The Fields of Communication Study belong to a Conceptual Map of a Domain |
To expect consensus about the models, methods, or fields that comprise the study of communication is unrealistic. This entry looks at them from an historical perspective based on the evolution of the concepts with which they are associated. This perspective is not a new one and in many respects characterizes all of the texts examined so far.
ABSTRACT The fields of communication study can be considered a conceptual landscape that changes over time. As it develops, this conceptual landscape is mapped so that persons can find their way in it. The concepts mapped tend to cluster and their relationships form a network of paths. Maps can be drawn from various perspectives. The terrain is mapped as a concept map of communication, thus, the map is of a conceptual domain. Paradigms are more brittle than domains. |
The fields of communication study can be considered a conceptual landscape that changes over time
Metaphorically, the fields of communication study can be understood as areas of a conceptual landscape that is constantly evolving much as a city grows out of a farmland. At first there only a few, widely scattered buildings constructed on it. As their numbers grow, the fields change into homes & streets and then into neighborhoods and then into a city. The boundaries of the city change as nearby fields being developed are incorporated. The buildings in this landscape thus share a history and an identifiable position in the landscape and a mailing address. This pattern of incorporation and division fits the evolution of communication study. At the turn of the 20th century, the adjacent field of rhetoric/speech and journalism were first developed. Then an adjacent field, communication, was developed. When the three were "incorporated," the city was called communication.
Everett M Rogers begins his History of Communication Study by identifying Wilbur Schramm as its founder. Schramm was not the first "settler" of the land. When he returned from Washington, D. C. to the University of Iowa in 1943, he took up residence in the school of journalism but his real interest was in communication.
While working as director of the education division of the Office of Facts and Figures and later at the Office of War Information during WWII, he was a colleague of many social scientists, including Margaret Mead. They met regularly in 1942 to discuss interdisciplinary issues. The group was brought to Washington because
communication was considered crucial in informing the American public about the nation's wartime goals, and the details of food and gas rationing and other consumer sacrifices and in motivating the public to purchase war bonds, to avoid buying silk stockings and other scarce products on the black market, to grow victory gardens, and to support the war effort in other ways. Accordingly, communication research initially focused on studying he effects of communication. (10-11).
It is not surprising, then, that Schramm was determined to institute a program in communication. As it happened, since he had been appointed the director of the School of Journalism, he developed communication studies in this terrain. Because journalism is a form of mass communication, Schramm's inauguration of the first PhD program in communication led to dividing the terrain into mass communication and interpersonal communication. Thereby, he established communication as an academic domain.
Schramm's intellectual background was a mixture of literary study and social science. He had a PhD in literature and was the founder of the Iowa Writer's Workshop. However, he did a post-doc in experimental psychology and was very much influenced by the social scientists with whom he worked in Washington. Asked in an interview why he did not return to the study of literature after leaving Washington, Schramm remarked:
I went to Harvard and worked with Alfred North Whitehead, did graduate work at Iowa with Carl Seashore and George Stoddard in psychology, then learned about statistics and quantitative research. Having such broad interests, it would have been hard coming back to Iowa and teaching the history of Chaucer (17)
Schramm's vision of communication study was formed in the Office of Facts and Figures—"Why aren't we in communication asking those kinds of questions [discussed by the planning group in OFF/OWI]? I wanted to do that so bad it hurt" (16).
The concepts that clustered around this new study were identified in part by Harold Lasswell's report to the Rockefeller Foundation Communication Seminars in 1940 entitled, "Who says what, to whom via what channels, with what effect?" Rogers notes that Lasswell's memorandum became a founding document for the emerging field of communication study and his model provided the framework not only for the Rockefeller seminar participants but also for the wartime researchers in Washington focusing on communication effects.
Who |
What (message) → |
Channel (medium) → |
Whom (audience) → |
Effect |
The history of communication traced by Rogers follows the concepts of communication developed by several key thinkers. The architects were Paul Lazarsfeld (on mass communication), Kurt Lewin (on group dynamics), Carl Hovland (on persuasion), Norbert Wiener (on cybernetics), and Claude E. Shannon (on information theory).
