Comm 10 Notes.docx

ONG: ORALITY AND LITERACY ------------------------- - Many features we have taken for granted in thought and expression (literature, philosophy and science, oral discourse among literates) are not directly native to human existence as such but have come into being because of the resou...

ONG: ORALITY AND LITERACY ------------------------- - Many features we have taken for granted in thought and expression (literature, philosophy and science, oral discourse among literates) are not directly native to human existence as such but have come into being because of the resources that technology of writing makes available to human consciousness - Contrasts between electronic and print media have sensitized us to the earlier contrast between writing and orality. Orality, Writing, and Being Human - 'Primitive', 'savage', and 'inferior' are weighted terms, somewhat like 'illiterate', which identify a state of affairs negatively, by noting a lack or deficiency - Levi-Strauss (1979) suggested 'without writing' as an alternative, although it is still a negative assessment, suggesting a chirographic bias. - Present treatment would suggest using a less invidious and more positive term, 'oral'. - Both orality and growth of literacy out of orality are necessary for the evolution of consciousness. - The shift from orality to writing intimately interrelates with more psychic and social developments than we have yet noted. MASS COMMUNICATION ------------------ - Communication -- transmission of a message from a source to a receiver - To describe communication (Harold Lasswell, 1948) is to answer these questions: - Who? - Says what? - Through which channel? - To whom? - With what effect? - Can also be defined as the process of creating shared meaning **Simple Model of Communication**  - Problems with this model: - There must be a sharing or correspondence of meaning for it to take place - Communication is a reciprocal and ongoing process with all involved parties engaged in creating shared meaning - The receiver does not only passively accept the source's message; responses and feedback are also a form of message **Osgood and Schramm's Model of Communication** A diagram of a message Description automatically generated - Shows that there is no clearly identifiable source or receiver - Therefore there is no source, receiver, or feedback - There is no feedback because all messages are presumed to be in reciprocation with other messages - Communication, being an ongoing and reciprocal process, makes all the participants, "interpreters" as workers to create meaning by *encoding and decoding* messages - Encoding -- the message is transformed into an understandable sign and symbol system - Decoding -- signs and symbols are interpreted - Medium -- carries encoded message; means of sending information - Ex. Sound waves, telephones, mass media - Mass media -- medium is a technology that carries messages to a large number of people - Problem with this model: - Noise---any interferences with successful communication---is missing - Includes screeching, loud music, biases, torn-out pages, etc. **Mass Communication**  - Is the process of creating shared meaning between mass media and their audiences - Original vs mass communication model of Osgood-Schramm: - Have much in common: interpreters, encoding, decoding, and messages - Differences lie in: - Mass communication offers "many identical messages" - Mass communication specifies "feedback" - Differences between individual elements of interpersonal and mass communication change the very nature of the communication process - Immediacy and directness of feedback in interpersonal communication free communicators to gamble and experiment with different approaches - [Interpersonal communication] is often personally relevant and possibly even adventurous and challenging - In contrast, distance between participants in the mass communication process creates a "communication conservatism" in which feedback comes too late to enable corrections or alterations in communication, making personalization and specificity difficult - [Mass communication] tends to be more constrained and less free - Inferential feedback -- indirect feedback (often with latency) - James W. Carey (1975) recognized mass communication, and offered a cultural definition of communication: "Communication is a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed." - Asserts communication and reality are linked - Communication as the foundation of culture, its truest purpose is to maintain ever-evolving "fragile" cultures - A sacred ceremony that draws persons together in fellowship and commonality CULTURE ------- - Is the learned behavior of members of a given social group - Harris (1983): Culture is the learned, socially acquired traditions and lifestyles of the members of society, including their patterned, repetitive ways of thinking, feeling, and acting - Rosaldo (1989): Culture lends significance to human experience by selecting from and organizing it; it refers broadly to the forms through which people make sense of their lives, rather than more narrowly to opera or art museums - Hall (1976): Culture is the medium evolved by humans to survive. Nothing is free from cultural influences for it is the keystone in civilization's arch and is the medium through which all of life's events must flow. We are culture. - Geertz (1991): Culture is a historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbolic forms by means of which people communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life. - Virtually all definitions of culture recognize that culture is *learned* - Creation and maintenance of culture occurs through communication, including mass communication - A culture's learned traditions and values can be seen as patterned, repetitive ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. It limits our options and provides useful guidelines for behavior. - Culture provides information that helps in making meaningful distinctions about right and wrong, appropriate and inappropriate, good and bad, attractive and unattractive, etc. through communication - Limiting effects of culture can be negative, such as when we are not willing or unable to move past patterned, repetitive ways of thinking, feeling, and acting; when we entrust our "learning" to teachers whose interests are selfish, narrow, or otherwise not consistent with our own - Culture can be liberating as well because cultural values can be *contested* - Dominant or mainstream culture -- it is the one, in pluralistic, democratic societies, that seems to hold sway with the majority of people; is often openly challenged - Liberation from