You might recall from our first class the Newcomb model.
One of the basic models we covered in our first week.
The model contains the elements A, B and X.
A is the sender, B is the receiver and X is some shared social factor that
1) influences the relationship between A & B and
2) is influenced itself by this relationship.
Let’s say A is Anton and B is Barbara.
Anton and Barbara are friends and both like the movies of the famous director Xavier.
Xavier’s new movie comes out and Barbara absolutely hates it,
she thinks it’s pretentious and boring.
The relationship between Barbara and Xavier has changed.
She is not such a big fan anymore.
As a result the relationship between Anton and Barbara might change as well,
since they now completely disagree on their appreciation of this movie and Xavier’s directing.
Also, Anton’s relationship with Xavier might change,
perhaps he will start to see this movie in a new light as a result of Barbara’s criticism
or he will defend him avidly and as a result become an even bigger fan.
Newcomb's model is important because it's one of the first communication models
that includes the idea of a social environment that influences the communication process
and is itself influenced by the communication process.
It contains the idea that communication is used to construct and maintain a social reality.
A reality that’s very personal for every individual.
This theory, that communication is a building block of a social reality,
became popular in the nineteen sixties.
In their influential book ‘The Social Construction of Reality’,
Berger and Luckmann's argue that all knowledge about everyday reality,
all knowledge that we take for granted,
even simple and even objective ‘truths’,
are actually born from and maintained by social interactions.
We ‘know’ that
lying is
wrong,
that
boys play with
cars,
that
motorcycles are
cool,
that we should
obey
the law,
because as children and adults
we are programmed by parents, friends, family, class mates,
and indirectly by mediated communication,
with ideas of what is real.
We are socially taught seemingly fixed ‘rules’
and ‘truths’ that are in reality are social constructs.
This reality is unique for every individual.
Our own reality lives, evolves and dies with us and in a way we are at the center of it.
This is the theory of social constructionism that was further developed
by scholars in the sixties and seventies.
A key element of social constructionism is that people do not construct reality by themselves.
We need to communicate with others to make sense of the world.
To understand the ‘rules of live’ and know where we belong and don’t belong.
This perspective completely challenged the idea that reality is fixed and objective,
and that the truth of that reality can be proven by scientists.
This meant that scientists – according to social constructionists -
had to study how reality was formed in the mind of people,
how they use social interaction and mediated communication
to create and maintain their personal image of reality.
New, more qualitative, deeper and explorative methods were required for this.
Communication scientists borrowed new methods from anthropology,
sociology, political sciences and literature studies
to gain insight in how reality, or culture, is formed with use of communication.
New popular methods were in-depth interviews,
textual analysis
and historical and socio-political analysis.
Scientists were also more and more interested in the social and political context
in which communication was produced and received.
We’ll discuss that further next.