Week 5: Transmissions view VS Ritual view/ Impact of culture on communications

Question 1

History: Transmissions view

Answer 1

• Common to industrial cultures – feature of American thought from 1920s
• Framed within power (influence theory)
• Also framed within anxiety (dissonance/ balance theory (motivational psychology – theory of attitude change to achieve psychological balance)/ functionalism, uses and gratifications analysis

Question 2

Religious origins of transmissions view

Answer 2

• Exchanging the old for the new as an act of redemption
• Establishing and expanding God’s kingdom on earth, geographically and via spreading the Word
• Democratic migration of space (James Carey)
• Placed in geography or transportation (metaphor)

- Transmission (transportation) of signals and messages
over distance (geography) for purposes of control

Question 3

History: Ritual view

Answer 3

• Representation of shared beliefs to maintain a society in time
• Rituals draw people together in commonality (shared experiences that bound to a certain point in history)
• Prayers, chants, ceremonies – Miserere by the Tallis Scholars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKj1iK2WKS8
• NOT sermons, instructions, admonitions
• Original and highest manifestation of communication (constructs and maintains/ ordered and meaningful cultural world/ controls and contains our human actions)

Question 4

How does the ritual view relate to how we communicate?

Answer 4

News reading:
- Nothing new

• Yet, highly satisfying
• Why? It is not about the knowledge that is acquired, but how the news draws us into a world of dramatic forces, dramatic action
• Think of watching a play: how we ‘participate’ as observers
• This representation of reality provides form, order and tone – to how we see and observe the world

Question 5

How does the ritual view relate to how we communicate?

Answer 5

Ritual:
- Grounded in time

• Similarity to the news – the news is posited in a certain time in history
• Applicable to other forms of media: music, movies, plays
• “Hunger for experience” – rather than adhering to the traditional, it reflects how the middle class craves the unique, original and new – which then dissolves when the class that created it, evaporates
• Think of a context that is specific to you, the art forms that it produces and how this may disappear in future

Question 6

How does the ritual view relate to how we communicate?

Answer 6

Ritual view:
- Necessary to understand the processes examined by the transmissions view

• Phatic communion, ie: ‘small talk’ – “How are you?”, “You’re welcome.” (Bronislaw Malinowski)
• Phatic communion takes place not to exchange information – it is a social task that takes place in everyday communication
• “Society is possible because of the binding forces of shared information circulating in an organic system.” – James Carey
• “Consensus demands communication.” – John Dewey

Question 7

Symbolic production of reality

Answer 7

• We think of language as representing reality.
• Language as giving rise to reality.

“In the beginning, there was the Word.”
“Read.”

• The one thing that the fish is unaware of is water. (Marshall McLuhan)
• Art is about “making the phenomenon strange”.
• Social sciences:
  Obvious, everyday ordinary wonder, strange, mystery
  Language does this.

Question 8

Symbolic production of reality

Answer 8

• “Man lives in a new dimension of reality, symbolic reality, and it is through the agency of this capacity that existence is produced.” – Ernst Cassirer
  Communication must be examined as a primary phenomena of experience, and not something that is derived from reality.
• Maps
  Spatial representation of an environment, in such a way that it clarifies a problematic situation
  Through song and poetry, utilises mnemonic means to commit the map to memory (sound)
  Danced ritual - movement

Question 9

Symbolic production of reality

Answer 9

The map is not really ‘there’. However:

• The map gives us a symbol, or a language, to talk about a place that is not present
• The map is capable of production – we can use its symbols to produce finite symbols (Powerfully, in language, we can use words to produce infinite sentences)
• The map simplifies and makes an environment abstract by reducing information produces different reality (think of hunting for food or tourist spots)
• The map reminds us that thought is not private – what we think is influenced by publicly available symbols (ie: language) how we get from A to B is influenced by how we ‘map’ the world

Question 10

Symbolic production of reality

Answer 10

• Similarity of religious rituals to maps
• Represents human life (“off”) + Induces dispositions in what it portrays (“for”) (In other words – realise the power of symbols, but don’t get caught up in them!)

Question 11

Symbolic production of reality

Answer 11

• So: as communicators, we produce reality
• Problematic:
  New generations will always remind us how our productions are problematic
  Our productions must be replaced by regenerated productions
  Reality must be repaired
  Our productions lose authority
  Skinner: conditioning
  Chomsky: deep structures, transformations, surface appearances

Question 12

Ethical connundrum of communications studies

Answer 12

• Communications can be understood only as far as we build our models for communications (“of” aspect – tells us what the mode is/ “for” aspect – produces described behaviour)
• This presents an ethical connundrum: by reducing something as complex as communications to a simpler model
• “Communications begins in the struggle to learn and to describe… We can change these models when they become inadequate or we can modify and extend them… many of our communications models become, in themselves, social institutions.” – Raymond Williams (p. 33)