Contenu du sommaire : Le XXe siècle saisi par la communication. Vol. 1 : Les révolutions de l'expression

The Internet and digital communication
Since the Internet took centre stage in the field of communication in the late 20th century, it has become the network with the greatest capacity to compile all the different media and thereby take over all the messages concerning communication that have prevailed over the years, sublimating them into a single mythology. Over the Internet's short history, we have had to move, in the space of a few years, from reflections on techniques and collaborative methods for developing norms and protocols to a more geopolitical approach. After the New World Order in communication that prevailed from the late 1970s came the World Summit on the Information Society, which would again raise questions on the social and economic impacts of digital technologies. In its wake came a wave of intensive concentration of economic players that brought in a new type of industrial conglomerate with a significant ideological component. However, the Internet's tremendous popularity cannot be fully understood without an appraisal of the cultural changes and the new social relationships and collective patterns that the Internet makes possible. If we want to understand the new balance of powers, the new forms of oppression and the new means of liberation afforded by the existence of Internet communication, we now need to move away from the rocky shores of myth and technophobia.

“The medium” is not soluble in “the mass media”In this article, we investigate the idea of the “medium”, whose often narrow interpretation has undoubtedly played a role in the negative perceptions of research on communication. In an attempt to correct the bias towards purely technological interpretations of “the medium”, this article shifts the emphasis to anthropological (as in cultural studies) and historical (as in media archaeology) approaches.

Journalists and communication
When a group of French journalists was formed around the March 1935 statute and the January 1936 Decree, which define journalism as a profession and set out the conditions under which it is exercised, a firm resolve emerged to maintain the distinction between journalism and the various other components of the communication sector, following the logic of the difference between the value of topical information to citizens and the commercial dimension of communication.

The magazine stand
Magazines and journals are not newspapers or weeklies. Their role is to broaden, to disseminate and to discuss cultural issues. These three purposes provide a basis for an initial classification, between magazines that nourish a discipline and enhance its presence within its - usually academic - intellectual community ; magazines on politics and ideology that raise or take part in debates ; and others, less easily classified, that revolve around one or more personalities and their circles and defend a certain idea of thought, criticism and literary or artistic creation. These three “types”, obviously simplified here, have coexisted since the late 19th century and are regularly hit by storms that damage their vessels and discourage their crew, sometimes even sinking them for good...

NICT deployment in European institutions
This article focuses on global communication technologies in the context of EU institutions, from satellite and aerospace development to low Earth-orbiting Internet satellites and the associated phenomenon of media convergence. The technological complexities that stem from their convergence (technical and functional merging of telecommunications networks, computers and mobile phones through global satellite networks) are compounded by the technical feasibility of using satellite communication in different ways for military, economic and telecommunications purposes. Hypotheses based on systems and historical approaches were used to guide our combined analysis of the technological, institutional and political dimensions, with the results interpreted through an (ideologically) critical approach.

The public sphere as the founding concept of communication
The concept of the public sphere as defined by Habermas in 1961 is one of the core components of information and communication theory, around which a great deal of debate has developed and helped to lay the theoretical foundations of the discipline. The concept has been much discussed, with regard to its exaggeration of the role of argumentation or the inadequate consideration given to the social system that has become established in our so-called post-modern societies. But the new participatory patterns emerging through social networks should be seen as an opportunity to reinvent a concept that has lost none of its relevance.

Permanence and metamorphosis of the “crowd”Throughout the 19th century, the crowd was a prevailing image, inspiring fears that left an indelible mark on the idea of political communication. The early 20th century, however, saw the “crowd” image shift to that of the “public”. Crowds became scattered into a multitude of individuals who were physically separate but mentally “connected”. The atomisation of the “original” crowd - through which modern politics became established – paved the way for the advent of public opinion and may be considered as one of the most salient characteristics of the 20th century. Today, however, the explosion of the Internet and the development of new information and communication technologies - despite the fact that they have made the very distance between communicators an inherent component of communication - now offer new opportunities for crowds to gather and take over the public sphere in different ways (flashmobs and mega drinks parties, but also through movements like the Indignados or the Arab Spring). The return of the “crowd” raises questions as to the future of communication, not only as regards its political dimension but also as the foundation of social ties.

Public opinion
The emergence of the idea of public opinion in the 18th century opened up joint debates, about democracy first and then on the media. This article traces the main phases in the process and also analyses the avenues into which the topic has been deflected, especially its confinement to the issue of opinion polls and the place they occupy in our societies.

The paradox of contemporary feminism
Our aim here is to bring an ethnological perspective to the history of feminism as a social, cultural and political movement. The remarkable achievements of feminism in the 20th century were linked to overall progress in democratising society and the emergence of a relatively affluent middle class of consumers, of both goods and communication. Little by little, women's freedoms expanded into all walks of life : voting, working, inheritance, political activity, sports, army careers, access to knowledge and control over their sexual, marriage and child-bearing choices. At the same time, however, the production of collective imagery put the spotlight on the female body as one of its preferred objects, whether in advertising or in mass-marketed cultural offerings. In law, “she” increasingly resembles “he”, but in images, the most stereotypical representations of femaleness reign supreme on every screen, where the shadow of the Belle Femme is ever-present. To an ethnologist, the question of feminism cannot evade the question of femaleness.

