COMM 89 Lecture Notes - Nonverbal Communication, Linear Model, Social Environment
Lecture 1- Tuesday (04-04-17)
Introduction
What is communication?
Many Communication Models
Communication- A social process in which individuals employ symbols to establish and
interpret meaning in their environment.
✴Communication is…
• a social process: notion that people and interactions are part of the communication
process
• Face-to-face or online
• Involves people who come to an interaction with various intentions, motivations,
and abilities
• a process: ongoing and unending; no definable beginning or ending
‣changes over time and among interactants
• Dynamic, complex, continually changing
‣Communication experiences are cumulative and influenced by the past
‣present experiences inevitably influence person’s future
✴Symbol- arbitrary label or representation given to a phenomenon (e.g. words are symbols
for concepts and things)
• may be ambiguous
• verbal/ nonverbal
• occur in face-to-face and mediated comm
• concrete symbols: symbol represents an object
• abstract symbols: symbol stands for thought or idea
✴Meaning- what people extract from the message
• message can have more than one meaning
• not all meaning is shared, thus, must be able to explain, repeat, and clarify
✴Environment- situation or context in which communication occurs
• elements include time, place, historical period, relationship, speaker’s and listener’s
cultural backgrounds
Modeling the Comm. Process
Early models were quite basic
✴Linear model:
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• source sends message to receiver
• assuming that we can only be either the source or the receiver of communicative
content but thats not true because we can be both
• also not a reasonable assumption that the message that you receive is the message
being send
‣messages have meanings but different interpretations
‣noise
‣message sent is not message received
✴Interactional model: view of comm as the sharing go meaning with feedback that links
source and receiver, a person is either sender / receiver but not both simultaneously
✴Transactional model:
• more complex model
• we are both encoders and decoders of a message, sending and receiving messages
simultaneously
• there is meaning that is the mediator of the interaction and is co-instructed by both
messengers
• also we bring in our field of experiences
‣all experiences of the past,
‣cultural experience,
‣the relationship can
‣personality
• channel matters (phone calls vs face-to-face vs social media)
• context matters: takes place in different settings and environments, the culture in
which the interaction takes place
• must account for noise
‣metaphor for semantic noise = language differences such as jargon,
‣physical noise such as noise that may distract you (construction outside),
‣psychological noise (whats going on in your brain; if you are worried about a
different class,
‣physiological noise (body condition; being thirsty, hungry, etc; so your brain
diverts its focus to that instead of the message)
What are theories?
Extension of everyday sense making and problem solving
Simple idea of having to figure out why we do things — Sense-making
Heider’s notion of “Naive Psychologists”: we are all naive psychologists in our everyday life,
we create theories everyday
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“Scholarly” Theory
An abstract system of concepts with indications of relationships among the concepts that help us
understand a phenomenon.
Theory of Planned Behavior Why do people do what they do?
Theories differ greatly
✴Different styles
✴Different scope — Theories are proposed to help solve a problem.
✴Different goals
Theories are used in research
Research and theory are interdependent
Theory guides research.
———————————
Research refines theory.
Lecture 2 - Thursday (04-06-17)
Scholarly Theory!
3 Approaches to Research
✴Empirical/Positivistic
•wants to find objective truths
•Searches for objective “truths” and make law-like statements about humans
behavior
✴Interpretive/Hermeneutic
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