicative environments.^[18] Urban communication views cities themselves as complex communicative spaces where the surrounding environment, infrastructure, and communities the citizens create are means of exchanging or carrying messages and interpersonal interactions.^[19]

It also accounts for modern digital media such as smartphones or the internet becoming increasingly popular since the 1990s and early 2000s, which allows for accessible, real-time exchanges between individuals and groups who want to give and receive information in industrialized countries.

• 1305 – The Chinese developwooden blockmovable type printing.
• 1406 – Toni Bell invents the Wordwheel, a mechanical contraption that turns out text.
• 1440 –Johannes Gutenberg invents aprinting press with metal movable type.
• 1844 –Charles Fenerty produces paper from a wood pulp, eliminating rag paper which was in limited supply.
• 1849 –Associated Press organizesNova Scotiapony express to carry latest European news for New York newspapers.
• 1938 –Chester Carlson invents the firstphotocopier suitable for office use.
• 1959 –Xerox begins sales of theXerox 914 photocopier.^[20]

Thehistory of telecommunication - thetransmission ofsignals over a distance forcommunication - began thousands of years ago with the use ofsmoke signals anddrums inAfrica,America and parts ofAsia. In the 1790s the first fixedsemaphore systems emerged inEurope however it was not until the 1830s thatelectrical telecommunication systems started to appear.

Morse Code was invented by Samuel F. B. Morse, who originally built telegraph lines in 1837. The telegraph is considered to be of the most revolutionary inventions in regards to telecommunication history with its use in World War 2.^[21] Morse Code has a symbiotic relationship with the telegraph because the invention of the code allowed for the creation of messages, and the telegraph was able to transmit the message.

Morse code is operated by using telegraph keys as the transmitter device, while the operator sends out the dots as signals combined sequentially with the dashes as longer signals. On the receiving end, the receiving device would make a clicking noise that the operator would transcribe.^[22]

• 26–37 CE – Roman EmperorTiberius rules the empire from the island ofCapri by signaling messages with metal mirrors to reflect the sun.
• 1520 – Ships onFerdinand Magellan's voyage signal to each other by firing cannon and raising flags.
• 1792 –Claude Chappe invents thesemaphore telegraph.

• 1792 –Claude Chappe establishes the first long-distancesemaphore telegraph line.
• 1831 –Joseph Henry proposes and builds an electrictelegraph.
• 1836 –Samuel Morse develops theMorse code.
• 1843 –Samuel Morse builds the first long-distance electric telegraph line.
• 1899 –The Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America was incorporated in New Jersey, andSpencer Trask & Co., an American investment service, underwrote theIPO. This was a subsidiary of the British Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company.^[23][24][25]

• 1876 –Alexander Graham Bell andThomas A. Watson exhibit an electrictelephone along with making the first official call inBoston
• 1889 –Almon Brown Strowger patents the direct dial

• 1877 –Thomas Edison patents thephonograph.
• 1977 – William K. Heine invents thelaser turntable.^[26]
• 1997 –ELP offers the first commerciallaser turntable for sale, the LT-1XA.^[27]

• 1895 –Guglielmo Marconi, an inventor and electrical engineer, used radio waves to transmit signals over a large distance.^[28]
• 1920 – Radio stationKDKA based in Pittsburgh began the first broadcast.
• 1924 –Bell Laboratories invents the first two-way, voice-based radio telephone.^[29]
• 1925 –John Logie Baird transmits the firsttelevision signal.
• 1942 –Hedy Lamarr andGeorge Antheil inventfrequency-hopping spread spectrum communication technique.
• 1947 – The first full-scale television commercial is broadcast.
• 1963 – The first geosynchronouscommunications satellite is launched, 17.5 years afterArthur C. Clarke's article.
• 1999 –Sirius Satellite Radio is introduced.

• 1843 – Patent issued for the "Electric Printing Telegraph," a very early forerunner of the fax machine
• 1926 – Commercial availability of theradioax
• 1964 – First modern fax machine commercially available (Long Distance Xerography)
• 1996 – First internet fax machine.

• 1947 –Douglas H. Ring and W. Rae Young ofBell Labs propose a cell-based approach which led to "cellular phones."
• 1957 –Leonid Kupriyanovich invents the LK-1mobile radio telephone, the first to usecode-division multiple access.
• 1965 – Chandros Rypinski, Jr. patents the first multiple-channel radio telephone system,^[30] which was licensed to Bell Labs^[31] (patent no. US3173996A).
• 1973 –Martin Cooper, then an employee ofMotorola, made the first mobile phone call.^[32]
• 1981 – Comvik introduces the world's first automatic mobile phone service followed a week later byNordic Mobile Telephone.
• 1981 –Millicom Inc., a telecommunications agency, and E.F. Johnson & Co. introduced the first portable cellular phone commercially available for use on a cellular network. It was called the “Lunch Box.”^[33][34]
• 1983 –Motorola launches theDynaTAC 8000X or the “Brick,” the first commercially available handheld mobile phone weighing 3 pounds (1.4 kg).^[35]
• 1986 –Technophone, under the guidance of the company’s then-chief executive officer, Nils Martensson, released the first pocket-sized mobile phone, the Excell PCT105.^[36][37][33]
• 1991 –GSM is put into operation
• 1992 –Neil Papworth sends the first SMS (or text message), on the Vodafone network.^{[38][39][40][41]}
• 1996 –Motorola StarTAC mobile phone introduced. It was significantly smaller than previous cellphones.^[42]
• 2001 – The first commercial launch of 3G was also byNTT DoCoMo in Japan
• 2007 –iPhone is launched
• 2009 – The first commercialLTE deployment
• 2014 – The number of mobile connections surpasses the global population.^[43]
• 2019 – The first 5G networks were launched in South Korea