limitations imposed by culture resides in our ability and willingness to learn, and use *new* patterned, repetitive ways of thinking, feeling, and acting; to challenge existing patterns; and to create our own. - Effects of culture: - Even people are defined by culture - Culmination of culture conjures stereotypes and expectations - Within large, national cultures, there are many smaller, bounded cultures (or co-cultures) that unite groups of people and enable them to see themselves as different from other groups around them, serving to *differentiate* themselves - Problems arise when differentiation leads to division, often through communication (or even miscommunication) - Through communication with people in our culture, we internalize cultural norms and values that bind diverse bounded cultures into a functioning, cohesive society. - Culture, is then, the world made meaningful; socially constructed and maintained through communication. It limits as well as liberates us; differentiates as well as unites us. It defines our realities and thereby shapes the ways we think, feel, and act. MASS COMMUNICATION AND CULTURE ------------------------------ [Two ways to understand our opportunities and responsibilities in the mass communication process are to:] - View mass media as our cultural storytellers - Stories -- sites of observations about self and society - We, the audience, are responsible for questioning tellers and their stories, interpreting stories in ways consistent with larger or more important cultural values and truths, being thoughtful, and reflecting on the stories' meanings and what they say about us and our culture. To do less is to miss an opportunity to construct our meaning, and thereby, culture. - Conceptualize mass communication as a cultural forum - Mass communication has become the primary forum for the debate about culture - The most powerful voices in the forum have the most power to shape our definitions and understandings - The forum is only as good, fair, and honest as those participating. MEDIA LITERACY -------------- - Literacy -- the ability to effectively and efficiently comprehend written symbols - Stuart Ewen (2000): Literacy was about crossing the lines that had historically separated men of ideas from ordinary people, about the enfranchisement of those who had been excluded from compensations of citizenship - Media literacy -- the ability to effectively and efficiently comprehend and use any form of mediated communication - Ewen (2000): Media literacy represents no less than the means to full participation in culture Eight Elements of Media Literacy 1. A critical thinking skill enabling audience members to develop independent judgments about media content 2. An understanding of the process of mass communication 3. An awareness of the impact of media on the individual and society 4. Strategies for analyzing and discussing media messages 5. An understanding of media content as a text that provides insight into our culture and our lives 6. The ability to enjoy, understand, and appreciate media content - Includes the ability to use multiple points of access---to approach media content from a variety of directions and derive from it many levels of meaning 7. Development of effective and responsible production skills 8. An understanding of the ethical and moral obligations of media practitioners Media Literacy Skills 1. The ability and willingness to make an effort to understand content, to pay attention, and to filter out noise 2. An understanding of and respect for the power of media messages - Third-person effect -- the common attitude that others are influenced by media messages but we are not 3. The ability to distinguish emotional from reasoned reactions when responding to content and to act accordingly 4. Development of heightened expectations for media content 5. A knowledge of genre conventions and the ability to recognize when they are being mixed - Genre -- refers to categories of expression within different media; characterized by certain distinctive and standardized styles of elements---conventions 6. The ability to think critically about media messages, no matter how credible their sources 7. A knowledge of the internal language of various media and the ability to understand its effects, no matter how complex - Each medium has its own specific internal language, expressed in production values---the choice of lighting, editing, special effects, music, camera angle, location on the page, size and placement of the headline, etc. TRENDS AND CONVERGENCE IN TELEVISION AND CABLE ---------------------------------------------- - MSO -- multiple-system operators - Companies that operate multiple cable or direct-broadcast satellite television systems - VCR -- Videocassette recorders - Allowed time-shifting (taping a show for later viewing) and zipping (fast-forwarding through taped commercials) - DVD -- Digital video disc - Allowed stopping images with no loss of fidelity - Can subtitle a movie in a number of languages - Can search for specific scenes from an on-screen picture menu - Can access information tracks that give background on the movie, its production, and its personnel - DVR -- Digital video recorder - Can "rewind" and play back portions of a program while they are watching and recording it without losing any of the show - Can digitally record programs by simply telling the system their titles - TV on the internet was slow to take off because of copyright and piracy concerns, and because few viewers had sufficient bandwidth - Bandwidth -- space on the wires bringing content into people's homes - For several years, the most typical video fare internet was a variety of short specialty transmissions (movie trailers, short independent films, music videos, news clips) - The development of increasingly sophisticated video compression software and the parallel rise of homes with broadband internet connection changed that. - Digital cable television -- delivery of digital images and other information to subscribers; offers the truest form of interactive television - Cable's digital channels permit multiplexing, carrying two or more different signals over the same channel---made possible by digital compression which "squeezes" signals to permit multiple signals to be carried over one channel and works by removing redundant information from transmission of the signal - Interactive cable - the ability of subscribers to talk back to the system operator, which permits video-on-demand (VOD)---one-click shopping, local information on demand, program interactivity, interactive program guides, and video games Recognizing Staged News - News staging -- re-creating some event that is