Individual communication. Mass communication

Improvements in transportation technology that have dramatically reduced the friction of distance have been paralleled by improvements in communication. Over the past few decades, increasingly efficient and speedy methods of sending information across long distances have come into common use.

Instantaneous transfer of long and complex messages from almost any point on the earth's surface to almost any other point is now possible. Such advances in communication have allowed for a much higher level of interaction between distant places. The overall number of transactions across international boundaries in Western Europe rose from 14 million per day in 1979 to over 120 million by 1987.

Communication, like other forms of spatial interaction, requires an origin and a destination, with information transmitted between the two points. Communication flows can be categorized as individual communications or mass communications. Individual communication involves direct transmission of information between people. Examples include personal conversation, letters, and telephone calls. Mass communication involves the transmission of information from an origin to large numbers of recipients through established channels. Examples include newspapers and radio and television broadcasts.

In most cases, individual communication is interactive. The people involved exchange information, alternating in the roles of message sender and message recipient. By contrast, the information flow in mass communication is one way. Newspaper readers or television viewers cannot interact immediately with program executives, writers, or broadcasters in order to exchange information (although most communications media encourage delayed responses, such as published letters to newspaper editors).

The flow of information transmitted via mass communication is regulated by individuals who control access to communications institutions. Whether or not a particular news story is broadcast depends on the decisions of newspaper editors or television news program directors. Such individuals serve as gatekeepers. A gatekeeper is someone who controls access to information by selecting which items will be broadcast and which will not.

Of course, individuals act as gatekeepers in ordinary informal communications as well. Have you ever decided to withhold information from friends or authorities? Yet formal communications channels like newspapers, television stations, and radio stations hire individuals whose gatekeeper role is explicit.

Modern long-distance communication was inaugurated in the late Middle Ages following the invention of the printing press. Once books, newspapers, and other documents could be printed, information could be communicated to large numbers of people at different locations simultaneously.

Printing encouraged the development of literacy. Prior to the invention of the printing press, very few people were literate. The availability of printed documents stimulated demands for education. Universal education in reading and writing had become commonplace by the eighteenth century in Western societies. Today, nearly universal literacy in the developed countries has contributed to an explosion in the flow of printed information, although a substantial proportion of people else- where remain illiterate (Figure 9-19).

Figure 9-19 World Literacy Rates. The illiterate is excluded from the global exchange of the printed word. Literacy is nearly universal in developed countries, but many people in the less developed countries do not know how to read and write.