The Body of the Ancestor and Other Stories. Social Sciences and the Distant Past of Communication

<span class="abs_content">The relationship between communication and society has been extensively studied in the 20th Century, following the dissemination of mass media announced already during the 19th Century (photog-raphy, cinema, comics, radio, telephone, etc.). However, communic...

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Autor principal: Stefano Cristante
Formato: article
Lenguaje:EN
Publicado: Coordinamento SIBA 2017
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Acceso en línea:https://doaj.org/article/bce43abbdcdb407fa301ad68db726d9d
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Sumario:<span class="abs_content">The relationship between communication and society has been extensively studied in the 20th Century, following the dissemination of mass media announced already during the 19th Century (photog-raphy, cinema, comics, radio, telephone, etc.). However, communication has always been one of the key variables of the entire human history, and not only of modernity. Through a retrospective survey, the es-say analyses communication as an adaptive invention of mankind to the environment. A winning answer to the primordial struggles for survival, communication distinguishes the human species from earlier times for the structuring of a shared oral language. Starting from the extraordinary flexibility of the human body as a multi-media and multi-meaningful tool, the essay offers a communicative revisionism that involves the antiquity, the Middle Ages and modernity. Sharing the idea of "the media as human extension" (McLu-han), the author proposes some examples for a new reading of single tales of the Odyssey, i.e. the sirens' and the Cyclops' episode. Eventually, five directions are proposed to run for a wide-ranging investigation of the relationship "communication-society" in the past: invention of symbols, sharing of meanings, crea-tion of networks, construction of knowledge and exercise of power.</span><br />