Communication Theory

Lecture  12 7/3/2012

Communication Theory – Garry Barker

Level 1 – technical – accuracy

Level 2 – semantic – precision of language

Level 3 – effectiveness – message affect behavior

Client message – designer – media outlet message – audience

Systems theory – the advantage is you can switch between mathematical and biographical

Media distribution Pakistan and India very low, Japan very high.

What media product has the highest level of communication

Baywatch was watched in 150 countries by over a billion people

Semiotics – 3 basic concepts

-       semantics addresses what a sign stands for. Dictionaries are semantic reference books; they s what a sign means

-       syntactic is the relationships among signs

-       signs rarely stand along. They are almost always part of a larger sign system referred to as codes

-       codes are organized rules that designate what different signs stand fo

pragmatics studies are the practical use the effects of signs

-       Semiotics and the semiosphere

-       the whole semiotic space of the culture semiotics examines signs as if they are part of a language

-       structuralists adopted language as their model in exploring a much wider range of social phenomena i.e. Culturally shared codes.

-       Levi Strauss for ethnography; myth, kinship rules and totemism

-       Lucan for the unconscious; psychology, the subjective aspects of signification, language is first of all a foreign one

-       Barthes for the grammar of narrative

The phenomenological tradition is the process of knowing through direct experience. It is the way in which humans come to understand things

The process of interpretation is central

3 schools of the phenomenological tradition

-       classical phenomenology

-       the phenomenology of perception

-       hermeneutic phenomenology

Hermeneutics started 100 years ago most of it to do with the bible – could say it means writing in the margins

Interpretation of text – hermeneutics

Rhetoric

-       Socrates: the fact is that the aspiring speaker needs no knowledge of the truth about what’s right or good, in courts of justices no attention is paid whatever to the truth all that matters is plausibility, Plato, Phaedrus 272

Aristotle first addressed the problem of communication and attempted to work out a theory in the rhetoric

In photographic and filmic media a close up is a simple synecdoche – a part of representing the whole.

Rhetoric – to understand – to make the audience listen; shout, repetition

Pictures without context are meaningless; they need to be anchored

Metaphor; from the Greek: metaphora, meaning transfer is language that directly compares seeming less unrelated subjects or activities

Originally used as a rhetorical trope, metaphor enables us to grasp new concepts and remember things by creating associations

The sociopsychological tradition

-       the study of the individual

-       useful when used to study the development of a relationship

-       core of this body language

key to understanding of when people come together

The sociocultural tradition

-       defining yourself in terms of your identity with terms such as father, catholic, student, lesbian, Asian, Yorkshire etc. You are defining yourself in your identity as part of a group and this group frames your cultural identity

-       understand the culture where it’s coming from.

Critical communication theory

-       The basis of critical communication theory rests of two aspects of Hegel’s thinking easily confuses facts and values.

“Who says that to whom in what channel with what effect?”