Lecture
1. Simulation of communication in different sciences. | Communication is traditionally called the exchange of values (information) between individuals through the common system of symbols (characters), language signs, in particular. This field of knowledge and scientific interests, like many others, began to take shape back in ancient times, therefore, communication has as many definitions as authors of works about it. |
The American psychiatrist Jurgen Ruesch (Jurgen Ruesch) identified 40 different approaches to communication in various fields, including architecture, anthropology, psychology, politics and many others.
Communication It means that it’s not . IARichards. | Here is how the English literary critic I. A. Richards defines communication: communication takes place when one human consciousness acts on its environment in such a way that this influence is experienced by another human consciousness, and in this other consciousness experience arises that is similar to experience in the first consciousness , and caused to some extent by this first experience. Although this definition was given by IA Richards in 1928, it is much closer to modern non-mechanistic, dialogical tendencies in the consideration of linguistic (and not only linguistic) communication, taking into account the role of the human factor itself, the interaction of participants in the act of communication. |
But how does the famous American researcher of politics and propaganda, Harold D. Lasswell, define the main problem of communication: Who says? Answers to his questions were given a lot. Lasswell's formula is considered classic, it can be found in all textbooks on the theory of communication, mass communication, social psychology, sociology and political science.
It is considered that the means of communication is language (verbal human language), more precisely one of the means providing communication between people (separate individuals, an individual and a society, groups of individuals, and even communication with oneself). The term 'language' can also be interpreted in a broad (semiotic) sense (including other sign systems).
At the same time, the revival of interest in the problem of communication in the 20th century was also observed outside of linguistics and psychology, and even not only in their new branches that emerged in the second half of the century, psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics . In telephony, telegraphy, radio, and other communications, this interest initially wore a purely practical character of 'improving' communication. Subsequently, the problem of modeling the relationship between a machine with a machine, and a person with a person and a person with a machine became the subject of cybernetics as a science of control and the theory of artificial intelligence . The development of communications and information has led to the emergence of the phenomenon of mass communication , and interest in the human component of industrial activity has raised questions of communication in the field of management . One way or another, the problems of communication are faced by specialists from many branches of human activity. Now the problems of the study of communicative processes are among the most pressing, global problems for humanity.
There are a lot of definitions given to the communicative process. For a better understanding of this phenomenon, they began to use the modeling method: reproducing the characteristics of one object with the help of another. The communication model reproduces the constituent elements and functional characteristics of the communication process in the form of a diagram. Of course, the content of the model depends on the concept of the scientist who developed this model, on the needs of the field of science in which it appeared, etc. We should not forget that models do not open, but invent, develop. Although the model reproduces some of the characteristics of the object being modeled, it is not a 'reflection of reality', much less reality itself. The model is necessary for the researcher to better organize his thoughts about reality and his actions with this reality. In accordance with what was already said in the previous lecture on paradigms, communication patterns can also be divided into mechanistic or linear and non-mechanical .
In a sense, the famous phrase of G. Lasswell also represented a collapsed model of communication. This is how this model is “unfolded” as a scheme in the course on the communication theory of one of the American universities:
In this interpretation, the author of the model identifies the participants and elements of the communicative act as a response to Lasswell’s questions: a communicator, a message, a channel, a recipient, and consequences. Further, he outlines the areas of communication research in accordance with the proposed division of the roles of the participants: management research, research of the content side of communication, research of the communicative environment, audience research, research of the communicative impact. Compare this model with linear models of Shannon and Weaver.
2. Model C. Shannon and W. Weaver. | For quite a long time in linguistics, they used a slightly expanded model, migrated from mathematics and cybernetics, the communication model proposed by the American mathematician Claude Shannon (his name is much more known than the name of his compatriot Warren Weaver, Warren Weaver) in the late 40s. This model has played a significant role in the development of many sciences related to the exchange of information, although now it can already be considered limited. |
C. Shannon | The model includes five elements: a source of information, a transmitter, a transmission channel, a receiver and an end goal, arranged in a linear sequence (linear model). In the future, the model was revised in order to meet the needs of other areas of research related to other types of communication. The revised model included six components: source, encoder, message, channel, decoder, and receiver (cf. telephone) . These terms, with varying success, were also used metaphorically in other communication systems. |
In addition to these terms, Shannon introduced more notions of noise (later they began to associate it with the concept of entropy and, conversely, negentropy ) and redundancy.
Entropy (noise) in the theory of communication is associated with those external factors that distort the message, violate its integrity and the possibility of perception by the receiver. Negropy (negative entropy) is associated with cases where an incomplete or distorted message is still received by the receiver due to its ability to recognize the message, despite distortions and missing information.
