tec.News - Harting

All these reports, forecasts and
visions of the future, if they are
to be believed, make one thing
perfectly clear: the year 2000
will witness a development towards
global networking, not
only for industry but for people
all over the world. Communication
is innovation.
REPRESENTATIVE FUNCTION
Whoever possesses communication
holds the future in his hands.
Communication allows real events
to be treated on a second level
(metacommunication) and thereby
has a representative function. It
is only by developing this function
that it becomes possible to think
and experience in the past and future,
and therefore in the dimension
of time. This possibility enables
us to place reality next to
the idea, objective fact next to
subjective opinion, and gives us
the means to shape methodical
thinking and development, and
therefore also specific expectations.
Considering that the separation
of communication and behaviour
through to the development of
language took 14 million years,
and that for around 2 million
years human beings have walked
upright and, for the last 100,000
years or so, have used language
as their means of expression,
it actually took a long time for
writing and the media to be invented.
The development of language communication
gave Homo sapiens an
incomparable advantage – communication
and understanding
puts the world at his command.
The representative function of
language in the age of the media
society makes it possible to communicate
both the past and the
future simultaneously.
UNIVERSALITY
Another opportunity provided by
communication is its universality,
as the Greek philosopher, Aristotle,
discovered 2,500 years ago. Art
forms other than rhetoric, the art
of speaking, can only talk about
themselves, e.g. the art of healing
about what is healthy and unhealthy,
geometry about spatial
characteristics, arithmetic about
the world of numbers etc. Only
the art of speaking is capable
of serving a universal field of
activity.
This homelessness of communication
must not be seen as a deficit,
but as an opportunity. Communication
can deal with all subjects,
everywhere and without any limitation,
and it permits universal
access.
This results in another essential
condition for communication: if it
is to deal with everything, it must
also be able to deal with itself.
Communication is reflexive
and permits communication
about communication. Today,
in an age long
after Aristotle,
we recognise how
accurate his as-
27
People Power Partnership