Communication: The Trajectory from Cybernetics to Semiotics

Abstract

‘Communication’ is a fluid and elusive term that resists precise definition, largely because numerous disciplines lay claim to it and intersect across its conceptual and practical domains. Human beings have communicated since antiquity, as their social nature requires; however, the scientific conceptualisation of communication and its establishment as a distinct object of study are relatively recent when compared with its long history as an interpersonal practice. The difficulty of defining the field and establishing stable, theoretically grounded research mechanisms arises from several factors, most notably the enormous technological expansion that has transformed the world into a space structured by virtual dimensions. In this world, the machine occupies a central position, while communication assumes an equally prominent role, a duality anticipated by the emergence of cybernetics in the 1940s. To clarify the considerable intellectual momentum surrounding the field, this study offers a concise diachronic survey of the principal stages through which communication studies have developed and seeks to explain their present configuration.