The concept of redundancy , repetition of elements of a message to prevent communicative failure, that is, means against entropy, is most often demonstrated by the example of natural human languages. It is believed that all languages are approximately half redundant: you can blot half the words of the text or erase half of the words in the radio presentation, but you will still be able to understand them. Of course, there is a limit of permissible noise, beyond the threshold of which the possibility of understanding is sharply reduced. In particular, it is difficult to understand a message using an unfamiliar code in noise conditions. By the way, for learning a foreign language it is useful to listen to the speech not only in the sterile conditions of the educational audience, but also to the accompaniment of street or industrial noise, pronounced by different voices and even with a different accent (foreign accent is also noise, obstacles for perception). Test the property of redundancy - one of the fundamental properties of the human language - try to read the following message, part of which is erased by rain:
The static model of Shannon was filled with the notion of feedback (feedback). This concept allowed to make the model closer to the reality of human interaction in communication. Its introduction was connected with the penetration of the ideas of cybernetics, in particular, the work of the same name by Norbert Wiener (Norbert Wiener, 1894-1964), the 'father' of this science. The model has become more dynamic. In order to make the communication model more consistent with the needs in other areas besides the telegraph, other dynamic theories of communication were put forward. For example, psychologist Theodore M. Newcomb developed a more mobile model of communication, reflecting the interaction of participants in the communicative act, especially in relation to their cognitive, emotional and artistic aspect.
M.Mack-Luen | A number of researchers paid more attention to the message transmission channel, for example, the famous Canadian communication theorist, Marshall McLuen, who works in the field of mass communication, for which modern mass communication was primarily visual communication. He claims that the transmission channel largely predetermines the message itself. His ideas were largely ahead of their time, and now, in the era of global television and computer networks, they are finding the widest response. The words of M. Mc-Luena: The medium is the message, - have become the motto of modern civilization, in which the visual communication channel is considered to be the leading one. |
3. Functional model of RO Jakobson. R.O. Jacobson | In linguistics, Shannon's ideas emerged in the interpretation of RO Jakobson, a man of unique human and scientific fate with the broadest interests (poetry and poetics, phonology and grammar, research of patients with aphasia, that is, with various speech disorders, and philosophical methodology, linguistics, and communication theory). According to Jacobson, the addresser and the addressee participate in the communication or speech event model, a message is sent from the first to the second, which is written using code, the context in the Jacobson model is related to the message content, the information transmitted by it, the concept of contact is related to the regulatory aspect of communication . The following figure shows the model of communication and functions of the language and other communication systems in the interpretation of one of the French sites on journalism, politics, mass media and communication theory: |
The Jacobson model in its various versions is used in linguistics both for analyzing the functions of the language as a whole, and for analyzing the functioning of its individual units, the production of speech and text. In the spirit of linguistics of the Prague School, this model is teleological (from the Greek word for 'purpose'), that is, it shows the purpose, functions of the language. Modern sociolinguistics, communication theory and sociology of communication also borrowed the Jacobson model to describe communicative processes. Unlike the Swiss linguist, founder of structural linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure (more precisely, from the understanding of Saussure's ideas by most of his followers), who suggested studying the language system 'in and for himself', this model can take into account not only the language itself, but also the user of the language included observer.
N. Bor | The idea of the observer was introduced into scientific use by Niels Bohr, who participated with Jacobson in a seminar at MIT, the author of the complementarity principle in physics and in science in general. This principle can be formulated as follows: there are no antagonistic contradictions, descriptions of different observers complement each other. It is noteworthy that N. Bor advanced the idea of complementarity initially on the example of the diversity of world languages. |
4. Nonlinear communication models. | Recently, ideas of the philosophy of dialogism have spread in science (it is associated with a Russian scholar, literary critic and linguist M.M.Bakhtin). |
M.M.Bakhtin | The two main ideas of Bakhtin are quite essential for understanding the communication process: first, a necessary sign of any utterance is its direction, address, that is, there is no speaker without a listener and no addressee; secondly, any statement acquires meaning only in context, at a specific time and in a specific place (the idea of a chronotop: from Greek words for 'time' and 'place'). |
R. Bart | Similar ideas were expressed by the outstanding French semiologist (headed the department of general semiology at the Sorbonne) Roland Barth. According to Bart, the word does not matter, the word is only a possibility of meaning, which receives it in a specific text. Moreover, each new reading of the text creates a new value, reading as if writing its own text again. These views destroy a coherent and clear, but still primitive picture of the 'transmission and perception' of information in the original Shannon communication model. |
Bakhtin's ideas have become very widespread in world linguistics, literary criticism, communication theory, and philosophy over the past twenty years. French researcher of Bulgarian origin, Julia Kristeva (Julia Kristeva, p. 1935, her field of activity is semiotics and literature, feminism), developing the ideas of Bakhtin and Bart, suggested the concept of intertextuality: every text is created in the form of a “quotational mosaic”, direct or indirect references to previously perceived other people's texts. Now, this idea of Kristeva has been picked up in a wide variety of fields, for example, in the study of the language of cinema, in psychoanalysis, in the study of advertising (advertising very often exploits intertextual allusions to influence the consumer: a strong but gentle Panadol <strict but fair father of nations; national X <Features of national hunting , etc.). The recipient of the message becomes his indirect co-author.
