Aristotle gave us early thoughts of empiricism which opposed the idealism of Plato. Gabriel Tarde, George Simmel, and others later provided key insights which challenged dualistic splits of individuals from the social groups they communicate with in everyday life. They told us about communication networks and how groups of people demonstrate the systems principle of nonsummativity. Charles Cooley and George Herbert Mead added symbolic interactionism to the intellectual direction of recognizing how important human communication is to individual-level phenomena.

Claude Shannon formulated a mathematical model of electronic signal transmission which explains how signals move from point a to point b with high fidelity. Warren Weaver added the important realization (Shannon & Weaver reports) that Shannon's model was not about meaning. Information, (a->b, entropy measure), is not the same thing as meaning. Much later than the year he pointed this out (1949), communication scientists would recognize that human communication is not signal transmission (fallacy of composition), but rather transmission is one minute sub-process of communication.

The great cybernetician Norbert Wiener, invented not only the modern inquiry and science known as cybernetics, but also the crucial cybernetic concept, feedback. Feedback is self-generated information which is either deviation amplifying or deviation reducing.

Communication scientist Everett Rogers, built a bridge from the electricity model of Shannon (a->b transmission) to a convergence model of social interaction. Rogers' model stresses communication as a process involving at least two communicators at any given moment.

The Rogers model also emphasizes communication networks and systems. A key principle to the model is that communicators are interdependent in what they do and think. Meanings are central and most important in the cycles of message exchange which lead to some degree of convergence in understanding. Of course, we need to admit that divergence may occur more than convergence in cases of poor social interaction.

Psychologists and communication scientists who study cognitive aspects of social interaction, have shown that perception and meaning are formed to some extent in processes of communication.

Vannevar Bush created the concept of hypertext and Tim Berners-Lee made the World Wide Web come to life as a hyptertextual system. This, in my view, has produced a new form of human communication which we can call hypertextual communication or n-dimensional communication.

Guiseppe Mantovani and others now help us to observe that humans are entering into new communication environments with greater frequency and greater significance. These are what Mantovani calls virtual communication environments.

In this short narrative so far, one name has not been mentioned. Like Leonardo da Vinci's 16th century writings about airplanes and submarines, the ideas of an important scientist regarding communication and communication technologies have gone without sufficient attention. They are the arguments presented by J. Licklider. The arguments were made in 1968 and have contributions to make to how communication and technologies of communication are conceived and adopted today. Licklider was one of the scientists who worked on the first computer network created by the U.S. Department of Defense to connect laboratories and scientists within a military infrastructure of a few key locations. This network evolved into what we now call the Internet.

Licklider noted that engineers think of communication as transferring information from one point to another in signals and codes. This is what Claude Shannon worked on (a->b flow with maximum signal-to-noise ratio in electrical flow). Licklider argued that communication is not simply this sending and receiving of signals. He observed that human communication is not the same thing as machine-machine signal processing. This is striking because he argued it way back in 1968 when even social scientists and experts in communication would confuse signals (bits, current, air molecules, etc.) with messages (encoded symbols).

Licklider argued that communication is not one-way transfer. I find this fascinating because today, in 1997, we still have people treating one-way transfer as communication -- what I believe is a fundamental confusion of sending signals or messages with message exchange and social interaction, i.e. communication.

Licklider said that communication involves joint constructive activities of communicators, that interactants produce new ideas which are not present before the interaction. This is an early interactive view of human communication --one which made two profound contributions to the emergence of communication science:

1. a rejection of transmission models of communication, and
2. a vision of the Internet as a system of communication used to produce knowledge and solve problems by enabling not merely retrieval of materials, but also the social interaction that can do so. Licklider argued that the most important instrument of human communication was the computer.

Moreover, he provided an early sociocognitive view of human communication which describes how each communicator in social interaction has mental models of conversation topics. Licklider noted that communication works best when the models become more similar. More importantly, he articulated a definition of communication as "cooperative modeling," meaning that communication involves coordination and coactive building of a model that is shared and exists simultaneously with the individual communicators' mental models. In my opinion, this conceptualization of communication, because it is sociocognitive, and because communication inherently links cognition and social affordances, could have advanced us much further than vague notions of "sharing meaning." As the social constructivists tell us, we us each other in conversations to make sense of our experiences, feelings, and thoughts. I believe that is true, but also that we need to specify how that occurs. The concept of cooperative modeling is a good step in that direction.

Part of what Licklider referred to was externalizing mental models with communication technology. The simplest manifestation of such a process is when you talk with someone and use paper to draw things to point at while you are explaining that which you want them to grasp. He argued that without such visual tools, communicators are likely to utter little and instead nod while not having a joint model with the other person. Joint modeling can be used to link thoughts and messages. If these thoughts had received more attention, I cannot help but wonder if communication technologies would have been designed in the past few decades with closer fits to user needs.

Like Everett Rogers today, Licklider said that communicators should differ in values of parameters, but converge toward common understanding.

The arguments advanced by Licklider provided an early conceptual basis for computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) and group decision support systems (GDSS). In addition, they contributed a basis for designing communication technologies to aid political communication between governments of nations. Licklider correctly generalized that each side in international conflicts try to hurriedly model what the other side is doing and intending. Simplification occurs when it overly risky in such situations. This line of thought is consistent with analyses of foreign policy leader communication, cognition, and decision-making. Perhaps better communication, aided with better communication technologies, can help national leaders understand the intentions and motivations and mental models of adversaries in ways that can reduce military interventions and battles.

Licklider rejected a Utopian view of computers as media which would automatically solve communication problems. He emphasized that engineers focus on the switching functions of computers and the store-and-forward nature of signal transmission. He said that we should be concerned more with the modeling aspects of communication. I think this can best be appreciated when we view communication at two levels (something that even Warren Weaver acknowledged in his work with Shannon):

1. technical level of signal transmission (electricity, air, light, etc.)

2. social level of everyday interaction (symbols, semiotics, etc.)

When he talked about communities of computer network users in 1968, there were 6 such networks. Yet, he pointed out that computer-based communities would be interest-based rather than defined by geography. He foresaw knowbots and intelligent agents as he describe each network user having what he called an "Oliver." The Oliver would be a set of programs that learns about its user, finds information on the networks for the user, and does various on-line chores.

Finally, Licklider noted the deep political issues that await serious debate regarding a network of networks. For example, he questions whether on-line access would be deemed a right or a privilege. He wondered if access would become the exclusive province of certain parts of society.

In conclusion, I think that J. Licklider deserves recognition as someone with valuable ideas about communication and fitting communication technologies to the process of communication and what it can accomplish. Dr. Licklider made the Internet possible and if this medium along with computer-mediated communication in general, ever contributes significantly to productivity and political empowerment, we should remember that the shift away from transmission views of communication were endorsed by this scientist. We should recognize the importance and utility of his cooperative modeling concept.