Transmission + Ritual =Communication

Dr Mira K DesaiAssociate Professor

University Department of Extension EducationSNDT Women’s University

Juhu Campus, Mumbai

What is Communication?

Ideology

Technology

Process

Communication…?!

SOCIETY- Mass

MASS- Many Groups

Institutional/Organisational

GROUP- With a group of people

INTRA GROUP- Within a group

INTER- Between two people

INTRA- Self as communicator

Elements/Process of Communication

= Noises

SENDER RECEIVERMESSAGECHANNEL

Types of Communication

Intra-personal (self)Inter-personal (other)

Group (others)Mass (many groups)

VocalNon-vocal

WrittenOral

DirectMediated

Audio-visual AudioVisual

UpwardDownwardHorizontal

Vertical

Communication

Transmission View

• Communication links the ways messages are transmitted and received via technology with the composition of these messages (or more broadly, as communicative relationships), and with the analysis of the effects of these communicative acts.

Ritual view

• Communication is a central daily ritual that helps form and sustain communities.

Ritual View of Communication

SENDER RECEIVER

MEANING

‘Transmission’ Versus ‘Ritual’Transmission view: Communication is a process by which messages are sent, transmitted, filtered, and received. * At core, the transmission view maps closely on to information theory of communication. * Originated in religion, age of exploration and discovery

Ritual view: Communication partakes in central daily rituals that forge meaningful human relationships and communities. * Meaning can be constituted in repeated media events

TRANSMISSION View of Communication

• Idea of communication as the transmission of signals or messages over distance for the purpose of control; characterized by the desire to increase the speed and effect of messages as they travel in space.

• Most common view in industrial culture

• Metaphor of geography or transportation

• Defined by terms such as “imparting,” “sending,” “transmitting,” “giving information to others” –eg: traditional classroom

Assumptions- Relationship between communication and reality: Transmission model

• Real world of objects/events/processes that we observe.

• Language or symbols name these events in the real world and create more or less adequate descriptions of them.

• There is a reality and then, after the facts, our accounts of reality.

• Distinction between reality and fantasy

• Our terms stand in relation to this world as shadow and substance.

• Language distorts and confuses our perception of external world; we peel away semantic layers of terms and meanings to uncover more substantial domain of existence.

John Dewey (1859 – 1952)

There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication. Men live in a community in virtue of the things which they have in common; and communication is the way in which they come to possess things in common. What they must have in common . . . are aims, beliefs, aspirations, knowledge, a common understanding– likemindedness as sociologists say. Such things cannot be passed physically from one to another like bricks; they cannot be shared as persons would share a pie by dividing it into physical pieces .... Consensus demands communication. (Dewey, 1916: 5-6).

James Carey (1934-2006)

• Communication as Culture

• “Communication is a symbolic process whereby REALITY is produced, maintained, repaired and transformed”.

• “social life is more than power and trade ... it also includes the sharing of this that experience, the religious ideas, personal values and the sentiments, and intellectual notions -- a ritual border”

Source: James Carey. A Cultural Approach To Communication. Routledge, York, N.Y., 1989.

RITUAL View of Communication• Projection of community ideals and their embodiment in material

form–dance, plays, architecture, news stories, strings of speech–to create a symbolic order that provides information, but also confirms, represents underlying order of things, and manifests ongoing and fragile social processes.

• Generally dismissed in American thought

a. Puritan individualism

b. Devalue ‘process’ in favour of ‘product’

c. Isolate science from culture–science provides culture-free truth

whereas culture provides ethnocentric error.

• Not imparting information but representation of shared beliefs

• Sacred ceremony draws persons together in fellowship and commonality.

• Downplays role of sermon and highlights role of prayer.

• Reality is not given, not humanly existent, independent of language and toward which language mirrors.

• Reality is brought into existence, produced by communication, by the construction, apprehension, and utilization of symbolic forms.

• Reality is not a mere function of symbolic forms, but is produces by humans that focus existence in specific terms.

• Reality is not there to discover in any significant detail.

Assumptions- Relationship between communication and reality: Ritual model

Approaches to Communication

TRANSMISSION

• ‘imparting,’ ‘sending,’ ‘transmitting,’ or ‘getting information to others”

• ‘not toward the extension of messages in space’

• ‘not the act of imparting information’

RITUAL

• ’sharing’, ‘participation’, ‘association’, ‘fellowship’, and ‘the possession of a common faith’

• ‘toward the maintenance of society in time’

• ‘the representation of shared beliefs’

Transmission vesus Ritual

TRANSMISSION

• Transportation

• Sender & Receiver

• Sent & Received

• Receiver ‘gets it’

• Accuracy of transmission

• Influence across space

RITUAL

• Ceremony

• Participants

• Created and Recreated

• Shared experience

• Sense of community

• Community across time

Metaphor- Role of participants- Role of meaning-Success criterion- Basic function

Language

• Syntactically organized system of signals, such as voice sounds, intonations or pitch, gestures orwritten symbols which communicate thoughts or feelings.

• If a language is about communicating with signals, voice, sounds, gestures, or written symbols, animals have their own language.

• A language is therefore, so to speak, languageminus speech: it is at the same time a socialinstitution and a system of values.

Semiotics - Science of Signs

• Semantic: Relation between signs and the things they refer to, their denotata.

• Syntactic: Relation of signs to each other in formal structures.

• Pragmatics: Relation of signs to their impacts on those who use them (Also known as general semantics)

• Social semiotics: Social dimensions of meaning in any media of communication, its production, interpretation and circulation, and its implications in social processes, as cause or effect.

Semiotics- Sign Categorisations

SOCIAL CODES TEXTUAL

CODES

INTERPRETIVE CODES

Social codes: In a broader sense all semiotic codes are 'social codes'

• verbal language (phonological, syntactical, lexical, prosodic and paralinguistic sub codes)

• bodily codes (bodily contact, proximity, physical orientation, appearance, facial expression, gaze, head nods, gestures and posture)

• commodity codes (fashions, clothing, cars)

• behavioural codes (protocols, rituals, role-playing, games)

Textual codes- Representational codes

• Scientific codes: including mathematics • Aesthetic codes: within the various expressive

arts (poetry, drama, painting, sculpture, music, etc.) - including classicism, romanticism, realism

• Genre, rhetorical and stylistic codes: narrative (plot, character, action, dialogue, setting, etc.), exposition, argument and so on

• Mass media codes: photographic, televisual, filmic, radio, newspaper and magazine codes, both technical and conventional (including format)

Interpretative codes- There is less agreement about these as semiotic codes

• Perceptual codes: Visual perception (this code does not assume intentional communication);

• Ideological codes: More broadly, these include codes for ‘encoding’ and ‘decoding’ texts-dominant (or 'hegemonic'), negotiated or oppositional. More specifically, we may list the 'isms', such as individualism, liberalism, feminism, racism, materialism, capitalism, progressivism, conservatism, socialism, objectivism, consumerism and populism; (however, all codes can be seen as ideological).