The later history of communication study is not different from the early history. Key thinkers built theories in particular areas of the conceptual landscape. (See "The Field of Communication.") At times, they remodeled older theories; at other times they broke ground for new ones.
As it develops, this conceptual landscape is mapped so that persons can find their way in it.
If we are to make our way through an increasingly complex terrain, maps are quite helpful. From a cognitive perspective, maps are "mental models"—which are "akin to architect's models of buildings" (Philip N. Johnson-Laird, The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, 525). Thus, the models of communication that have emerged from particular research projects can be considered cognitive maps of its terrain or domain.
After Thomas Kuhn's immensely influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, such models tended to be discussed as research "paradigms." To categorize them as paradigms leads to questions about the extent to which they are shared and used by researchers in the field. This criterion is a kind of litmus test of the existence of a paradigm in a disciplinary field. There is another way of looking at them—as cognitive maps drawn by different "cartographers" for distinctive purposes.
Since there is so little agreement in almost any discipline about its "paradigm," the notion of a paradigm is not very helpful. Debates about its existence tend to be contentious at best and corrosive at worst. Rather than posit a discipline of communication based on a widely shared paradigm, another perspective on the matter—the notion that the field of communication is a conceptual domain that is variously mapped—avoids the monolithic character of a paradigm.
The most useful maps are usually the most current ones. However to understand their configurations, it is often quite helpful to compare them to earlier maps to see how streets and walkways connected the buildings in the past. The field of communication studies is a conceptual domain that been mapped since the 1940s when Harold Lasswell's "map" was used by Wilbur Schramm to guide him through it. More recent maps include the ones in C-CS. 
The concepts mapped are clusters.
Because field maps are of domains, such as communication, the concepts employed in them identify specific areas of research. The eight areas identified in the 1960s as the principle components of communication—senders, channels, codes, messages, contexts, noise, receivers, feedback—have arrays of concepts associated with them. (From a linguistic standpoint, concept clusters are categories.)
A map of a state in the United States, such as one might find on the Internet, shows the major cities and roads linking them. Zooming in on a given city, computerized maps show various neighborhoods and streets. Zooming in on a neighborhood, these maps can show the buildings on the streets. By analogy with such electronically embedded maps, a map of the domain of communication would show the eight principle components and lines indicating their relationships to each other. Zooming in on a component, concept maps show a cluster of terms associated with it, and so on. Concept maps, for the most part, emphasize the relations among concepts.
maps are drawn from different perspectives.
Maps can be drawn from various perspectives providing a view of the terrain mapped that emphasizes different features of it. Weather maps show different features than travel maps. Maps that emphasize geography show hills, mountains, and other aspects of the terrain not seen in travel or weather maps. GIS (Geographical Information Systems) maps can show demographic, economic, diachronic views of a terrain. The perspectives taken on a given terrain are virtually limitless.
Similarly a concept map of communication can emphasize inter-personal, group, or mass communication, each showing different aspects of its conceptual terrain.
The terrain mapped is a conceptual domain.
What does it mean to say that a concept map of communication is a map of a conceptual domain? The general meaning of the word "domain" is "sphere, area, orbit, field, arena," but it also means a "territory over which rule or control is exercised" ( Wordnet). Both senses apply here.
In a more technical sense, a conceptual domain is "a coherent area of conceptualization relative to which semantic units may be characterized" (Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, 488). Langacker distinguishes between two types of conceptual domains—basic and abstract. Though the sense of domain used in this entry is "abstract,"
his account of a basic domain is helpful in understanding the term. He writes:
The concept [KNUCKLE], for example, presupposes the conception of a finger. It would be virtually impossible to explain what a knuckle is without somehow invoking the conception of a finger as a holistic entity; it would also be misguided, for the position of a knuckle in relation to the finger as a whole is surely a central and crucial feature of our understanding of the notion. Given the concept [FINGER], however, [KNUCKLE] is easily and straightforwardly characterized. [FINGER] provides the necessary context—or domain—for the characterization of [KNUCKLE] and hence constitutes one of its primary conceptual components. (147-148.)
