We’ve just seen that different scientific disciplines all study communication.
Of course they focus on different aspects of communication.
Some scholars want to understand the workings of the media infrastructure for instance,
others focus on the social importance of communication, or
political communication effects or one of many alternative perspectives.
It’s not surprising that communication is studied by so many from so many angles.
It fills our lives & society, we spend tremendous amounts of time communicating ideas,
sharing thoughts, absorbing new information, being entertained or persuaded somehow.
Communication, simply put, enables us to function as social, cultural and political animals.
It makes sense that these different perspectives have led to a wide spectrum
of scientific thought on the topic of communication.
In this course we’ll go out and explore some of them and try to find our way
in this wild jumble of theories, models and concepts.
Perhaps a good starting point therefore is to begin with a brief definition
of ‘theory’, ‘model’, and ‘concept’.
A concept is a word or set of words that represents an idea.
It’s of course important to clearly define the concepts we use.
Let’s take the concept of ‘identity’ for instance.
It’s easy to imagine two or more different interpretations
about what constitutes an identity
Is it how one views oneself, or perhaps we should also take into consideration
how ones identity is perceived by others.
Or is that particular concept better described perhaps with the word ‘image’?
Often scientists squabble over definitions, and rightly so,
because it should be clear what we talk about.
These discussions sometimes never stop, and why would they?
Different people give different meanings to a word,
and who can say which are the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ definitions?
At most we can speak about preferred or dominant definitions of concepts,
but even these usually change over time and from context to context.
In this course I will often stop to define certain key concepts.
I would like to stipulate that these definitions are unfortunately
more often than not quite disputed.
If you are following this MOOC and you had some previous classes in communication
or perhaps you have worked in communication or read books or articles about the topic
don’t be surprised when I will define things slightly different than you have learned.
For instance, when I said that media are every channel that we use to communicate,
so this would include the voice, it’s very possible that you have learned previously
that only technical channels are considered media, which would exclude the voice.
Because both definitions, and many more, exist in the scientific field.
To make things more difficult, scientists, like many professionals,
sometimes give every day words a different meaning.
If I would ask a random person in the street the definition of the word ‘text’,
most will agree that a ‘text’ is a message made up out of some type of letters.
Communication scientists however regard each carrier of communication as a text.
So a movie, a song, a painting, they‘re all ‘texts’ in our eyes, ready to be ‘read’ by an audience.