Abstract

What is this thing called communcations? Communications is the mass media, and its apparatuses and its content. Communications is the network of wires and switches, light-beams and impulses, fibers and all kinds of other things by which modern corporations seek to oversee the channelling of order, information, knowledge and assorted other categories of messages. Communications is a consultant coming into a factory or business and designing a routing system which will institute “efficiency” or will facilitate “order” or will expediate “conflict resolution.” Communications is an attempt to reconcile an increasingly universal market economy with the priorities of highly centralized corporate powers.