Reviews for Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication

The average rating for Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-01-16 00:00:00 Patrick S. Crotty From page one, this book blew my mind. Peters does a great job of stepping back and assessing how and why we communicate, beginning with the philosophical opposites of Jesus and Socrates (seriously), hitting the ideas of Renaissance idealists, and ending with our endless pursuit to communicate with animals, machines, and other things that can't directly talk back. He covers an incredible amount of territory, but what makes the book work is Peters' pitch-perfect balance between academic thoroughness and narrative accessibility. The concepts are about as complex as any communication book I've read, sans Shannon's The Mathematical Theory of Communication, but the writing, examples, and insight make it both intense and readable. Anyone with even a passing interest in how we communicate should have this book on the shelf.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-02-13 00:00:00 David Rice For the most part, this is a very lucid and fascinating history of the concept of communication, illustrating how such questions gave rise to the discipline that bears that name. Peters traces the development of a wide range of communication questions from the Old Testament to Plato to new media such as radio and television, with pit stops along the way in strange arenas such as spiritualism and psychical research. The book probes rather deeply into areas that may otherwise seem nonsensically related to the study of communicative practices and phenomena, but Peters deftly explores how fascinations with things like spirits and the melding of minds gave rise to the dominant perspectives on communication that exist today, as well as many of the questions that remain hotly debated in the field today. The real audience for this book is fairly niche--namely those interested either directly or indirectly in communication as a phenomena and as an academic discipline. But for those who are wont to enjoy it, this book offers some phenomenal insights and even some great encouragement at the end.