Communication Fundamentals: Concepts, Types, Functions and Theoretical Perspectives

Communication: Concepts and Fundamentals

What is communication?

Communication is a social action in which one or more individuals participate, located in space and time, given in language and experience. It is a stimulus exchanged between individuals of a system, placed in an era and context, and it involves the sharing of common codes according to Martin, 2003.

It is a peculiar mode of social interaction. Communication is an intentional act whose purpose is understood by the other party, which expresses its content and effectively comprehends the meaning of the action. Martin, 2003

Concept of Communication

a) It is the process by which transmission occurs between people.
b) It is linked not only to language but to all systems of signals.
c) It is present in all its studies throughout the history of humanity.
d) It is inherent to human existence and to social evolution itself. Overboard, 1996

Characteristics of Communication

Human: the ability to transform symbols into meaning.
Social: it is oriented toward the other person.
Referential: it is oriented toward another person and a situation.
Complex: it involves the production of messages and the construction of meaning.
Present in lived experience: it occurs within specific spatial-temporal coordinates. Martin, 2003

Components of Communication

Sender: the initial party in the process.
Message: the content.
Channel: the medium through which it is sent.
Code: the language or set of signs used to transmit the expression.
Receptor: the party that receives the content.

Types of Communication

Individual communication, mass communication (diffusion), telecommunication, unidirectional/bidirectional, public/private.

Types of Receptors

Group: a collaborative activity restricted to a small number of people who share sentiments, identification, or interests, and who rationally structure the pursuit of objectives.

Crowd: a broad collective activity driven by emerging motivations that are not rational, more emotional and loosely structured. It is reconstructible but not directly observable in particular.

Public: people who share some common characteristics as a group, but with a more dispersed character. They are oriented around specific or shared interests, emotionally, and tend to last longer.

Crowd + Public: dispersion, absence of self-awareness and self-identification, absence of structure, strong emotion, and behavior that is not rational in its attitudes and conduct. Blumer, Cosio, 1939; Washy, 2004

Concept of the crowd and the public: anonymous. Neither self-identification nor identification with others exists among disorganized people. There is no other organization or hierarchy, and the composition is heterogeneous and homogeneous in behavior.

Mass Communication

Communicative experience: it is prompt and transient, with one communicator (transmitter), and it is a complex and costly organization (Rodrigo, 2001). It is generalized in selection and diffusion of stereotypes. It is one-directional telecommunication.

Origins and History of Mass Communication

Origins of communication: from the 15th century, the printing press; in the nineteenth century, newspapers and specialized media; in the late nineteenth century, the telegraph; in 1895, cinema; in the 1920s, radio and the general information press; in 1940, television; in 1950, the multiple penetration of cars and radio; and by 1970, complete saturation.

Basic Communication Functions

Basic functions: information, entertainment, education, and persuasion. Also monitoring of the social environment, correlation among the components of society, and social transmission of culture across generations.

Culture and Mass Culture

Attributes of culture and vulgar culture, mass culture, artificial culture, commercial purposes, standardization, and homogenization of culture.

Characteristics of popular culture of our time: interclass, produced by institutions or specialized companies, and benefiting the largest audience. It is transmitted through media technologies, with spatial and temporal distance between production and consumption.

Comparison: Humanist Culture and Mass Culture

Humanist culture: knowledge, sensitivity, elegance, quality, depth, formal refinement, and public competence; educational vocation; the charisma of the author as creator.

Mass culture: ignorance, insensitivity, vulgarity, quantity, superficiality, ordinariness, commercial vocation, impersonal production, and standardized production.

Transformation of Mass Culture (Causes)

Abundance of cheap cultural supply, greater choice of possibilities, diversity, and the audience's control over its own evolution; decentralization and increased interactivity. Predictable little public, sovereign public, and a dispersed public; active reception, specialization, and fragmentation of the audience.

Broadcasting: communication through visual and acoustic codes, always requiring decoding, interpretation, and both types of affective comprehension and interpretation of the message.

Communication as an Object of Study

Definition of the object of study: reference to empirical communication. The object of study is communication itself, which is characterized as resistant, changing, expansive, and in need of delimitation. It relates the components of communication to their own space-time and cultural contexts.

Fields of study: research methods in communication, studies of general dimensions of the social communication system, the study of media, intercultural communication, and audience studies.

Methods and Techniques

Method: a sound, orderly, objective, and systematic activity or process by which one establishes the way to achieve a purpose. Types: historical, comparative, critical, quantitative, and qualitative.

Techniques: the concrete operations used to carry out a scientific method. Quantitative: seeks generalization and general trends, without including non-quantifiable and unique aspects. Qualitative: seeks not generalization but singularization and the understanding of concrete cases.

Theory

What is a theory? A systematically organized body of knowledge that establishes classifications of precise concepts, formulates complex concepts and research problems, and formulates general ideas about social change, supported by empirical evidence.

Theoretical Currents

Interpretive perspective: the origin of communication is interpersonal; from intersubjectivity and social relations arises the construction of shared meanings within society. Media act as definers of symbolic systems, legitimizers, and switches, grounded in sociopolitical processes.
Palo Alto School, symbolic interactionism, constructionism.

Functionalist perspective: society is an organized whole; each element explains the system through its function. Independence exists between structure and function, along with dysfunctional consequences. It seeks to discover functions of the media. Lasswell, Wright, Lazarsfeld, Merton.

Critical perspective: Marxist analysis of capitalist society as the object of analysis. Means of communication are seen as companies that help reproduce the capitalist system, denounce persuasion strategies and manipulation, and act as ideological instruments. Frankfurt School: Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse; strict methodology, analytic induction, rationalism, critical discourse, Marxism and psychoanalysis, and the critique of technology as an agent of social control and the commodification of culture.

Interpretive Perspective in Detail

Palo Alto School (1960s-70s): Paul Watzlawick, Gregory Bateson, and Erving Goffman. Classifications of orders of communication: first-order and second-order communication. We face communication through interpretations. It is impossible not to communicate, and every act communicates within the situation.

Symbolic interactionism: George Herbert Mead (1982), Charles Cooley, and William I. Thomas. Symbols (not only verbal language) enable communication. Interaction permanently constructs the meaning of social situations and behavior. Subjective construction is central, media contents vary, and responses are diverse, which challenges simplistic notions of media influence.

Constructionism: Berger and Luckmann. Everyday life is shared intersubjectively. The social world of daily life is taken for granted, inevitable, and confirmed. We relate through face-to-face typifications, and social structures are a set of typifications. Information is self-legitimized: representation, objectification, and imagination. Production of meaning arises from social interaction.