Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society

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Carey, James W. (1989) Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. Unwin Hyman, Boston.

Contents

Chapter 1: A Cultural Approach to Communication

Dewey's two conceptions of communication

  • Transmission
  • Ritual

Transmission view of Communication

The transmission of signals or messages over distance for the purpose of control.

  • or, A process whereby messages are transmitted and distributed in space for the control of distance and people
  • Dominant understanding in industry cultures
  • Evangelical, colonial history

Ritual view of Communication

Communication for the maintenance of society in time

  • Not the act of imparting information but the representation of shared beliefs
  • Ancient, archaic def
  • Drawing ppl together in community, commonality, fellowship

American intellectual aversion to culture

Focus on transmission instead of ritual is about a weak notion of our own culture:

  • Neither Puritanical productive work
  • Nor quantitative, scientific
  • Nor radically individual

What might an American cultural communication look like?

  • Transmission: EFFECT of reading a newspaper on the reader
  • Ritual: reading a newspaper is participation in a mass phenomenon

Carey's project and purpose

"When I came into this field I felt that [the transmission] view of communication, expressed in behavioral and functional terms, was exhausted." (23)

Communication is a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed.

The Symbolic Production of Reality

Communication hard to ascertain

  • Comm activities so mundane, familiar as to evade attention
  • Social sciences must take the mundane and make it strange (like art)
  • Put focus on typically background detail

Reality is brought into existence by language

  • Not a given to which human language vainly attempts to mimic, describe, refer
  • Simple examples: various approaches to mapping the same spaces

Thought is primarily public and social, not private

  • "on blackboards, in dances, and in recited poems." (28)
  • Thought involves building models of an environment and then running tests on it
    • Trace the mapped route with your fingertip

Dual nature of symbols:

  • Symbols of
  • Symbols for

Repetition, revision:

  • Reality must be constantly be repaired as it is constantly broken
  • e.g., intellectual paradigms, shifting, overlapping, challenging, popularizing

Paradox of studying communication

Communication about communication itself (31)

  • Not some pure phenomenon we can discover
  • No objective, natural communication object to observe
  • Seek and enact models of communication from areas of culture (law, religion, common sense, science)
    • e.g., religious thought not only described communication but modeled an appropriate use (31)

Problems of communication are linked to problems of community (33)

  • Carey critiques a "power"/"anxiety" model of transmission communications for leading to policy and institutions that reflect and recreate those mods of power and anxiety! (32)
  • "Our existing models of communication are less an analysis than a contribution to the chaos of modern culture" (34)
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