Understanding Communication in Today’s Working Society

Abstract

As much as all societies need communication to establish themselves as societies, needs for communication shift when societies change from prehistoric to slavery societies and to agrarian-feudalist societies. These shifts are required as the forms for production and reproduction change. Communicative needs have changed when pre-historic communities moved into more organised forms of hierarchical social structures. When these societies grew larger as more and more food became available due to ever more sophisticated production arrangements, changes in the communicative needs in the non-productive structure were required. In order to exist and reach agreement in relatively large human formations, these social structures needed new forms of communication. Sophisticated forms of enlarged production and the resulting social structures demanded that communication moved at a somewhat higher and more sophisticated level. With the end of societies that had been built around the exploitation of slaves and the rise of feudalist forms of food production, communicative needs changed again dramatically. No longer was the slave at the centre of production; the peasant and the lord who rented soil to the peasant became the cornerstones of the new societal arrangements. For thousands of years prior to the most dramatic transformation these arrangements had been able to sustain human existence.