Chapter 1: Launching Your Study Of Communication Theory
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Theory: A set of systematic, informed hunches about the way things work
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In earlier editions theory was used as an “umbrella term for all careful systematic, and self-conscious discussion and analysis of communication phenomena.”
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A theory is a set of multiple hunches and those hunches have to be informed
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Burgoon’s definition: It’s not enough to think carefully about an idea; a theorist’s hunches should be informed.
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Fred Casmir’s description of theory parallels Burgoon’s call for multiple informed hunches:
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Theories are sometimes defined as guesses—but significantly as “educated” guesses. Theories are not merely based on vague impressions nor are they accidental by products of life. Theories tend to result when their creators have prepared themselves to discover something in their environment, which triggers the process of theory construction.
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Images of theory:
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If a theory is a net that “catches the world” then we need all different types of nets, (theories), to capture distinct and different types of communication. [this is what net you have so this is what you get]
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If a theory is a lens then some lenses allow us to see certain parts of communication and not others. In the same way, those lenses could allow us to see the same part of the world in a different way. [this is how you view it so this is how it seems to you specifically]
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Theories can also lead us to unknown places and help us discover unchartered waters. The truth they depict may have to do with objective behavior [also seems more objective]
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What is communication?
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Communication: The relational process of creating and interpreting messages that elicit a response.
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Messages: Talking and listening, writing and reading, performing and witnessing, or, more generally doing anything that involves ‘messages’ in any medium or situation.”
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Text: A record of a message that can be analyzed by others; for example, a book, film, photograph, or any transcript or recording of a speech or broadcast.
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Creation of messages: The phrase in the working definition of communication indicates that the context and form of a text are usually constructed, invented, planned, created, constituted, selected, or adopted by the communicator.
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Interpretation of messages: The meaning that a message holds for the creators and receivers doesn’t reside in the words that are spoken, written, or acted out. (Word don’t mean things, people mean things).
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A Relational Process: Much like a river, the flow of communication is always in flux, never completely the same, and can only be described with reference to what went before and what is yet to come.
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Messages That Elicit a Response: The final component of communication deals with the effect of the message upon people who receive it. Communication is the relational process of creating and interpreting messages that elicit a response.
Reading Notes
Chapter 2: Talk About Theory
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Behavioral scientist: a scholar who applies the scientific method to describe, predict and explain recurring forms of human behavior.
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Rhetorician: A scholar who studies the ways in which symbolic forms can be used to identify with people, or to persuade them toward a certain point of view.
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Glenn Sparks (social scientist)
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Objective approach: The assumption that truth is singular and is accessible through unbiased sensory observation; committed to uncovering cause-and-effect relationships.
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Successful persuasive messages evoke past experiences that create resonance between the message content and a person’s thoughts or feelings.
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It’s not arguments that persuade people as much as it is memories of personal experiences triggered by the message.
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Resonance principle of communication:
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Marty Medhurst (rhetorical critic)
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Interpretive approach: The linguistic work of assigning meaning or value to communicative texts; assumes that multiple meanings or truths are possible.
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Most interpretive scholars (including Marty) are humanists who study what it’s like to be another person in a specific time and place.
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These interpretive scholars refer to themselves with a bewildering variety of brand names: hermeneuticists, poststructuralists, deconstructivists, phenomenologists, cultural studies researchers, and social action theorists, as well as combinations of these terms.
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Carl Jung created the idea of the collective unconscious.
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Humanistic scholarship: study of what it’s like to be another person in a specific time and place; assumes there are few important panhuman similarities.
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Epistemology: The study of the origin, nature, method, and limits of knowledge.
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Scientists assume that Truth is singular. They see a single, timeless reality “out there” that’s not dependent on local conditions.
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Interpretive scholars seek truth as well, but many interpreters regard that truth as socially constructed through communication. Most of these scholars, in fact, hold that truth is largely subjective—that meaning is highly interpretive.
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Five senses: sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell.
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Determinism: The assumption that behavior is caused by heredity and environment.
