Communication Theory // 7th March 2012
Communication Theory // 7th March 2012
The Phenomenological Tradition
- The phenomenological tradition is the process of knowing through direct experience. It is the way in which humans come to
understand the world.
Phenomenon refers to the appearance of an object, event or condition in one’s perception.
Makes actual lived experience the basic data of reality.
A failure in communication can be seen as an absence of, or failure to sustain, authentic human relationships
Merleau-Ponty “The theory of the body schema is, implicitly, a theory of perception“ in which "our own body is in the world as the
heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it
forms a system”
The weakness of Merleau-Ponty’s position is grounded in his attachment to semiotics.
The corporeal turn
- The embodied mind: used all the time
- Communication through visual / facial features
- Language is seen as part of that system existing as as neuronal pathways that are linked within the brain.
- The key is a physiological classification of coding and encoding.
- Starting early: face recognition
•The process of interpretation is central
•
•Unlike the semiotic tradition, where interpretation is separate from reality, in the phenomenological tradition we are interested in what is real for the person.
•Interpretation emerges from a hermeneutic circle in which interpreters constantly go back and forth between experience and assigning meaning.
Classical phenomenology. Key thinker Edward Husserl, who states that it is highly objective and claims the world can be experienced, through bracketing, the putting aside of bias without the knower bringing his or her own categories to bear. This is often criticised as being an impossible task.
The phenomenology of perception. Key thinker Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Most contemporary phenomenology rejects the objectivist view and posits that we can only know things through our personal, subjective relationship to things.
Hermeneutic phenomenology, the interpretation of being, extends the subjective tradition even further by incorporating the communication system itself as a further interpretive mechanism.
Hermeneutics, can be thought of as a type of reading between the lines: Interpretations of interpretations, reflecting the fact that communication is a matter of dialogue and is multi-channel.
Rhetoric
Socrates: The fact is…that the aspiring speaker needs no knowledge of the truth about what is right or good... In courts of justice no attention is paid whatever to the truth; all that matters is plausibility... Plato, Phaedrus 272
Aristotle first addressed the problem of communication and attempted to work out a theory of it in The Rhetoric. He was primarily focused on the art of persuasion.
In photographic and filmic media a close-up is a simple synecdoche - a part representing the whole. It is a type of ‘rhetoric trope’ such as…………
Rhetoric
- Useful for thinking through how you are going to achieve certain effects on the ‘reader’ or audience. In particular if a ‘theatrical’ or
‘performative’ approach to communication is required. The key concept is the use of metaphor. Often used for propaganda.
Main limitations
The art of rhetoric can be learned only by practice. Intervention in complex systems involves technical problems rhetoric fails to
grasp. Rhetoric lacks good empirical evidence that its persuasive techniques actually work as intended. Rhetorical theory is culture
bound & overemphasizes individual agency vs. social structure.
Above all, because its difficult to prove how it effects change,
(although many would argue that it is the most effective type communication ) it can be difficult to prove its research value.
Therefore best used when triangulated with other theories.
- Rhetoric can be used to change the way we ‘read’ things. It persuades us to see or read things differently. Because most of the
information we receive is ambiguous we can easily be persuaded to read it as others do. Rhetoric relies on communication as a
social activity and is a device that is designed to help individuals exert the power of their ideas and views over others.
- “All images are polysemous; they imply… a 'floating chain' of signifieds, the reader able to choose some and ignore others.
- Polysemy poses a question of meaning and this question always comes through as a dysfunction....Hence in every society various
techniques are developed intended to fix the floating chain of signifieds in such a way as to counter the terror of uncertain signs”
Barthes
“BURYING THE LUSITANIA’S DEAD AND SUCCORING HER SURVIVORS”
- Newspaper headline at the time
“ENLIST” was a WWI Recruitment poster designed by Fred Spears. Spears’ design was inspired by a news report from that described, among the recovered bodies from the Lusitania, “a mother with a three-month-old child clasped tightly in her arms. Her face wears a half smile. Her baby’s head rests against her breast. No one has tried to separate them.”
- On the evening of May 7th, 1915, the RMS Lusitania was off the coast of Ireland en route to Liverpool from New York when it was torpedoed by a German U-Boat and sank.
- About 1,200 of the nearly 2,000 passengers and crew aboard drowned, including more than 100 Americans.
- Metaphor; from the Greek: metaphora, meaning "transfer" is language that directly compares seemingly unrelated subjects or activities
- Originally used as a rhetorical trope, metaphor enables us to grasp new concepts and remember things by creating associations.
The sociopsychologial tradition
•The study of the individual as a social being
•Three key areas
•Behavioural
•Cognitive
•Biological
- Social and Cognitive Psychology
- Paivio's notion of dual coding states the visual and verbal information are encoded and decoded by separate specialized perceptual
and cognitive systems. One system is visual/pictorial and manipulates the elements of imagery simultaneously; the other is linguistic
and propositional and operates in sequence.
- The two systems are assumed to be structurally and functionally distinct. Although independent, the two subsystems are also
interdependent so that a visual concept can be converted into a verbal one and vice versa. A more recent approach to explaining
the interaction between the two systems is the metaphor of interactive parallel processing.
