Communication

An Introduction

Karl Erik Rosengren

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 1999
• ISBN:
  9781446224809
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Written as an introduction for beginning students, this book offers a thorough, yet lively, overview of human communication in all its aspects.

Accessibly written and assuming no prior knowledge of the discipline Communication: An Introduction: offers a thorough, yet lively, examination of all aspects of human communication, including: a summary of its nature, form and function; a detailed analysis of all the levels of communication; a description and overview of the different traditions of communication studies; and a consideration of the future of communication - as a phenomenon and as a field of research.

PART ONE

INTRODUCTION

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1

Communication: Elusive Phenomenon, Emergent Discipline

1.1 On communication

The word ‘communicate’ is historically related to the word ‘common’. It stems from the Latin verb communicare, which means ‘to share’, ‘to make common’, and which in turn is related to the Latin word for common: communis. When we communicate, we make things common. We thus increase our shared knowledge, our ‘common sense’ – the basic precondition for all community.

Shared knowledge, of course, may sometimes also include knowledge about conflicting views and interests. It may thus lead to conflict rather than to community. In addition, conflicting parties also need to communicate with each other. Sometimes continued communication may make them agree to disagree – an often very productive outcome, characterizing, for instance, all democracies.

Communication may take place between units of very different size and complexity. It may occur between and within individuals, groups, organizations, social classes, nations, countries and regions of the world. Obviously, the character of communication varies with the size and complexity of the communicating units (see section 4.1 below). The distance in space and time between the communicating units is also very important.

Over the millennia, human beings have used various media to communicate in space and time: wood and stone, parchment and paper; fire, smoke, flags and semaphore; electricity and electro-magnetic waves. As new media for communication have been created, the old ones have become specialized, but none have been completely abandoned. We still write in both wood and stone. Nor did radio disappear when television was invented. Instead, it became a specialized medium: light music, noisy commercials and fast information in commercially-oriented radio; in public service-oriented radio, classical music and serious fiction, as well as political, economic and cultural analyses.

Although communication media have changed drastically as centuries have passed by, communication shows some basic characteristics common to all times, regardless of the size and complexity of the communicating units, and regardless of the distance in time and space between them. Communication is thus a phenomenon basic to all human beings and to all things human. Indeed, in a sense it is common to all living beings.

All animals communicate in one way or another, within their own species and with animals of different species, sometimes including homo sapiens, the only species of man extant today (see section 2.1.1). Plants may also be said to communicate. Think, for instance, of the way flowers attract bees and other insects. Plants may even be said to communicate with other plants; they may produce stuff attracting other plants, which in their turn have something valuable to offer to the first type of plant. Most of us would hesitate, however, to regard this as communication in the sense in which human beings communicate with each other.

Later on, we will define the concept of communication more precisely, in a way which will allow us to differentiate between various kinds of communication (see sections 2.2 and 2.3). For the time being we will stay with the common-sense meaning of the term, realizing that communication is a very basic phenomenon indeed. It should be mentioned, however, that this is a book about communication by means of signs and symbols. It is not a book about communications in the sense of the transportation of goods or people, although both the production and transportation of goods tend to be accompanied by communication by means of signs and symbols – as does, of course, the transportation of people.

This book is about the systematic, scholarly and scientific study of communication by means of signs and symbols in general, and of human communication in particular. Before turning to the study of communication, however, we will briefly discuss the following:

• the general character of science and scholarship (section 1.2);
• the general relations between society and the individual (section 1.3);
• four approaches in the humanities and social science (section 1.4); and
• the general relations between communication studies and other academic disciplines (section 1.5).

1.2 On science and scholarship

1.2.1 Concepts and terms, types and typologies

Human beings are learning beings. In many different ways we are learning all the time – any number of skills, capacities and knowledge. The process of learning is often haphazard, and as a rule is not very systematic, but in order to result in really new knowledge for other individuals, the learning process has to be systematic. There are only two basic instruments for gaining new knowledge – reason and experience – and both science and scholarship have to use these instruments in combination.

In order to understand and explain a given aspect of the world surrounding us, the world of phenomena – all those buzzing, blooming, overwhelming things out there which we call reality and which all the time we experience with our senses and try to understand by our reason – we need concepts. To understand any phenomenon of the world we must first conceptualize it.

To conceptualize is to make distinctions, and distinctions have to be made along some dimension or other: some important aspect of an otherwise bewildering world of phenomena. We must be able to make distinctions between light and darkness, earth and water, man and woman and so on, in never-ending processes of conceptualization which all of us must engage in. Then we also need names for our concepts. That is, we need a great number of (more or less technical) terms.

In everyday parlance, we do not always distinguish between phenomena, concepts and terms. Sometimes, it may be quite difficult to do so. In scientific and scholarly activities, however, it is absolutely mandatory.

When we have made distinctions along a number of dimensions, as a rule, another problem will announce itself. One way or another we need to combine the various dimensions so that a given phenomenon can be characterized along more than one dimension at a time. We must be able to distinguish not only between men and women, young and old, but also between young men and old women etc. What we need is a typology, and the corresponding terminology.

A typology is an instrument for classification. All typologies build on a number of basic dimensions which, when combined, result in a space of ideas and concepts, a ‘conceptual space’ in terms of which the phenomena under study may be located – classified – in a meaningful way, so that they can be better understood. This process is facilitated if we also manage to create a good terminology, corresponding to the basic dimensions of the typology at hand.

