Communities of Action and the Message Society

According to Rafael Capurro we are living in a “message society.” One characteristic of a message society is an excessive increase of messengers and messages of all kinds (Capurro 1999). After having produced the best-ever genealogy of the information concept (Capurro 1978), Capurro concluded that the “message” rather than “information” is essential for the development of society. He found striking evidence that vertical messaging was partly replaced and complemented, if not outbalanced, by horizontal messaging. The former was carried out by herolds and other angels delivering messages sent by gods or god, and was typical of the communication situation until the Middle Ages. The latter is conducted among members of societies built up in a more secular and more democratic way. Today, computerisation has made possible the so-called new information and communication technologies (ICTs), with the Internet as the most prominent representative. This entails an “ongoing transformation of the 20th century society dominated mass media with their hierarchical one-to-many structure of message distribution and consumption.” (Capurro 2003a, section 6).