THE LIBRARY AS AN AGENCY OF SOCIAL COMMUNICATION

Abstract

The act of communicating is, by definition, the transmission of a message from a communicator to a receptor. The message may be a simple signal or an extensive body of oral or recorded symbolic or pictorial representations. Communication can take place within an individual organism, between two individuals, or among the members of an aggregate, but always there is a mutually intelligible ‘language’ as well as a carrier or medium; and while there may be multiple receptors, in any given instance there can be only one transmitter. Just as in the biological organism there is a neural communication system, so in organized societies there is a social communication network. While the agencies which are a part of this network are easily recognized, and their functions easily identified, the fundamental nature of the communication process within society is only imperfecdy understood. Students of society know lamentably little about the ways in which knowledge and information are communicated within a culture, even a primitive culture. For that matter, psychologists and specialists in the operation of the human nervous system know precious little about the communication of information within the individual. Analogies have been drawn with the electronic circuitry of the computer just as the communication of information within a society has been likened to the spread of epidemics in a population.

Citation

SHERA, J.H. (1965), "THE LIBRARY AS AN AGENCY OF SOCIAL COMMUNICATION", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 21 No. 4, pp. 241-243. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb026370