Corporate communication, the great unloved
In the last fifty years, the communication professions have seen an unprecedented boom – every organisation, even the most discreet, now has to have its own corporate communication. But this irresistible rise comes with a good deal of criticism, and even scorn for the activities undertaken, including from press professionals who see it as a means for obscuring reality. This paper explores the inherent paradoxes of these professions, tracing their history and analysing the relationships between communication and information to draw out the reasons for the misunderstanding, and even the decline in status - at least in representations - that affect communication professionals.

Communication and consumerism
Advertising first became established as a communication activity in the 1850s, with the advent of the first department stores. Since the 1980s, marketing has shifted the focus of communication from the product to the symbolic power of the brand. It is this shift from information to symbol, where meaningfulness is more important than reality, that accounts, in part, for the loss of confidence in advertising that has intensified since 2008, when purchasing power in France began to decline. Marketing thus appears to be far less manipulative than the anti-advertising activists believe, since the adverts designed by communication professionals appear to fail in 40 to 60 % of cases.

Illiterate literature, a forgotten project for poetry and society
In the 20th century, during the two World Wars, two intellectual, literary and artistic movements emerged, with one common characteristic : both raised the question of worn-out language as largely responsible for war. The Dadaist movement appeared during the first World War, and the Lettrists during the second. Both called the entire linguistic apparatus into question and advocated a return to the fundamentals, i.e. phonemes, experimenting with other terms and means of expression in which graphics and sounds had an essential role. A great many artists and writers joined these movements and exerted considerable influence – largely forgotten today – on literature, painting and song.

Communication, a long-forgotten aspect of literature
Communication has always been a dimension in literary activities and creation, as exemplified by media coverage of literature, the recognition of media-driven literature, inter-media production and today's transmedia storytelling. Digital literature offers new ways of experiencing reading and writing that are bringing new dimensions to the relationship between technology and literature, and to the interactions between literature and communication. The new patterns of literature in the media raise questions on both of these aspects. Four key points emerge : redocumentarisation, literary communities, literary controversies and the digital ethos.

Contemporary art, or how to communicate chaos
The attempt that society makes to take artists hostage, to make them complicit in its bid to consume them like any other product and thus confuse advertising with communication, has triggered paradoxical reactions in the forms and communication of contemporary art.

Music and communication in the 20th century
The 20th century saw profound changes in the conditions in which sound is produced, broadcast and heard. Undeniably, the new techniques for recording sounds and broadcasting them by duplication on a storage medium or by wireless transmission were determining factors in these radical changes. Taking a mediological approach, and after a brief historical outline of the far-reaching changes in sound technology, we look into two important consequences of this continuous process of technological innovation : the shifting relationship between sound and image and the all-encompassing hybridisation of aesthetics.

20th century cinema : a communicational approach
This article explores the cinema from the perspective of communication, thus placing it within a web of different tensions between the aesthetics of film, mass media, society and the art of cinematography, technical input, financial investment and the aesthetic, sociological and technical history of the cinema. This approach to the cinema reveals a history of 20th century communication theory and the tensions between social communities and individual reception, between the recording of reality and artistic representations, and between the material and the cognitive.

Design as an act of communication
Communication and design are both 20th century phenomena - but is this coincidence meaningful ? How might an act of design be an act of communication, and how, conversely, might an act of communication be an act of design ? What are the points of intersection between design and communication ? This article looks into the question from three angles : first, we show that in a consumer society, design, as the original correlate of marketing, is a weapon of mass communication ; secondly, we show how design contributes to un-communication on consumer goods at a time when semantic inflation is the order of the day where products, images and discourse are concerned ; finally, drawing on the most recent advances in the discipline, we show how contemporary design is attempting to return to a more complex, and more truthful, approach to communication.

Rediscovering Simondon as the symptom of an age
The work of the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon (1924-1989) is gradually being discovered internationally, after its rediscovery in the last decade by French philosophers and scientists. Yet its long-delayed reception has largely been diverted, with Deleuze playing a major role. This article chronicles, albeit briefly, the theoretical efforts that Simondon deployed - mainly from 1954 to 1968 - to gain a clearer insight into the reasons for the persistent misfortunes attending the reception of his work. Ultimately, the fate of his difficult œuvre clearly emerges as one of the most blatant symptoms of the deficient thinking typical of our times, in which the hallmark is a sterile and simplistic division between views shaped by their underlying scientism and views shaped by their underlying relativism - both equally far removed from the real issues that arise from the need to relate ontology and technology : a need that Simondon was already attempting to show half a century ago.

Fraud and malpractice in scientific publishing
This article presents several experiments that show that the most prestigious scientific conferences, the best journals and the most reputable scientific publishers are not immune to fraud and large scale interference. A major reason for the growing number of cases of scientific fraud can be found in the importance given to bibliometric indices in the evaluation of scholars and research centres. Malpractice and fraud are the undesired but logical side-effects of a system that merely counts the number of publications without reading them, and where the H-index has become a substitute for assessments of the value of research. Efficient tools exist to detect fraud, and changing the way academic research is evaluated has become a matter of urgency.