I had a class in college that required me to research communications. Communication was a lot simpler then: no internet, no email, no cell phones, no laptop computers. Post-it boards actually used physical paper notes secured with thumbtacks. There was no such thing as PowerPoint, no Gmail, no X (formerly known as Twitter). Yes, the Dark Ages.
Phones were still tied to the wall with four wires. My parents still had a rotary dial phone, and I knew how to use it. AT&T had not been broken up yet, so still held a monopoly on telephony in the U.S. Conference calls were expensive and largely reserved for executives.
Television had expanded into cable systems, but I still had a rabbit ear antenna TV that picked up all of four stations. News came to me via accepted reliable industry icons from CBS, ABC, NBC and PBS such as Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, Frank Reynolds, Harry Reasoner, John Chancellor, Roger Mudd, Robert McNeil and Jim Lehrer. You got your national information from a handful of vetted television news stations, and local news from your local station that actually employed local reporters. Politicians had to get their message into soundbites on the evening news reports, competing for time between advertisers, sports, weather and public interest stories in that critical evening half-hour time slot.
Thick daily newspapers were essential to information searches. Paperboys and girls were still delivering them to houses off their bicycles or on foot, but that news was still at best a day old. Magazines were glossy, thick, ubiquitous, and, at best, weekly, like Newsweek and TIME.
I’m a realist, not a nostalgic Baby Boomer. How we communicated in 1978 was much simpler than today, but not better. Demographics were also grossly oversimplified, compositing large diverse groups into stereotyped large categories.
My college report focused on the fundamentals of communication; that communication requires a sender, a receiver and a message. Picture Alexander Graham Bell and his first phone call to Watson. Both the sender and the receiver have their own unique understanding of language, words, accents, emphasis, idioms and such.
Definitions are in the ear of the listener. There is no guarantee, for example, that the word “transmission” means the same to both parties. If you are an engineer working at Eaton talking with a utility engineer working at the Bonneville Power Administration, it’s very likely that the word transmission has two completely different meanings.