Psychological communication
Communication as the act of sending a message to a receiver, and assessing the feelings and thoughts of the receiver upon
interpreting the message and how these will effect an understanding of the message.
Useful for: Deep analysis of the moment of communication.
Gestalt psychology (a type of cognitive theory) refers to a structure, configuration, or layout that is unified and has specific
properties that are greater than the simple sum of its individual parts. For example, a person reading text perceives each
word first as a complete word and its meaning rather than seeing individual letterforms. Each letterform is clearly an individual
unit, but the greater meaning depends on the arrangement of the letterforms into a specific configuration (a word). Another
analogy is the individual frames in a movie. Each frame in a movie may be considered separately, and judged on its
compositional strength, but it is the rapid projection of multiple frames across time that forms the perception of movement and
narrative continuation.
Gestalt theory provides rational explanations for why shifts in spacing, timing, and configuration can have a profound effect
on the meaning of presented information.
- “Gestalt perceptual factors build a visual frame of reference which can provide the designer with a reliable psychological basis for the spatial organization of graphic information.”
Greg Berryman
The sociocultural tradition
•If defining yourself in terms of your identity with terms such as father, Catholic, student, lesbian, Asian, Yorkshire etc. you are defining yourself in terms of your identity as part of a group and this group frames your cultural identity.
•The sociocultural tradition looks at how these cultural understandings, roles and rules are worked out interactively in communication.
Context is seen as being crucial to forms and meanings of communication •Socio-cultural communication theory within education
•The social cognition learning model asserts that culture is the prime determinant of individual development. Humans are the only
species to have created culture, and every human child develops in the context of a culture. Therefore, a child’s learning
development is affected in ways large and small by the culture–including the culture of family environment–in which he or she is
enmeshed. (Vygotsky)
•Vygotsky's theory was an attempt to explain consciousness as the end product of socialization. For example, in the learning of
language, our first utterances with peers or adults are for the purpose of communication but once mastered they become internalized
and allow "inner speech".
•A difference exists between what child can do on her own and what the child can do with help. Vygotskians call this difference the
zone of proximal development.
•A useful approach to thinking through the educational development of children and therefore important in educational design.
- Using socio-cultural communication theory to understand both how to educate and how beliefs may have been built up
Critical communication Theory
The basis of critical communication theory rests on two aspects of Hegel’s thinking.
In the ‘Phenomenology of the Mind’ the critique was an examination of various forms and sources of deceptions and illusions
that the mind is subject to on its journey to absolute knowledge. This attitude led Marx to clarify how society is subject to the
deceptions of capitalism how labour transactions are hidden within the fetish of exchange value.
Hegel believed that human history has a purpose. He assumes that we are driven by a common interest in freedom and
therefore we seek to break free of all systems of overt and hidden constraints. Marx developed his own views of historical
materialism in response to Hegel and developed Communism as a vehicle for historical change.
A synthesis of philosophy and social science.
Critical theory approaches to communication examine social conditions in order to uncover hidden structures.
Useful to use when examining the ways the media produce encoded messages, the ways audiences decode those messages,
and the power base apparent in these processes.
Key thinkers and schools of thought: Frankfurt School, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, disability studies and feminist theory
However: Critical theory easily confuses facts and values, as well as imposing a dogmatic ideology. Critical theory questions
the rational validity of all authority, tradition, and conventional belief, therefore as a theory it can be difficult to use if the main
purpose of research is to examine simply the fact that communication is taking place and how well it is working.
The cybernetic tradition in communication is mainly specific to our modern technological society. It presents communication
as “information processing”. However, ideas of consciousness and emotions are not recognised, which can mean that the
languages of distortion, noise and overload are not compatible with the human realities of social discourse.
The rhetorical tradition, the practical art of discourse, appeals to popular ideas and beliefs about communication; however it
requires us to believe in collective deliberation and judgment and the power of individuals to shape these.
The semiotic tradition explains the use of languages and other sign systems and tends to see all other sign systems as
‘texts’. The problems of this tradition are the gaps and misunderstanding that take place when presupposing that all
communication can be boiled down to textual issues.
The phenomenological tradition focuses on the experience of otherness or dialogue within the parameters of perception: it
seeks to explain what is ‘real’ for the individual as communication takes place. The Embodied Mind is seen as a key factor in
the development of authentic human relationships. However, it is hard and practically impossible to measure authentic
communication between people.
In the socio-psychological tradition communication is presented as a “process of expression, interaction and influence,”
where behavioural and emotional factors play an essential role. This is the process where people interact and influence each
other. Nevertheless, this tradition challenges the personal autonomy of humans and relies on a belief in our ability to
understand or have a dialogue with what might be going on in the unconscious mind.
Socio-cultural communication theory looks at communication as a symbolic process that produces and reproduces shared
socio-cultural patterns, which means that our everyday communication is based on some common pre-existing cultural and
social structures. The problem of this theory, as in semiotic tradition, is that there can be gaps during the communication
process based on socio-cultural diversity and socio-cultural change, as well as the fact that it does not fully recognise
individual agency.
The critical theory tradition describes communication as discursive reflection. Critical theory, however, questions the rational
validity of all authority, tradition, and conventional belief and can itself be questioned if communication needs to stand
outside of this debate.
