Communication Education For The Twenty-First Century   

Daniel Bell’s observation about the evolution of communication is appropriate and to the point. He says: “Human societies have seen four distinct revolutions in the character of social interchange in speech, in writing, in printing, and now in telecommunication.”  

Each of these revolutions has added to available communication options; each has increased the demands on the capabilities of individual communicators. None of the communication innovations has made any of the predecessors obsolete. Reading and writing did not outmode speech, not did television make either the printing press or radio obsolete. Daniel Bell’s inventory of communication revolutions will grow at an increasingly rapid pace. Some say that computer-assisted communications constitute a new communications revolution for the mankind. Others, looking farther down the road, forests new kinds of human relationships growing out of genetic and biochemical experimentation and even, eventually, direct brain-to-brain communication. One implication is clear: citizens of the future will need to understand and be able to use a rapidly growing array of new technologies-the technologies that extend the interval’s and society’s communication capacities.

Two fundamental questions need to be addressed. What are the social and technological developments-now in progress or anticipated during the century-that has important implications for the communicating education needs of tomorrow’s citizenry? In the light of these developments, what communication competences will be needed in the twenty- first century?

These are global questions. Let us first agree that today’s communicating education has achieved only limited success. Some of our learners, all too frequently, lack real proficiency, in such basics as reading, writing, speaking, listening and critical viewing. It is known that college score tests have been declining owing to lack of fundamental literacy. World-wide literacy battle is being lost. So, as we look forward to the education needs of the future, we must acknowledge that we have not met adequately the educational needs of the present. Sometimes theoretical knowledge is there in candidates but the knowledge that is not communicated and translated into action remains largely impotent.

Communication overload creates great many complexities in communication environment. The proliferation of information leads to greater fragmentation o information. Fragmentation creates islands of expertise not easily bridged. Robert Hutchins identified a growing dilemma when he observed about a quarter of a century ago that the intelligibility of our massages has declined while the mans of communication have improved. And all theist is happening within a context of social change than teems to be accelerating gout of control.

Consider the computer. The capacity of computers to store, organize and manage large quantities of information strains the human computer, the mind. The dramatic growth in computer speed and capacity and thereat reduction in computer stores counties, seemingly, unabated. In the industrialized world, computers are already commonplace I the world of work, that will soon be as commonplace in our homes, as telephones or a television set. Cleary computer literacy is an emerging educational mandate of our time.

The computer is, of course, one of the many communication-related technologies that are changing the nature and scope of human communication. Of particular concern here are those theologies than are interactive-that allow individuals to create and send messages or images as well s receive them.

Communication education programmers of the future will, no doubt, continue to reflect the special and sometimes parochial needs and interests of the learners, and of those who manage their leering environments. Communication professionals are expected to have a good grasp on a vast store of general knowledge.

The Personal and Social Hazards of Communication Personnel

1.    The citizens of tomorrow will require, at the very least, the basic communication skills (in there
       native language) that continue to elude many today, namely the skills of effective reading,
       writing, speaking and listening.
2.    The demands and opportunities of the 21st century will require a higher order of competent
       that we associate with basic skills. Thinking abilities and communication abilities are
       insatiably linked developmentally and functionally.
3.    Communication literacy must be drawn form the full spectrum of the communication arts,
       sciences, and technologies. It includes some knowledge of deletes. videotext, interactive cable
       television, satellite communication, video-discs and the whole range of audio-video-data
       recording technologies, telephones, radio, television and photography, etc.

The 21stcentury communicators will function in a communication environment replete with bother opportune to be realized and the difficulties to be overcome. It will be a communication-rich environment, offering a bewildering of communication options. Innovation overload will always be sustained or centuries by ethnocentricity and militant nationalism will constitute a serious impediment to constructive international communicators until one has grasped the points of similarity and congruence.