The rise of the media, as from the years 1920, introduced the concept of communication “of mass”, which is placed in the center of a full debate on the culture at the era of industrial civilization. The development of electronic and data-processing technologies, as from the years 1960, puts the communication in the middle same of the organization of our companies, which are taken from now on in the increasingly tight meshs of the transborder technical networks.  

Certain historians bait themselves to find the first steps of the “communication” in the oldest civilizations: Egyptian papyruses, cave paintings or Assyrian post offices. Any organized company has, indeed, its own modes of communication.

But it is only with the appearance of the technical networks, to the XIX E century, that body of a practical and theoretical knowledge was constituted on the communication like device of being able, like form of government.