Telecommunication :: Communication Technology Media Essays

Telecommunication Abstract What is telecommunication? Although a considerable number of studies have been actually conducted on telecommunication, I have never had academic opportunity to examine what it is. While the word ?etelecommunication?f has been brought to public attention, how many of us can exactly define it? How many of us can explain it in cultural context as well as in technological context? In my opinion, the word ?etelecommunication?f seems to be going forward itself so that our consciousness cannot catch up with it. As a new graduate student of the department of telecommunication, I hope to comprehensively understand what telecommunication is, and organize present issues systematically through this article. According to the requirement, this article consists of the following: areas and issues in telecommunication; key questions that telecommunication tries to answer; methods for studying, researching, and creating in telecommunication; and my learning and career goals for my telecommunication M A. What is telecommunication? In order to answer a kind of vague question such as what telecommunication is, I would like to focus on the areas in telecommunication in the beginning. Carne (1995) proposed the following: Telecommunication means communication from afar; it is the action of communicating-at-distance. In the broadest sense, it can include several ways of communicating (letters, telegraphs, telephone, etc); however, it is customary to associate it only with electronic communication systems such as telephone, data communication, radio, and television. (p.5) From this viewpoint, one may say that telecommunication is literally one of the ways of communication to receive or send massages. The question I have to ask here is what communication is. We unconsciously use the word ?ecommunication?f in a daily life. Then, how can we define communication, whose categories seem to range widely? In 1985 Charp and Hines described communication as the method by which we exchange sounds, signals, pictures and languages between people and places (p.13). From this definition, I realize that discussion in a class, conversation with someone by phone, writing a letter, reading a newspaper, and watching television are all grouped into the same category named communication because we exchange something with somebody by them. The question is what differentiates one communication from the other at more detailed categories. The first thing I notice is that the way of communication is different from each other: in some cases, communication from one to many or many to many, in the others, however, communication in person. In addition, it seems to depend on whether it is mediated or not.