Abraham Moles: biography of the father of information science

There are many personalities who, throughout his career, have contributed to creating what today is an entire field of knowledge. This is the case of Abraham Moles.

through this biography of abraham moles We are going to go through the life of this author and thus better understand what his influence was in contributing to the advancement of information science as we know it today. Likewise, we will review some of his most relevant works.

• Related article: "The types of communication and their characteristics"

Brief biography of Abraham Moles

Abraham Moles was born in the French city of Touzac, in the southwest of the country, in 1920. After completing primary and secondary education, he enrolled at the University of Grenoble to study to become an electrical and acoustic engineer.

Upon completion of this training, he started working in a laboratory of the metal physics department, where he worked as an assistant to important professors, such as Félix Esclangon and Louis Néel. This work allowed him to acquire great skill in metallurgy, but also in other fields, such as the use of various electronic equipment and the preparation of analyzes and reports technicians.

The global context, meanwhile, was nothing less than that of the Second World War, which devastated several European countries, including France. After this contest, Abraham Moles was able to access the National Center for Scientific Research, or CNRS, for its acronym in French.

It was not the only activity that he developed during this time. At the same time, he combined this work with continuity in his training, in this case in the field of philosophy. For this he returned to the University of Grenoble, where he was a student of Jacques Chevalier and Aimé Forest, among others.

But it was not the only institution where Abraham Moles learned philosophy, since at the University of Aix he was able to learn directly from Gaston Berger, and even attended the prestigious Sorbonne as well, in order to attend Gaston Bachelard's classes. It was precisely at the Sorbonne where he achieved the highest academic degree, that of doctor, in 1952.

His doctoral thesis was entitled, The physical structure of the musical and phonetic signal. This work was the start of a long career developing the field of information science. To develop the thesis he had the supervision of authors such as René Lucas, Alexandre Monnier, Henri Pieron, and Edmond Bauer.

Beginning of his career and second doctorate

Already as a doctor, Abraham Moles had the opportunity to collaborate at the Center for Radio-television Studies at the university. The objective of this institution was to investigate said media. Inside the Study Center, Moles he worked together with Pierre Schaeffer, an engineer and composer, who had developed a musical style known as música concrete.

However, this work did not allow him great financial independence. For this reason, he tried to apply for some scholarships from the Rockefeller Foundation, which were granted. Through this help, he was able to temporarily transfer to the music department at Columbia University, in the United States, and thus learn from the composer Vladimir Ussachevsky.

Although Abraham Moles was already a doctor, he presented a new doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne, to achieve this distinction also with respect to the discipline of philosophy, which he had also studied. His thesis was "Scientific Creation", and he did it under the supervision of Gaston Bachelard, who had already been one of his professors several years before at that same university. This is how Moles, in 1954, became a doctor twice, and on both occasions through from one of the most prestigious universities, not only in France, but in all of Europe, such as the Sorbonne.

Continuation of his career

From that year, Abraham Moles would be directing the Scherchen electroacoustic laboratory, which is located in the Swiss municipality of Gravesano, for almost five years.. In said center he was able to collaborate with a whole personality from the world of music, nothing less than orchestra director, Hermann Carl Julius Scherchen, after whom the institution was named.

Scherchen was one of the first leaders of Radio Berlin until the early 1930s. During that stage, he was the promoter of great European composers, including names such as Luigi Nono, Iannis Xenakis, Luciano Berio or Bruno Maderna.

But his work in this musical center was not the only activity carried out by Abraham Moles during this time. At the same time he acted as a teacher for different entities. Firstly, at the University of Stuttgart, where he taught philosophy in the same department headed by author Max Bense. Likewise, he was a professor at the University of Utrecht, at the University of Berlin and at the University of Bonn.

But it was at a different institution where he got a tenure as a professor. It happened at the Hochschule für Gestaltung, or design faculty, located in the city of Ulm. It was the architect and artist, Max Bill, who was in charge of creating this center, after the end of the Second World War.

His life as a professor and Strasbourg School

The prestige of Abraham Moles was increasing, and he combined his position in that entity with a position as a professor at the University of Strasbourg. Here, he had the opportunity to work together with the sociologist Henri Lefebvre. In Strasbourg, he began by teaching sociology to eventually become a professor of social psychology.

In 1966, Abraham Moles established another of the great milestones in his career. And it is that in that year, he founded the Institute of Social Psychology of Communications. This institution was also popularly known by the short name of the Strasbourg School. This would be his workplace for the next two decades.

The School of Strasbourg was a training center for professionals in the communication sciences. Many of Abraham Moles's students also ended up becoming teachers and thus were able to continue transmitting the knowledge of his teacher to the new generations.

Many of these people were part of the International Association of Micro Psychology and Psychology Social Communications, an important entity that served as a link for authors versed in this field.

Another of the positions carried out by Abraham Moles, already converted into an eminence, he was the president of the French Society of Cybernetics, an institution that had been created by the mathematician, Louis Couffignal. Likewise, Abraham Moles received an honorary invitation to join the famous creative literature club known as the Oulipo, in 1970.

During the following years, Abraham Moles did not stop publishing new works, contributing more and more to enlarge the field of information sciences. His death would come in 1992, in the city of Strasbourg itself, where he had resided during the last decades of his life.

• You may be interested in: "The 8 elements of communication: characteristics and examples"

Main contributions

After having made a summary of the main stages of the biography of Abraham Moles, it is time to focus on some one of the most important contributions that this author made regarding communication processes, especially in media massive.

To do this, he made clear the enormous relevance that auditory, visual and graphic information had to get a message across to large audiences. numbers of people at the same time, which made radio and television the main channels of communication during that epoch.

For Abraham Moles, communication was a process of dynamic interaction between individuals, in which a series of basic elements were transmitted and successively combined, creating an increasingly complex message. In this reasoning, the influence of the Gestalt school can be appreciated. But in addition, he also collected theories from other schools of psychology.

Moles claimed that the communicative process occurred in two different ways, one being the short cycle and the other the long cycle. The short cycle refers to specific messages that are launched by the media towards the population, through experts in this task. In this sense, the professionals would select the information to be transmitted and would send it to the citizens.

The long cycle would refer, on the contrary, to the process that takes place before a certain phenomenon has acquired sufficient relevance to have been captured by observers and therefore chosen to be transmitted through the media of masses.

According to Abraham Moles, these were the two fundamental processes that should be taken into account to study communication processes in depth. Therefore, this theory is one of his great contributions to the information sciences.

Bibliographic references:

• Deveze, J. (2004). Abraham Moles, an exceptionnel passeur transdisciplinary. Hermes, La Revue.
• Mathien, M. (2007). Abraham Moles: scientifically confronting the daily life of human communication. Hermes, La Revue.
• Moles, A.A. (1966). La radio-télévision au service de la promotion socio-culturelle. Communications.
• Sanchez Zuluaga, U.H. (2003). From chimeras to understanding reality: An approach to communication models. Anagrams: Courses and senses of communication.