Media Studies:
Week 1: The Concept of Communication
Reporters at the US House of Representatives telegraph office 1875
John Durham Peters
The Problem of Communication
• “The term evokes a utopia where nothing is misunderstood,
hearts are open, and expression is uninhibited.”
• The concept of communication first comes into view
through the possibility of its failure.
• Communications emerges as a concern and a social anxiety
in the late 19th century.
• Developments in media of transmission and recording
(Transatlantic Telegraph - 1866, Telephone - 1876, Radio 1896)
John Durham Peters
The Problem of Communication (cont.)
• Such media made “communication” possible as a concept,
highlighted by the potential for misfires, wrong numbers, lost
letters, downed wires…
• “Only moderns could be facing each other and be worried
about ‘communicating’ as if they were thousands of miles
apart.”
• “Miscommunication is the scandal that motivates the very
concept of communication in the first place.”
John Durham Peters
The Varied Senses of Communication - Linguistic Origins
• From the Latin communicare meaning to impart, share, or
make common
• Partaking or belonging in a social body
• A connection or linkage (“steam communication”)
• Transfer or transmission (physical or psychical - one way)
• An exchange (two way)
• Symbolic interaction (word, argument, discourse, speech…)
• The mechanisms through which human relations develop
John Durham Peters
Peters’ position:
• Uses the term “communications” to refer to these
mechanisms - as Cooley writes “all the symbols of the mind,
together with the means of conveying them through space and
preserving them in time”
• these might include: hieroglyphics, writing, the press, the
post, telegraphy, photography, cinema, television…
• Takes “Communication” to be “the project of reconciling
self and other”
• “the mistake is to think that communications will solve the
problem of communication”
Peters’ History of Communication
Three Periods or Constellations:
• The Late 19th Century
• The 1920’s
• Post World War II
Spark Gap Radio
The Late 19th Century
Opposing Ideas of Solipsism…
• the impenetrability of the individual self
• the impossibility of direct communication
and Telepathy...
• the promise and possibility of total and
direct communication
• the speculations about immaterial mental
contact at a time when wireless and quasiphysical communication technologies are
emerging
• the historical connection between media
and spiritualism (mediums)
The 1920’s
Five Visions of Communication:
1) Communication as the management of
mass opinion
• Concern over the “manufacture of
consent” for good or ill - powers of
persuasion and propaganda
• Walter Lippmann’s theory of a distracted
public unqualified for political
involvement and requiring expert rule
Hugo Ball performing Karawane
The 1920’s
Five Visions of Communication:
2) Communications as the elimination of
semantic dissonance and misunderstanding
• Ogden and Richards exploration of the
potential for the accurate sharing of
consciousness
• Communication as contact between
minds via some delicate and error-prone
sign medium
• The need for an educated public and a
purification of language
Hugo Ball performing Karawane
The 1920’s
Five Visions of Communication:
3) Communication as an insurmountable
barrier
• Humans are doomed to misunderstanding
• Dada, Surrealism, and modernist
literature exploring the impossibilities of
communication and connection
Hugo Ball performing Karawane
The 1920’s
Five Visions of Communication:
4) Communication as an open-ness to the
otherness of others
• The ontological philosophy of Heidegger
• Communication is not semantic or
pragmatic, it is world disclosing
• “here communication is about the
constitution of relationships, the revelation
of otherness, or the breaking of shells that
encase the self, not about the sharing of
private mental property”
Hugo Ball performing Karawane
The 1920’s
Five Visions of Communication:
5) Communication as the re-establishment
of community and the partaking in social
life
• John Dewey’s philosophy of pragmatism
• aimed for the reinvigoration of
communication on a large scale to correct
for the loss of an “immediate community
of experience”
• communication means taking part in the
creation of a collective world
Hugo Ball performing Karawane
Post World War II
Two dominant discourses:
• communication as information exchange
- a technical discourse
• communication as both social disease and
cure - a therapeutic discourse
Atom Bomb Test
Post World War II
Information Theory:
• Shannon and Weaver’s “Mathematical
Theory of Communication” quantification of information, exchange of
signals
• Cybernetic systems theory
• anything that processed information was
a candidate for “communication”: people,
machines, biological organisms, cities
Atom Bomb Test
• communication becomes a concept that
unifies the natural sciences (DNA, genetic
codes), the liberal arts (structures of
language) and the social sciences
(communication as the basic social
process)
Post World War II
Therapeutic Discourse:
• 1950’s deliberations on the state of the
many in a mediated world: the public as
crowd, consumerism stultifying public
engagement, 5 A’s - alienation, anomie,
anonymity, apathy, and atomization
• response from humanistic psychology
and psychotherapy
• Healing the breakdown in
communication with the self and with
others
Atom Bomb Test
• Interpersonal concern with restoring the
social bond
John Durham Peters
Peters’ conclusion:
• “Communication, in the deeper sense of establishing ways
to share one’s hours meaningfully with others, is sooner a
matter of faith and risk than of technique and method.”
• “Too often ‘communication’ misleads us from the task of
building worlds together.”
• “‘Communication’ presents itself as an easy solution to
intractable human troubles: language, finitude, plurality.”
• “Acknowledging the splendid otherness of all creatures that
share our world without bemoaning our impotence to tap their
interiority.”