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Empirical evidence: Data collected through direct observation.
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Emancipation: Liberation from any form of political, economic, racial, religious, or sexual oppression, empowerment.
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We cannot conduct rhetorical criticism of social reality without benefit of guiding rhetorical theory that tells us general what to look for in social practice, what to make of it, and whether to consider it significant.
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Metatheory: Theory about theory; the state or inherent assumptions made when creating a theory.
Chapter 3: Weighing The Words
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An objective theory is credible because it fulfills the twin objectives of scientific knowledge. The theory predicts some future outcome, and it explains the reasons for that outcome.
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Social scientists of all kinds agree on four additional criteria a theory must meet to be good—relative simplicity, testability, practical utility, and quantifiable research.
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Scientific Standard: Prediction of future events
A good objective theory predicts what will happen
A theory based on research claimed that communication apprehension was a trait only some people possess. The theory had great predictive power in identifying nervous public speakers, but it lacked a good explanation for why some people became nervous and others didn’t.
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Scientific Standard: Explanation of the data
a good objective theory explains an event or human behavior
An objective theory should bring clarity to an otherwise jumbled state of affairs; it should draw order out of chaos
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Scientific Standard: Relative Simplicity
A good objective theory is as simple as possible—no more complex than it has to be
Rule of Parsimony (Occam’s razor): Given two plausible explanations for the same event, we should accept the simpler version
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Scientific Standard: Hypotheses That Can be Tested
A good objective theory is testable. If a prediction is wrong, there ought to be a way to demonstrate the error.
Falsifiability: The requirement that scientific theory be stated in such a way that it can be tested and disproved if it is indeed wrong.
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Scientific Standard: Practical Utility
A good objective theory is useful.
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Scientific Standard: Quantitative Research
Scientists tend to appeal to numbers as they gather evidence to support their theories.
Experiment: A research method that manipulates a variable in a tightly controlled situation in order to find out if it has the predicted effect.
Survey: A research method that uses questionnaires and structured interviews to collect self-reported data that reflects what respondents think, feel, or intend to do.
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Interpretive theories should accomplish some or all of the following functions: identify values, create understanding, inspire aesthetic appreciation, stimulate agreement, reform society, and conduct qualitative research.
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Interpretive Standard: Clarification of Values
A good interpretive theory brings people’s values into the open.
Interpretive theorists should also be willing to reveal their own ethical commitments.
Ethical imperative: Grant others that occur in your construction the same autonomy you practice constructing them.
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Interpretive Standard: New understanding of people
Interpretive scholarship is good when it offers fresh insight into the human condition.
Self-referential imperative: Include yourself as a constituent of your own construction.
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Krippendorff urges us to recognize that we, as theorists, are both the cause and the consequence of what we observe. His for building theory states, “Include yourself as a constituent of your own construction.”
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Interpretive Standard: Aesthetic Appeal
The way a theorist presents ideas can capture the imagination of a reader just as much as the wisdom and originality of the theory he or she has created. No matter how great the insights the theory contain, if the essay describing them is disorganized, over written, or opaque, the theorist’s ideas will come across murky rather than clear.
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Interpretive Standard: Community of Agreement
We can identify a good interpretive theory by the amount of support it generates within a community of scholars who are interested and knowledgeable about the same type of communication.
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Interpretive Standard: Reform of Society
A good interpretive theory often generates change
Critical Theorists: Scholars who use theory to reveal unjust communication practices that create or perpetuate an imbalance of power.
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Interpretive Standard: Qualitative Research
While scientists use numbers to support their theories, interpretive scholars use words.
Textual Analysis: A research method that describes and interprets the characteristics of any text. (Rhetorical criticism is the most common form of textual research in the communication discipline).
Ethnography: A method of participant observation designed to help a researcher experience a culture’s complex web of meaning.
Common Ground Among Theorists
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Sensing: One way to “find out” is to use your sensing function. Your eyes, ears, and other senses tell you what is actually there and actually happening, both inside and outside of yourself.