The conceptual domain [COMMUNICATION] similarly provides a necessary context or domain for characterizing [SENDER], [MESSAGE], [RECEIVER], [CODE], [CONTEXT]. It needs to be noted that "most concepts require specifications in more than one domain for their characterization" (154).
The concept [BANANA], for example, includes in its matrix
a specification for shape in the spatial (and/or visual) domain; a color configuration involving the coordination of color space with this domain; a location in the domain of taste/smell sensations; as well as numerous specifications pertaining to abstract domains, e.g., the knowledge that bananas are eaten, that they grow in bunches on trees, that they come from tropical areas, and so on.
With respect to the "meaning" of the word "banana," Langacker takes an encyclopedic view rather than a dictionary view (155ff.).
As a conceptual domain, communication "characterizes" the technical concepts used in studying the phenomena to which we refer when using the term. For example, the term "sender" does not necessarily imply a message. Senders can send packages of fruit. However, placed in the abstract domain, communication, itself understood in the domain of "technical term," it characterizes the qualities of the senders of message/texts not of baskets of fruit.
Paradigms are more brittle than domains.
As mentioned above, after the publication of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, many fields of academic study—especially in the humanities but also in some social sciences, communication being one of them—claimed to be researching according to a shared paradigm and that they, therefore, should enjoy the status of an academic "discipline." These ineluctable searches for disciplinarity proved to be quite disconcerting.
If the concept of a discipline was applied in its strict sense,
none of the aspiring fields of study would qualify. This is the case in the field of communication studies. When the term, discipline as currently understood, is used as a "logical" category, those and only those fields that share a model of their field can be called disciplines. This conception of discipline shatters easily when applied to practitioners working in their fields.
Rather than attempt to redefine the term discipline or to insist that the term as a category needs to be reassessed given Eleanor Rosch and other's research on categorization, understanding the field of communication studies as a cognitive domain that can be mapped can serve in its place. In Kuhn's view, the value of a paradigm was as a source of research questions. Cognitive maps can serve the same purpose. The can reveal anomalies in the way a field is being studied and thus provoke research questions.
Consider the following thought experiment: imagine traveling with a map that shows a road leading from one place to another and discovering that you ended up in some unexpected place. This experience would surely provoke you to question the accuracy of the map. In this section of C-CS, many such "roads" were questioned in reference to the map of communication drawn up by researchers using a computational model. The concept of "noise" on their map of the field is a good instance. (See "Noise.")
In C-CS the field of communication is considered to be a conceptual domain that has been mapped and will continue to be re-mapped. (See Conceptual Maps of Domains.)
jjs
Notes:
In his Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolutions of Concepts, Stephen Toulmin takes this perspective on scientific fields. It is also notable that all of the textbooks (once again with the possible exception of Holmes) provide historical contexts for the theories they include.
At a symposium on "the Structure of Scientific Theories" at the University of Illinois in 1977, Thomas Kuhn presented his "Second Thoughts on Paradigms." Kuhn remarks that readers of his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions extended his conception of a paradigm, which was intended to refer to shared examples, in ways that made it an all-inclusive conception of scientific theory (482). Frederick Suppe responded to his paper in "Exemplars, Theories, and Disciplinary Matrixes" (483ff.). Even if Kuhn's clarification could change the way persons use the term paradigm, the notion of "shared examples" presented the same problem—how many practitioners share the same or similar examples.
In his " Scientific Theories and Their Domains" (1977), Frederick Suppe offers a conception of a theoretical domain as an alternative to Kuhn's "paradigm." The conception of a conceptual domain in this entry is not indebted to Suppe whose concept of a domain is a logical category. Rather it is indebted to Ronald Langacker linguistic conception of a domain in his Foundations of Cognitive Grammar (147ff.).
The concept [COMMUNICATION] is an abstract domain in Langacker's terms—a conceptual complex.
Langacker's use of the term "matrix" works well with the conception of a "communication matrix.".
Stephen Toulmin defines discipline in a strict sense in his Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolutions of Concepts, 145ff.
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last revised:
September 4, 2007
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