Why is communication problematic? Human are hardwired by the privacy of their experience to have communication problems.

My nerve endings terminate in my own brain, not yours. No central exchange exists where I can patch my sensory inputs into yours, nor is there any sort of wireless contact through which to transmit my immediate experience of the world to you.

William James took the mutual insulation of consciousness to be given in human condition.

The breaches between such thoughts are the most absolute breaches in nature.

All humans naturally have a privileged relations to themselves such that sharing of consciousness is impossible.

Solipsism (1874)
Telepathy (1882)

Both reflect an individualist culture in which the walls surrounding the mind were a problem, whether blissfuly thin (telepathy) or terrifying impermeable (solipsism). Since then, "communication" has simultaneously called up the dream of instantaneous access and the nightmare of the labyrinth of solitude.

Later on, technologies such as the telegraph and radio refitted the old term of communication into a new kind of quasi-physical connection across the obstacles of time and space.

The term conjured up a long tradition of dreams about angelic messengers and communion between separate lovers.

Interpersonal relations gradually became redescribed in the technical terms of transmission at a distance - making contact, tuning in or out, being on the same wavelength, getting good or bad vibes, ... Communication in this sense makes problems of relationships into problems of proper tuning or noise reduction.

communication as interpersonal understanding - Plato's Phaedrus.
communication as a perversion - manipulation, rhetoric, and writing.


              ----------- from The Problem of Communication in John Durham Peters' "Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication"