This innovative volume selectively assesses three centuries of inquiry into the role of communications in the history of civilization. It challenges the conventional assumption that inquiry into the human consequences of living in a communications-dominated age began in the middle of the twentieth century as a response to omnipresent technology. Beginning with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, Heyer shows how scholars as well known as Rousseau and as obscure as Monboddo were concerened with the historical dimension of aspects of social communication. Heyer approaches his subject as a problem in intellectual history and social thought, includes major twentieth-century thinkers who deal with the communications/history question, and concludes his study with an appraisal of the work of several contemporary researchers who have attempted detailed studies of specific media or historical periods.