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Introduction

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Communication Theory for Humans

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Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of the book, presents some reflections on ‘theory’ generally and communication theory specifically, and explains the book’s particular orientation towards embodied and situated human communicators. It describes the book’s six core concepts (actors, narrators, members, performers, influencers, and produsers), gives a brief overview of each chapter, and points to a number of potential gaps and omissions in the concept-led theoretical journey undertaken. This chapter also presents a brief history of communication studies as an academic discipline and describes recent attempts to ‘de-Westernise’ it—that is, to open it up to non-Western ideas, voices, and frameworks and to better recognise the contributions of non-Western scholars.

Communication is a—perhaps the—fundamental social process. Without communication, human groups and societies would not exist.

—Schramm (1963: 1)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Relatedly, in their recent book Changing News Use: Unchanged News Experiences? (2021), Irene Costera Meijer and Tim Groot Kormelink argue that while practices around news consumption are evolving and diversifying—for example, in addition to reading, watching, and listening, we now also scroll, tag, check, and sometimes actively avoid news—‘many underlying patterns of news experience—how people appreciate news—are surprisingly durable’ (p.2). Indeed, James Carey (2009: 17) similarly observes that ‘news changes little and yet is intrinsically satisfying; it performs few functions yet is habitually consumed’.

  2. 2.

    The first academic paper I always assign my theory classes to read is Howard Becker’s ‘Becoming a Marijuana User’. This paper was published way back in 1953 and yet it remains one of the best examples of ‘applied’ symbolic interactionism. We will briefly examine this paper in Chapter 2; however, I mention it here simply because it offers an excellent example of how scholarly works can act as catalysts for our imagination. For example, Carter and Fuller (2016: 938) observe that ‘to this day, when students read ‘Becoming a Marijuana User’ they realise how creative one can be as a researcher; Becker was instrumental in inspiring scholars to dare to examine unique, taboo, and esoteric phenomena not studied by others’.

  3. 3.

    As Pooley (2016: xii) humorously puts it, ‘“communication”, as an organized academic enterprise, was jerrybuilt atop a motley cluster of barely compatible, legitimacy-starved skills-training traditions’.

  4. 4.

    Relatedly, activists sometimes suffer the delusion that everyone is equally attentive to their cause—or at least should be. But of course some people, such as those facing starvation, have little concern for causes other than how to obtain food. As the humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow once famously put it: ‘For the man who is extremely and dangerously hungry, no other interests exist but food. He dreams food, he remembers food, he thinks about food, he emotes only about food, he perceives only food and he wants only food’ (Maslow 1943: 374).

  5. 5.

    Rob Stones (2008: 5) rightly argues that older theories ‘can be very helpful in the analysis of new societal features, just as new ways of seeing things can provide fresh insights not only into new societal features but also into long-standing and/or historical societal features’.

  6. 6.

    Though we give his work scant attention in this book, it is important to add that James Carey’s (2009) ‘cultural approach’ to communication was also heavily inspired by the Chicago School of symbolic interactionism. For Carey, ‘the most viable though still inadequate tradition of social thought on communication comes from those colleagues and descendants of Dewey in the Chicago School: from Mead and Cooley through Robert Park and on to Erving Goffman’ (2009: 19).

  7. 7.

    It is worth adding here that in 2021 the Swedish scholars Susanne Schotz, Joost van de Weijer, and Robert Eklund were awarded the prestigious Ig-Nobel prize for biology for their research on ‘cat-human communication’.

  8. 8.

    For example, Berger and Luckman’s famous work, The Social Construction of Reality (1966), overlaps in many ways with the works of George Herbert Mead and Herbert Blumer. Berger and Luckman argue that human society is intersubjective and that it is fundamentally created and sustained by our continuous interactions and communications with others. While each of us may perceive the world from a somewhat unique perspective, there will always be a ‘correspondence’ between our meanings and interpretations and those of everybody else—that is, we will ‘share a common sense’ about reality (1966: 36), and a ‘social stock of knowledge’ will always be ‘transmitted from generation to generation’ (ibid. 41). Couldry and Hepp’s (2017) The Mediated Construction of Reality, which we draw on throughout this book, also overlaps to some extent with Berger and Luckman’s work. However, they emphatically state at the outset that their aim is neither to ‘rework’ Berger and Luckman’s book nor to ‘reinterpret’ it: ‘Our aim instead, starting out from something like their basic ambition, is to build a different but comparable account of how social reality is constructed, an account that is adequate to the communicative forms of the digital age’ (p.6).

  9. 9.

    The most obvious example of this is a prison but border checkpoints (e.g., between Israel and Palestine), encampments (e.g., housing Uyghur people in China), and other kinds of detention institutions clearly inhibit human agency in various ways. And yet even in such circumstances humans are never entirely without agency. Indeed, even when incarcerated, individuals can still ‘envision themselves as competent agents capable of independent thought and action’ (Novek 2005: 296). For example, Novek’s study demonstrates that contributing to a prison newspaper affords inmates limited forms of self-expression and can help them maintain a sense of autonomy in a largely controlled, depersonalised environment.

  10. 10.

    In the same vein, Barney et al. (2016: xxii) write that ‘participants in new media environments (engineers, policymakers, investors, branders, employers, users, workers, thinkers, hackers, activists, players, dreamers, propagandists, educators, artists, and so on) shape the media as they are being shaped through them’.

  11. 11.

    It is worth noting here that the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to two journalists (Maria Ressa of the Philippines and Dmitry Muratov of Russia) for their courageous efforts ‘to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace’ (RTÉ 2021).

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  1. Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland

    Neil O’Boyle

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O’Boyle, N. (2022). Introduction. In: Communication Theory for Humans. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-02450-4_1

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