believed to or could have happened THE INTERNET TODAY ------------------ - The internet is most appropriately thought of as a "network of networks" that is growing at an incredibly fast rate, consisting of LANs (local area networks) and WANs (wide area networks) that connect several LANs in different locations - Internet Service Providers (ISPs) -- companies that offer internet connections at monthly rates depending on the kind and amount of access needed - Instant messaging (IM) -- a real-time version of e-mail, allowing two or more people to communicate instantaneously and in immediate response to one another - Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) -- is telephone whereby calls are transferred in digital packets over the internet rather than on circuit-switched telephone wires; "voice e-mail" - World Wide Web (WWW) -- uses hypertext transfer protocols (HTTP) to transport files from one place to another; is a function of a number of components: - Hosts -- wired to the internet hosts, essentially servers - Uniform resource locator (URL) -- a site's official address - Domains -- allows more common recognition of websites - Ex. ".com", and ".org" are top-level domain names for businesses and nonprofits respectively - Browsers -- software programs loaded onto the user's computer and used to download and view Web files, taking separate files and put them all together for viewing - Search engines -- software that allows users to navigate the Net simply by entering a search word and pointing and clicking at the resulting on-screen menus - Home pages -- entryway to the site itself, containing information the site's creators want visitors to know but also provides hyperlinks to other material in that site, as well as to material in other sites on other computers linked to the Net anywhere in the world - Social networking site (SNS) -- websites that function as online communities of users, often defined by common interests such as hobbies, professions, or schools usually for socialization and interaction CHANGES IN THE MASS COMMUNICATION PROCESS ----------------------------------------- - Digital natives -- people who have never known a world without the internet - Online feedback can be, and is very often, immediate and direct thus it is more similar to feedback in interpersonal communication than in mass communication - Global village -- the idea that the new communication technologies will permit people to become increasingly involved in one another's lives; a world in which people encounter each other in depth all the time - Media do not bring the world to us but rather permit us to experience the world with a scope and depth otherwise impossible - Media, then, are extensions of our bodies - Communication technologies do not deliver or transmit information; they fundamentally alter relationships between people and their world, encouraging us to construct new meanings for the things we encounter with and through them - McLuhan (in Carr, 2011): "We shape our tools and afterward our tools shape us." Module 1: The changing landscape of communication Activity: make sense of the instruction and how to do the analysis on your own; framework as a group Instructions: Interview someone who was alive during - 1950s -- 1970s, - 1980s -- 1990s, - 2000s -- 2020s Output: How does communication and media shape culture & society? **Culture** - Learned behavior of members of a given social group - Includes traditions and lifestyles; patterened ways of thinking, feeling, and acting (Harris, 1983) - Forms through which we make sense of our lives (Rosaldo, 1989) - Historically transmitted meanings by means of which we communicate, (re)produce knowledge, attitudes (Geertz, 1991) - Is socially constructed - It is learned (How?) - We learn and maintain it through communication (Why?) - We learn it to help us interpret (classify, categorize) our experience (So what?) - What we learn enables as well as limits how we make sense of the world (What can we do about this?) - Cultural values can be contested: ability & willingness to learn new patterns - Culture is underpinned by language as an instrument for the collection of knowledge - Culture & language aid us in classifying our experiences Orality-literacy contrasts & relationships, differences in 'mentality' between oral and writing cultures +-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+ | Oral cultures | Literary cultures | +===================================+===================================+ | **Communication tends to be | **Communication tends to be | | aggregative** | analytic** | | | | | Pre-pachakaged chunks or formula | Focus: breaking down complex | | that are easily remembered | ideas; logical reasoning | | (proverbs, epithets in epic | (cause-effect, perspectives, | | poems) | details, and nuances) | | | | | Focus: on the whole, not on | Uses precise language and complex | | dissecting into component parts | sentence structures | +-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+ | **Communication tends to be | **Communication tends to be | | additive** | subordinate** | | | | | Ideas strung together using | Focus: express complex | | connecting words ("and") or | relationships between ideas | | repetition | | | | Reliance on subordination: | | Focus: adding new info | grammar tools like clauses & | | | conjunctions ("because", | | | "although") to show how ideas | | | depend on each other (main clause | | | vs subordinate clause) | +-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+ | **Homeostatic** | **Heterogeneous** | | | | | Relatively stable & consistent in | With writing & print, becomes | | the transmission of knowledge and | more diverse & open to change | | traditions | | | | Multiple voices & perspectives | | Preserves cultural identity & | | | promotes social coheision | Accumulation of knowledge: | | | innovation | | Resistance to change & loss of | | | knowledge when disrupted | | +-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+ "Orality and the growth of literacy out of orality are necessary for evolution of consciousness." (Ong, 2002) Cultures can exhibit characteristics of both oral and literary cultures **COMM 10** - Explores how communication takes place in various levels of human interaction Module 1. Changing landscape A1. Communication behavior & media Q1. Ong (2002) and Baran (2013) Module 2. Communication & rhetoric A2. Rhetorical analysis of a speech Q2. Zappen (2005) Module 3. Communication & Identity construction Module 4. Communication & representation A3. Semiotic analysis of an advertisement Q3. Hecht (2009) and Hall (1997) Module 5 & 6. Communication & culture A4. Roleplay Q4. Maggay (2002)