the communication matrix |
Working Definition:
A matrix is an environment in which something is created. A communication matrix is the situation in all its inter-related aspects that envelopes the communication. All communication is situated and is governed by its situation.
The OED defines matrix in the following way: "1. The uterus or womb ... 2. A place or medium in whch something is bred, produced, or developed 1552. b. A place or point of origin and growth. 1605.
Disciplinary Definitions:
The term communication matrix identifies not the eye or the ear but that complex human sensorium of speech, vision, hearing, gesture, touch, and kinesthetic processes. The communication matrix includes those subtle and profound ways in which humans intereact with the phenomenal world." C. Kaha Waite, Mediation and the Communication Matrix, 23.
For Waite, communication is a generative matrix in which each part can be understood only in its relation to the other parts in the matrix. In her view, to isolate one element of a communication situation and consider it as if it were a "stand alone" fact, so to speak, is misleading. It would be more or less equivalent to trying to understand the taste of a chocolate cake by tasting flour. The ingredients of a cake have to be understood in relation to each other and in a temporal sequence of the activity of making a cake. The concept of a communication matrix brings this point of view into communication studies.
Comments:
Although I have adoped Waite's term, in C-CS it does not have the phenomenological cast that it does in her work. It correlates with James Paul Gee's view that meanings are always "situated." (An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method, 40ff.). He remarks that "the meanings of words are not stable and general. Rather, words have multiple and every changing meanings created for and adapted to specific contexts of use" (40). Gee believes that "the context of an utterance (oral or written) is everything in the material, mental, personal, interactional, social, cultual, and historical situation in which the utterance was made" (54) This view correlates to Fauconnier's conception of "mental spaces" that "are built up during an ongoing discourse and revised as the discourse proceeds" (Mental Spaces, 16) It also correlates to his later work with Turner on The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities.
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last revised:
June 13, 2007
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