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Intuition: The other way to “find out” is through intuition, which reveals the meanings, relationships, and possibilities that go beyond the information from your senses.
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Both Prediction and value clarification look to the future. The first suggests what will happen, the second, what ought to happen.
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An explanation of communication behavior can lead to further understanding of people’s motivation
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For many students of theory, simplicity has an aesthetic appeal.
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Testing hypotheses is a way of achieving a community of agreement.
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What could be more practical than a theory that reforms unjust practices?
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Both quantitative research and qualitative research reflect a commitment to learn more about communication.
Chapter 4: Mapping The Territory
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The Socio-Psychological Tradition (Communication as interpersonal interaction and influence)
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Tradition that epitomizes the scientific or objective perspective described in chapter 2.
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Scholars in this tradition believe there are communication truths that can be discovered by careful, systematic observation.
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The Cybernetic Tradition (Communication as a system of information processing)
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Illustrates the way feedback makes information processing possible in our heads and on our laptops.
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Cybernetics: The study of information processing, feedback, and control in communication systems.
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His concept of feedback anchored the cybernetic tradition, which regards communication as the link connecting the separate parts of any system such as computer system, a family system, a media system, or a system, such as a computer system, a family system, a media system, or system of social support.
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The Rhetorical Tradition (Communication as artful public address)
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Rhetoric: The art of using all available means of persuasion, focusing on lines of argument, organization of ideas, language use, and delivery in public speaking.
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Examples: a conviction that speech distinguishes humans from other animals. Cicero suggested that only oral communication had the power to lead humanity out of its brutish existence and establish communities with rights of citizenship.
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The Semiotic Tradition (Communication as the process of sharing meaning through signs)
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Semiotics: the study of verbal and nonverbal signs that can stand for something else, and how their interpretation impacts society.
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Symbols: Arbitrary words and nonverbal signs that bear no natural connection with the things they describe; their meaning is learned within a given culture.
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Self-Disclosure = Intimacy
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Self-Disclosure: Revelations about self that the friend didn’t know
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Emotional expressiveness: Closeness, warmth, affection, and caring
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Physical contact: Nonsexual touch
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Trust: Confidence that the other is reliable
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Unconditional support: Being there for the other in good times and bad
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Sexual contact: Overt sexual activity
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Activities: Doing things together of a nonsexual nature.
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The Socio-Cultural Tradition (Communication as the creation and enactment of social reality)
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Based on the premise that people talk, they produce and reproduce culture. Most of us assume that words reflect what actually exists. Our view however is strongly shaped by the language we’ve used since we were infants.
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Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis of linguistic relativity: The claim that the structure of a language shapes what people think and do; the social construction of reality.
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The Critical Tradition (Communication as reflective challenge to unjust discourse)
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Culture Industries: entertainment businesses that reproduce the dominant ideology of a culture and distract people from recognizing unjust distribution of power with society; e.g., film, television, music and advertising.
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Although there is no single set of abuses that all of them denounce, critical theorists consistently challenge three features of contemporary society:
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The Control of language to perpetuate power imbalances.
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The role of mass media in dulling sensitivity to repression.
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Blind reliance on the scientific method and uncritical acceptance of empirical findings.
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The Phenomenological tradition (Communication as the experience of self and others through dialogue)
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Refers to the intentional analysis of everyday life from the standpoint of the person who is living it.
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Phenomenology: Intentional analysis of everyday experience from the standpoint of the person who is living it; explores the possibility of understanding the experience of self and others.
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Pragmatism: An applied approach to knowledge; the philosophy that true understanding of an idea or situation has practical implications for action.
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The ethical tradition (Communication as people of character interacting in just and beneficial ways)
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Since the time of Plato and Aristotle, communication scholars have grappled with the obligations that go along with the opportunities we have to communicate.
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We advocate truthfulness, accuracy, honest and reason as essential to the integrity of communication.
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We accept responsibility for the short- and long-term consequences of our own communication and expect the same of others.
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We strive to understand and respect other communicators before evaluating and responding to their messages.