Theories of communication--Mattelart and Mattelart

good intro that starts with Adam Smith and Quesnay and moves from there...good breakdown of the field into seven components that might be useful to my field and have a key organizing understanding of the field as being non-chronological, i.e. a circularity of these theories. Nevertheless, they still root all the theories of communication in the sociological theories (and the logic of the social) of the time. A good resource for a bibliography of Communication starting with "the social organism" and coming almost full circle to concepts of the network (perhaps fortelling Armand's later work "networking the world" which links this same sort of intellectual development (qua ideological development) to the technological development of communcation networks.


So far it has helped me to make a distinction between a pragmatist and a funcitonalist approach--which should be completely obvious but which I had not made before. I.e. the pragmatist approach has a certain set of goals it sees as necessary or desirable to accomplish--e.g. Dewey--while the functionalist approach claims to be non-partisan in its development of the facts of communication but, as Elias says at one point, had an implicit set of assumptions in the way that it defined things like a non-function or a disfunction (30).