Theories of a more general nature also began to appear in cybernetics. Heinz von Foerster coined the expression 'second order cybernetics'. Unlike cybernetics itself, as a technical, primarily science, second order cybernetics, first of all, draws their view of themselves, on the process of their own creation, i.e. on the person, on how he thinks.
U. Maturana | Von Förster reiterated the famous saying It needs two to Tango to It needs two to Language, emphasizing the dialogical nature of communication. Von Förster’s views influenced Humberto Maturan, a Chilean explorer (who also spent several years at MIT). Maturana, a biologist by scientific 'origin', in turn, influenced and continues to influence most of the sciences of the late twentieth century with his idea of consensual interaction of self-organizing systems (Maturana calls these systems 'autopoietic', that is, 'self-creating'). |
Language activity ( languaging ) Maturana compares with the dance, which is not characterized by 'hierarchy' and 'management' and not 'competition', but the mutual fitting of actions, cooperation. “Human beings are biologically loving (cooperating) creatures,” he says in one of his interviews, “and language is our biological way of life.”
Maturana, by the way, casts doubt on the term 'information transfer', because in the real process of language interaction nothing is conveyed to anyone in the direct sense, and the 'transfer' of information is just an unsuccessful metaphor of joint activity, which results in a similar response: more or less less close mutual understanding of something else. This is reminiscent of the words of the famous philosopher Merab Mamardashvili (1930-1990): you should not even try to understand the other, it is useless, it is better to understand something third together.
There is also doubt in the customary understanding of the existence of language and other communication systems. Of course, not fixed speech works (books and phonograms), dictionaries and textbooks, but language as a kind of abstract system of 'rules and exceptions' imposed on a person from outside and to which he is forced to obey. Language appears as a myth in which it is beneficial for us to believe, and not as a thing living according to the laws and rules of the physical world. “A person sees what he believes in,” wrote U. Maturana.
Finally, the philosopher Eugen Rosenstock-Hüssi (Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Germany - USA, 1888-1973), who proclaimed the identity of the “grammar of language and grammar of society”, who considered every utterance a political act, saw in language, in communication, the path to peace in society: “This peacekeeping mission of the language rests on its ability to bind together free and independent people.” And yet: “speech strengthens the temporal and spatial axes on which the society rests” - what is not a motto for public relations and other communication technologies ?!
Literature:
1. Bart R. Selected Works. Semiotics. Poetics. M .: Progress; Univers, 1994.
2. Wiener N. Information, language and society // Cybernetics. M .: Science, 1983. P.236-248.
3. Voloshinov V.N. (M.M.Bakhtin). Marxism and the philosophy of language: The main problems of the sociological method in the science of language. M .: Labyrinth, 1993.
4. Maturana U. Biology of knowledge // Language and intelligence. M.: Progress, 1995. Pp.95-142.
5. Rosenstock-Hussy O. Speech and reality. M .: Labyrinth, 1994.
6. Jacobson, R.O. Speech communication; Language in relation to other communication systems // Selected Works. M .: Progress, 1985. P.306-330.
7. McLuhan M. Essential McLuhan. NY: Basic Books, 1995.
8. Shannon C. The Mathematical Theory of Communication // The Bell System Technical Journal. 1948. Vol.XXVII. # 3.
1. What property of the human language is manifested in the following example from organizational communication (a letter from the company management to the employees)? Has the author of the message proved his thesis or not?
2. The 'naive user' (unfamiliar with theories) also has its own communication model, that is, ideas about how the communicative process works. Is it possible to divide such communicators into two conditional groups: Listen to what I'm saying! and let's think together! ?What theoretical approaches does it resemble? Observe the leaders of companies and enterprises, politicians and public figures, children and parents, offer your options
3. Какая особенность коммуникации использована авторами следующего рекламного объявления (из газеты Ва-Банк, Воронеж):
Кто, по Вашему мнению, является получателем этого сообщения, нарисуйте его 'портрет'.
4. Какие еще теории и модели коммуникации Вам известны (из литературы, из интернета, из других источников)? Какие из них больше всего подходят для понимания сути практической работы в Вашем будущем PR-агентстве (рекламном агентстве, пресс-службе, отделе по связям с общественностью и т.п.)?
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Communication theory
Terms: Communication theory