To create good typologies and corresponding terminologies is no easy thing to do. Human beings have been busy with the task since the beginning of humankind, in various ways ordering plants, animals, minerals, diseases and so on (see Box 1.1). In Antiquity, Aristotle (384–322 BC) presented the basic principles for classification. But it was only some 2,000 years later that Linnaeus (1707–78) presented the typologies for plants and animals which still form the basis for the generally accepted terminology in those areas.

1.2.2 Typologies of science and scholarship

During the last century, a number of typologies for scientific and scholarly activities have been presented by philosophers, scholars and scientists from various disciplines. What is the difference between science and scholarship, then?

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BOX 1.1 ‘LET THERE BE LIGHT’

‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was a vast waste, darkness covered the deep, and the spirit of God hovered over the surface of the water. God said, “Let there be light”, and there was light; and God saw the light was good, and he separated light from darkness. He called the light day, and the darkness night. So evening came; it was the first day. . . .

‘Then God said, “Let us make human beings in our image, after our likeness, to have dominion over the fish in the sea, the birds of the air, the catde, all wild animals on land, and everything that creeps on the earth.”

God created human beings in his own image: in the image of God he created them.

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase, fill the earth and subdue it, have dominion over the fish in the sea, the birds of the air, and every living thing that moves on the earth.” . . .

‘So it was, and God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. Evening came, and morning came, the sixth day.

‘Thus the heavens and the earth and everything in them were completed.’

From: The Revised English Bible (1990) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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One difference, of course, is based on the subject matter of study. Classical science is the study of nature in the widest sense of the word – all forms of dead and living matter. In a number of natural sciences, human beings are studied primarily from biological, bio-chemical, medical etc. perspectives, much as all other living beings are studied. Scholarship, on the other hand, is the study of specifically human matters: human ideas, human action, human artefacts, human history.

Another difference is the general approach used by science and scholarship. In simple terms, it could be said that scholarship tends to be particularizing (or idiographic); science, generalizing (or nomothetic). Both approaches use specific hypotheses and general theories, but in rather different ways. Generalizing science is interested in testing hypotheses and theories by means of empirical data, with a view to arriving at evermore general hypotheses and theories explaining the phenomena under study in terms of causes and effects. Classic, particularizing scholarship, on the other hand, is less interested in testing hypotheses and theories, but rather in using them as tools, interpretative devices for understanding the concrete case under study in terms of intentions and goals – intentions and goals fulfilled and achieved or failed and missed.

Related to these basic differences between the two ways of gaining knowledge is their way of looking at human beings. Particularizing scholarship tends to look at the individual as a willing and acting subject. Generalizing science tends to look at individuals as objects of strong forces which – from within and from outside – determine their behaviour. Particularizing scholarship may thus be said to focus intentions and consequences; generalizing science, causes and effects.

During the last 150 years or so, there has been a tendency in the study of human beings and all things human to develop approaches that are strongly influenced by natural science. Psychology is perhaps the best example of this tendency, but also in sociology there have been strong tendencies towards approaches used in natural sciences. As so often happens, such tendencies have been met with counter-tendencies, various types of reaction. Thus during the last few decades, there has been a strong reaction towards regarding the natural sciences as ideal models when it comes to the study of human phenomena. More humanistically oriented types of psychology and sociology have appeared or re-appeared. (At the same time, however, linguistics has become a highly formalized science, using logical models as basic tools of analysis.)

Ultimate truth – complete explanation and full understanding – will never be reached. New theories and hypotheses always have to be tested, and in the long run, many theories will be forsaken for lack of empirical support. But meanwhile, surviving hypotheses and theories may be used – by generalizing science and particularizing scholarship, by political leaders and social critics alike – to explain the world in which we live, to try to understand and interpret specific phenomena at the individual and societal level. (In the special case, of course, we often complement available scholarly and scientific knowledge with our own, personal knowledge about particular circumstances pertaining to the case at hand.)

In the process of creating new knowledge, be it scholarly or scientific, it is absolutely mandatory to have good and easy access to previous knowledge in the area of study. We thus need to store our knowledge in ways which make it accessable to ourselves, and to colleagues in different disciplines, all over the world. This is a problem which has been with human beings from the very beginning, but over the last 50 years or so computerization has offered increasingly powerful ways of storing knowledge, be it scholarly or scientific (see Box 1.2).

1.3 On society and individuals

Beside the distinctions between scholarship and science mentioned above, there is another important distinction to be made: that between different ways of regarding society. In the humanities as well as in the behavioural and social sciences there are two main ways of regarding society: as characterized primarily by conflict, or primarily by consensus. Adherents of the former view hold that all societies are at bottom characterized by conflict, often between classes of people located at different positions within the overall societal structure. Adherents of the latter view do not deny the existence of societal conflicts, of course, but maintain that in order to exist, in spite of sometimes very serious conflicts, all societies must be characterized by an overriding consensus about at least some basic values and what may be called a fair distribution of those values within the population.

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BOX 1.2 FROM SCROLLS TO SEARCH ENGINES – ON THE STORAGE OF KNOWLEDGE

There are a number of ways of storing knowledge:

• in your own brain;
• in other people’s brains;
• on wood and stones, by way of tombs, monuments, etc.;
• on walls and hoardings (bills, posters, placards, graffiti) etc.;
• on a scrap of paper;
• in a notebook;
• in a newspaper;
• in a magazine;
• in a journal;
• in a book;
• in a library;
• on a com...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• PART ONE: INTRODUCTION
• PART TWO: FORMS AND FUNCTIONS OF COMMUNICATION
• PART THREE: LEVELS OF COMMUNICATION
• PART FOUR: THE FUTURE OF COMMUNICATION
• References
• Name Index
• Subject Index