Communication technologies create a structure within which human cultures are expressed. The mode of communication influences the type of expression taking place in the "space" that it has created.
Most of life's significant events occur in physical encounters between human beings through the medium of speech. In civilized societies, the communication technologies set the stage for other kinds of experience. Ideographic writing created and preserved a certain kind of experience. So did alphabetic writing, printing, radio and television broadcasting, and communication via the Internet.
Communication technology allows a communicator who may be physically separated from the audience to communicate with a potentially unlimited number of persons. Plato, dead for twenty-three hundred years, is still able to share his thoughts with humanity through written language. His words, translated from the Greek, can be read on a printed page. Millions of people around the earth can participate in that communicative experience.
We discuss this aspect of world history in two ways:
First, we explain the relationship between communication technologies and civilizations.
Second, we can review some dates in the history of communication technology.
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