Revisiting Communication in Iran: From the Concept of Media and Mass Communication Means to New Media Studies

This article is a review of the trajectory of the concept of communication through academic teachings in Iran. First studies in this field were based on the two terms of “mass communication means” and “media”. The first was accepted by late Dr. Motamed-Nezhad and the latter was accepted by late Dr. Majid Tehranian. This difference in the choosing of the words did not come solely from a difference on the hardware and the communication technologies; it’s also related to social aspects of language and the way terms are filled with meanings. The word equivalent to “media” in Farsi was filled with meanings that didn’t exist in Farsi before. The study uses the related history and documents to explore the evolution of the concepts through the works of Motamed-Nezhad and Tehranian who were both the founders of communication studies in Iran. Referring to the foundation of the Faculty of Communication Sciences and the launch of the quarterly journal of “New Media Studies”, I will discuss the new expectation from the science of communication and the new media. I will do a comparative historical work to argue that in the study of new media, both hardware and software evolutions in the field of media and communication should be considered.