Communication theory

Cybernetics

Norbert Wiener, a mathematician, engineer and philosopher was the first to try to thoroughly define cybernetics. He believed it was the science of communications and control in animals and machines. He took the word from the Greek word for steersman. Ampere, who came before Wiener, wanted cybernetics to be the science of government and philosopher Warren McCulloch thought cybernetics was an experimental idea concerned with the communication with and between an observer and his environment. Some think of cybernetics as the science of effective organization, while others believe it focuses on form and pattern. Margaret Mead, the famed anthropologist, believed it was a language for expressing what one sees.

Cybernetic theory has four components: variety, circularity, process and observation. Variety relates to the information and communication/control theories and emphasizes choices. Circularity ignores concepts of hierarchy in systems, favoring a more level playing field. Process looks at feedback loops and involves regulations within systems. Observation involves decision making and how we compute conclusions.

Currently, cybernetics is applied to cognition and such practical pursuits as psychiatry, family therapy, management and government and is mainly used to understand complex forms of social organization including communication and computer networks.

... society can only be understood through a study of the messages and communication facilities which belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever increasing part.

Still in its infancy, the full potential of cybernetics is as yet unknown. Called the science and art of understanding and often thought of as interfacing hard problems with soft sciences, cybernetics is likely to be studied by philosophers, mathematicians, sociologists, and other scientists for many years to come before a firm definition evolves..

The Rhetoric

Rhetorical theory is based on the available means of persuasion. That is, a speaker who is interested in persuading his or her audience should consider three rhetorical proofs: logical, emotional, and ethical. Audiences are key to effective persuasion as well. Rhetorical syllogism, requiring audiences to supply missing pieces of a speech, are also used in persuasion.

Semiotics:
Basic Assumptions

Cultures are formed through language. Language is public, social, and communal, not private or personal. (If anyone used a private language, it would be very uninteresting to the rest of the world.)

Users of a common language form what is called a "speech community," though we use "speech" in this context to include many kinds of communication communities (subcultures, dialects, ethnic groups, social-class specific communities, etc.); any individual can participate in multiple "speech communities".

Language is a system with rules (its own internal structure). Language as a system is multi-leveled, from speech sounds, words, and sentences to longer units called discourse. Discourse circulates through a culture, providing meanings, values, and social identities to individuals.

Discourse is the level studied by most cultural theory and semiotics. All of our cultural statements--from "mainstream" and official "high culture" products to popular culture genres and emerging new cultural forms--can thus be studied as forms of discourse, parts of a larger cultural "language."

Communication and meaning are formed by mediations--representive or symbolic vehicles that "stand for" things, meanings, and values. The mediating vehicles are called "signs". For example, words in a language, images, sounds, or other perceptible signifiers.

Therefore signs and sign-systems never present a copy of "reality"--the order of things external to language and our mediated way of knowing things--but a socially interpreted and valued representation.

The study of how a society produces meanings and values in a communication system is called semiotics. (Here "sign" has a specialized meaning, referring to our social and cultural vehicles for signification or meaning.) Languages, and other symbolic systems like music and images, are called sign systems because they are governed by learnable and transmittable rules and conventions shared by a community.

Phenomenology

The intuitive experience of phenomena (what presents itself to us in conscious experience) as its starting point and tries to extract the essential features of experiences and the essence of what we experience. It stems from the School of Brentano and was mostly based on the work of the 20th century philosopher Edmund Husserl, developed further by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger. Phenomenological thought essentially influenced the development of existential phenomenology and existentialism in France, as is clear from the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, and Munich phenomenology (Johannes Daubert, Adolf Reinach) in Germany.

"The experience of otherness or dialogue within the parameters of perception: it seeks to explain what is ‘real’ for the individual as communication takes place. The Embodied Mind is seen as a key factor in the development of authentic human relationships. However, it is hard and practically impossible to measure authentic communication between people. "

Social-psychological

Social psychological studies how individuals relate to the societies they live in, particularly insofar as those relations are mediated by face-to-face interaction. Children first learn languages, moralities, and positions in class structures, not by encountering abstract entities labelled 'institutions' or 'social structures' but primarily through everyday intercourse with others. When, as adults, we are in contact with economic, legal, or religious institutions, the contacts in practice are usually with employees or agents of the institutions.


Is continually interrelating three levels of analysis: the individual, the interpersonal, and the social structural (which should be taken to include economic and political structures). According to this view, it is something of an interstitial science: it aims to link the study of the individual by general psychology and the biological sciences to that of society by sociology and the other social sciences, and it is thus a very challenging and potentially pivotal social science.

The sociopsychological tradition can be divided into three large branches.

Behavioral, associated with a stimulus-response approach, concentrates on how people actually behave in communication situations.

Cognitive, the mental operations used in managing information that leads to behavioral outputs, is much more in vogue today because many see the behavioral as too simplistic.

Communibiology is the study of communication from a biological perspective.

Sociocultural.

The sociocultural tradition focuses on social structures and how people interact with each other in everyday life. This view is associated with scholars such as Mead (psychology), Garfinkel (ethnomethodolgy) and Goffman (sociology). For this tradition, the important aspect of communication is the role of the social world and how people work together to create meaning.

There are a number of contributing lines of work within this tradition.

Symbolic interactionism from the work of George Mead, emphasizes the idea that social structures and meaning is created and maintained within social interactions.

Social constructionism, or the social construction of reality investigates how human knowledge is constructed through social interaction and argues that the nature of the world is less important than the language used to name and discuss it.

Sociolinguistics is the study of language and culture.

Critical theory

Critical theory is adequate only if it meets three criteria: it must be explanatory, practical, and normative, all at the same time. That is, it must explain what is wrong with current social reality, identify the actors to change it, and provide both clear norms for criticism and achievable practical goals for social transformation. Any truly critical theory of society, as Horkheimer further defined it in his writings as Director of the Frankfurt School's Institute for Social Research, “has as its object human beings as producers of their own historical form of life”

"Marxist inspired movement in social and political philosophy originally associated with the work of the Frankfurt school. Drawing particularly on the thought of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, critical theorists maintain that a primary goal of philosophy is to understand and to help overcome the social structures through which people are dominated and oppressed. Believing that science, like other forms of knowledge, has been used as an instrument of oppression, they caution against a blind faith in scientific progress, arguing that scientific knowledge must not be pursued as an end in itself without reference to the goal of human emancipation. Since the 1970s, critical theory has been immensely influential in the study of history, law, literature, and the social sciences." - Britannica Encyclopedia