• 1946 – TheUniversity of Pennsylvania introducesENIAC, the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer
• 1949 –Claude Shannon, the "father ofinformation theory", mathematically proves theNyquist–Shannon sampling theorem.
• 1957 –Gordon Gould invents thelaser and theoptical amplifier.^[44]
• 1965 – Firstemail sent (atMIT).^[45]

  

• 1966 –Charles K. Kao realizes that silica-basedoptical waveguides offer a practical way to transmit light viatotal internal reflection.
• 1969 – The first hosts ofARPANET,Internet's ancestor, are connected.^[46]

• 1971 –Erna Schneider Hoover invents a computerized switching system for telephone traffic.
• 1971 –8-inch floppy disk removable storage medium for computers is introduced.^[47]
• 1973 –Optelecom, Inc. delivers the first operational optical communications system under an ARPA contract to the US Army Missile Command, and the first commercial fiber optic system to Chevron.^[48]
• 1975 – Firstlist servers are introduced.^[47]
• 1976 – The personal computer (PC) market is born.
• 1977 –Donald Knuth begins work onTeX.
• 1980 –Usenet is established.
• 1981 –Hayes Smartmodem introduced.^[42]
• 1983 –Microsoft Word software is launched.^[49]
• 1985 –AOL is launched.
• 1988 –Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is released.
• 1989 –Tim Berners-Lee andRobert Cailliau build the prototype system which became theWorld Wide Web atCERN.
• 1989 –WordPerfect 5.1 word processing software released.^[42]
• 1989 –Lotus Notes software is launched.^[50]
• 1990 –Archie, the world’s first search engine, was released.^[51]
• 1990 –Adobe Photoshop is released.
• 1991 – Anders Olsson transmits solitary waves through an optical fiber with a data rate of 32 billion bits per second.
• 1992 –Internet2 organization is created.
• 1992 – IBMThinkPad 700C laptop computer created. It was lightweight compared to its predecessors.^[42]

• 1993 – Tim Bernes-Lee released the World Wide Web to the general public.^[52]

• 1993 –Mosaic graphical web browser is launched. It was one of the first browsers to display images in line with text and not in a separate window.^[50][53]

• 1994 – Internet radio broadcasting is born.
• 1995 –Yahoo, an American web services provider, is launched.^[54]
• 1996 – The first Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (WDM) system was installedCiena Corp under the guidance of co-founderDavid Huber.^[55][56] WDM subsequently became the common basis of all telecommunications networks^[57] and a foundation of the Internet.^[58]
• 1997 –SixDegrees.com is launched, the first of several earlysocial networking services.
• 1998 – Google, an advanced search engine, is launched.^[59]
• 1999 –Napsterpeer-to-peer file sharing is launched.^[42]
• 1999 –XMPP is released.
• 2001 –Cyworld adds social networking features and becomes the first of several mass-market social networking service
• 2003 –Skype video calling software is launched.
• 2004 –Facebook is launched, becoming the largest social networking site in 2009.
• 2004 –Gmail is launched.
• 2005 –YouTube, the video-sharing site, is launched.
• 2005 –Reddit is launched.
• 2006 –Twitter is launched.
• 2007 –iPhone is launched.
• 2009 –WhatsApp is launched.
• 2010 –Instagram is launched.
• 2011 –Snapchat is launched.
• 2013 –Telegram is launched.
• 2014 –Signal is launched.
• 2015 –Discord is launched.
• 2017 –Teams is launched.

• (in Polish) Piotr Konieczny,Komunikacja: od mowy do Internetu,Histmag #49

• Berger, Arthur Asa.Media and communication research methods: An introduction to qualitative and quantitative approaches (SAGE 2013)
• Briggs, Asa, and Peter Burke.A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet. Cambridge: Polity, 2002.
• Burke, Peter.A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot (2000)
• Burke, Peter. A Social History of Knowledge II: From the Encyclopaedia to Wikipedia (2012)
• de Mooij, Marieke. "Theories of Mass Communication and Media Effects Across Cultures." inHuman and Mediated Communication around the World (Springer 2014) pp 355–393.
• Esser, Frank, and Thomas Hanitzsch, eds.The handbook of comparative communication research (Routledge, 2012)
• Gleick, James (2011).The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. Pantheon Books.ISBN 978-0-375-42372-7.
• Jensen, Klaus Bruhn, ed.A handbook of media and communication research: qualitative and quantitative methodologies (Routledge, 2013)
• Miike, Yoshitaka, and Jing Yin, eds.The Handbook of Global Interventions in Communication Theory (Routledge, 2022)
• Paxson, Peyton.Mass Communications and Media Studies: An Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2010)
• Poe, Marshall T.A History of Communications: Media and Society From the Evolution of Speech to the Internet (Cambridge University Press; 2011) 352 pages; Documents how successive forms of communication are embraced and, in turn, foment change in social institutions.
• Schramm, Wilbur. Mass Communications (1963)
• Schramm, Wilbur, ed. Mass Communications: A Reader (1960)
• Simonson, Peter.Refiguring Mass Communication: A History (2010)

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