CMNS1234 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Critical Thinking, Rationality, Media Studies
28 May 2018
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Critical Thinking
• Critical thinking helps you to identify the obvious and the hidden messages more
accurately, and to understand the process by which an argument is constructed
• reasoning requires us to decide between opposing points of view. We may not like
evidence that contradicts our own opinions or beliefs.
• Our thinking might not be accurate if we are not fully aware of the influences that
affect it. These can include such things as our own assumptions, preconceptions,
bias, dislikes, beliefs, things we take for granted as normal and acceptable, and all
those things about ourselves and our world that we have never questioned.
• It is also challenging to question our belief systems. We think of these as part of our
identity and it can be unsettling if we feel our identity is called into question.
• Is this true?
• Intuition, Tenacity, Authority, Rationality, Empiricism
Communication as an Object of Study: Mapping the Territory.
• ‘communication is a fundamental social process, a basic human need and the
foundation of all social organization’ (WSIS 2004:online).
• Four major ages of communication have been identified and outlined by De Fleur
and Ball-Rokeach (1989).
The Age of Signs and Signals
• without communication, social organisation and the ensuing cultural lives it enabled,
could not take place.
• the change to speech and language communication made possible breathtaking
modifications of human existence
• Walter Ong has argued that the storehouse of information in oral cultures is found in
repetitive, formularised stories of human action.
The Age of Writing
• The Age of Writing, was a transitional one. It included a transition from
conventionalist pictographs to the advent of phonetic writing.
• development of portable and easily stored media such as scrolls and books meant
that ‘the human mind was freed from the burdensome task of having to remember
entire cultures and reproduce them in the minds of and memories of every new
generation
• With the invention of Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press and movable type the
spread of literacy in the west quickly followed.
The Age of Mass Communication
• The development of the newspaper, the first significant medium of mass
communication, was made possible because it occurred in a particular social setting
• the pace of human communication has accelerated, compressing and altering
perceptions of space and time with a proliferation of broadcast and narrowcast
media.
• There is a convergence of three essential components namely, telecommunication
systems including mobile telephony, computer hardware and software, and digitized
media content.
Defining Communication
• a form of ‘social interaction through messages’
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Critical thinking: critical thinking helps you to identify the obvious and the hidden messages more accurately, and to understand the process by which an argument is constructed reasoning requires us to decide between opposing points of view. We may not like evidence that contradicts our own opinions or beliefs: our thinking might not be accurate if we are not fully aware of the influences that affect it. These can include such things as our own assumptions, preconceptions, bias, dislikes, beliefs, things we take for granted as normal and acceptable, and all those things about ourselves and our world that we have never questioned. It is also challenging to question our belief systems. We think of these as part of our identity and it can be unsettling if we feel our identity is called into question. Communication as an object of study: mapping the territory.
