Whichever communication technologies are used, successful communication must be accessible to recipients, intelligible to them and (in relevant ways) assessable by them. However, communication that meets these technical requirements may fail to meet important ethical and epistemic requirements. Such failures can become harder to detect when established ways of communicating are disrupted by technological innovations: and the digital revolution is not the first example of such disruption. In this chapter I shall look at some difficulties produced by past innovations in communication technologies. These disruptions, and the steps taken to deal with them, may offer clues for addressing the disruptions produced by digital communication technologies.