ABSTRACT
Communication Studies as a discipline contains a recognisable body of theoretical work. Within this body of work there are two traditions, what are commonly characterised as schools of thought, schools for short. These constitute two distinct ways of understanding communication both in terms of theory and in terms of practice. What follows is a very succinct clarification of where these schools stand and what they stand for. It is taken from the introduction to Fiske’s Introduction to Communication Studies, a section entitled ‘What is Communication?’ Fiske makes a number of useful statements about communication and its study. For example he argues that ‘communication is amenable to study’ and that ‘we need a number of disciplinary approaches to be able to study it’. He also advances a definition of communication as ‘social interaction through messages’. It is at this point he begins his survey of the two schools.
The structure of this book reflects the fact that there are two main schools in the study of communication. The first sees communication as the transmission of messages. It is concerned with how senders and receivers encode and decode, with how transmitters use the channels and media of communication. It is concerned with matters like efficiency and accuracy. It sees communication as a process by which one person affects the behaviour or state of mind of another. If the effect is different from or smaller than that which was intended, this school tends to talk in terms of communication failure, and to look to the stages in the process to find out where the failure occurred. For the sake of convenience I shall refer to this as the ‘process’ school.
The second school sees communication as the production and exchange of meanings. It is concerned with how messages, or texts, interact with people in order to produce meanings; that is, it is concerned with the role of texts in our culture. It uses terms like signification, and does not consider misunderstandings to be necessarily evidence of communication failure – they may result from cultural differences between sender and receiver. For this school, the study of communication is the study of text and culture. The main method of study is semiotics (the science of signs and meanings), and that is the label I shall use to identify this approach.
The process school tends to draw upon the social sciences, psychology and sociology in particular, and tends to address itself to acts of communication. The semiotic school tends to draw upon linguistics and the arts subjects, and tends to address itself to works of communication.
Each school interprets our definition of communication as social interaction through messages in its own way. The first defines social interaction as the process by which one person relates himself to others, or affects the behaviour, state of mind or emotional response of another, and, of course, vice versa. This is close to the common sense, everyday use of the phrase. Semiotics, however, defines social interaction as that which constitutes the individual as a member of his culture or society. I know I am a member of western, industrial society because, to give one of many sources of identification, I respond to Shakespeare or ‘Coronation Street’ in broadly the same ways as do the fellow members of my culture. I also become aware of cultural differences if, for instance, I hear the Soviet critic reading King Lear as a devastating attack upon the western ideal of the family as the basis of society, or that ‘Coronation Street’ shows how the West keeps the workers in their place. Both these readings are possible, but my point is, they are not mine, as a typical member of my culture. In responding to ‘Coronation Street’ in the more normal way, I am expressing my commonality with other members of my culture. So too, the teenager, in appreciating one particular style of rock music is expressing his identity as a member of a subculture and is, albeit, in an indirect way, interacting with other members of his society.
The two schools also differ in their understanding of what constitutes a message. The process school sees a message as that which is transmitted by the communication process. Many of its followers believe that intention is a crucial factor in deciding what constitutes a message. Thus pulling my earlobe would not be a message unless I deliberately did it as a pre-arranged signal to an auctioneer. The sender’s intention may be stated or unstated, conscious or unconscious, but must be retrievable by analysis. The message is what the sender puts into it by whatever means.
For semiotics, on the other hand, the message is a construction of signs which, through interacting with the receivers, produce meanings. The sender, defined as transmitter of the message, declines in importance. The emphasis shifts to the text and how it is ‘read’. And reading is the process of discovering meanings that occurs when the reader interacts or negotiates with the text. This negotiation takes place as the reader brings aspects of his cultural experience to bear upon the codes and signs which make up the text. It also involves some shared understanding of what the text is about. We have only to see how different papers report the same event differently to realize how important is this understanding, this view of the world, which each paper shares with its readers. So readers with different social experiences or from different cultures, may find different meanings in the same text. This is not, as we have said, necessarily evidence of communication failure.
The message, then, is not something sent from A to B, but an element in a structured relationship whose other elements include external reality and the producer/reader. Producing and reading the text are seen as parallel, if not identical, processes in that they occupy the same place in this structured relationship. We might model this structure as a triangle in which the arrows represent constant interaction, the structure is not static but a dynamic practice.
(Fiske 1982: 2–4) What's Next?Consider how process and semiotic approaches might differently describe:
communication between a teacher and a student
a popular television programme
a poetry reading by a contemporary poet
an e-mail to a friend describing a time and place to meet
the communication of a ringing fire alarm.
