Jim Mann
Community and communication have the same root, historically as well as etymologically. Whether family, village or nation, a community cannot happen unless people agree to live together and somehow organize themselves. This requires communication. This exchange of information and ideas determines how people live, the way they interrelate and, ultimately, the kind of government and other social institutions that they accept.
As humanity developed, the nature of society, its social structures, the cultural elements we call civilization, directly followed the increases in communication and information. As knowledge grows and changes, so society grows and changes.
It is this growth and change in the development of societal structures that we call Social Evolution.
A crowd is not a community. To function as a community people need some type of organization, no matter how primitive. The first step in organization is leadership. It need not reside in a single individual. From the beginning the father tended to lead in providing food, the mother in caring for the children.
Community leadership may have arisen out of physical characteristics and circumstance, but ultimately it was exercised and recognized through communication. As communities grew in size and complexity the position of leader was won more often through skill in communication than by physical strength. As an Egyptian scribe wrote 2200 years before Christ: “Speech was mightier than any fighting.”
Communication Techniques Drive Social Evolution