Introduction to communication studies- John Fiske: PDF

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Introduction to communication studies- John Fiske:...

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Introduction to communication studies- John Fiske: Communication is talking to one another, it is television, it is spreading information, it is our hairstyle, it is literary criticism: the list is endless. Communication is a multi-disciplinary area of study. “I assume that all communication involves signs and codes. Signs are artefacts or acts that refer to something other than themselves; that is, they are signifying constructs. Codes are the systems inte which signs are organized and which determine how signs may be related to each other.” “I assume too, that these signs and codes are transmitted or made available to others: and that transmitting or receiving signs/codes/communication is the practise of social relationship”. “I assume that communication is central to the life of our culture: without it culture of any kind must die. Consequently the study of communication involves the study of culture with which it is integrated”. Underlying these assumptions is a general definition of communication as “social interaction through messages”. Kommunikation i den här boken kan ses på två olika vis: The first sees communication as the transmission of messages. It is concerned with how senders and receivers encode and decode, with how transmitters use the channels and media of communication. It is concerned with matters like efficiency and accuracy. It sees communication as a process by which one person affects the behavior or state of mind of another. If the effect is different from or smaller than the which was intended, this school tends to talk in terms of communication failure, and to look to the stages in the process to find out where the failure occured. The second sees communication as the production and exchange of meanings. It is concerned with how messages, or texts, interact with people in order to produce meanings: that is, it is concerned with the role of texts in our culture. It uses terms lika signification, and does not consider misunderstandings to be necessarily evidence of communication failurethey may result from cultural differences between sender and receiver. For this school, the study of communication is the study of text and culture. The main method of study is the science of signs and meanings. Each scholar interprets the definition of communication as social interruption through messages in its own way. The process school sees messages as that which in transmitted by the communication process. Many of its followers belives that intention is a crucial factor in deciding what constitutes a message. The message is what the sender puts into whatever means.

For semiotics, on the other hand, the message is a construction of signs which, through interacting with the receivers, produce meanings. The sender, defined as the transmitter of the message, declines in importance. The emphasis shifts to the text and how it is “read”. And reading is the process of discovering meanings that occurs when the reader interacts or negotiates with the text. This negotiation takes place as the reader brings aspects of his or her cultural experience to bear upon the codes and signs which make up the text. It also involves some shared ideas about what the text is about. So readers with different social experience or from different cultures may find different meanings in the same text. Shannon and Weaver's mathematical theory of communication. Seeing communication as the transmission of messages. Their basic model of communication presents it as a simple linear process. Information source→ transmitter→ (signal) noise source (received signal) → receiver→ destination. Three levels of problem in their study of communication: 1. (Technical problems) How accurately can the symbols of communication be transmitted? 2. (Semantic problems) How precisely do the transmitted symbols convey the desired meaning? 3. (Effectiveness problems) How effectively does the received meaning affect conduct in the desired way? 1. De tekniska problemen är de som är lättast att förstå och anledningen till att de utvecklade teorin för att kunna förklara. 2. De semantiska problemen är enkla att identifiera, men svårare att lösa. Ett meddelande kan betyda en sak inom en kultur och en annan inom en annan kultur. 3. De har även fått kritik till att de kan ses som manipulering eller propaganda när A kommunicerar till B och B svarar på ett sätt som A vill. The source is seen as the decision maker, that is, the source decides which message to send, or rather selects one out of a set of possible messages. The selected message is then changed by the transmitter into a signal which is sent through the channel to the receiver. For the telephone, the channel is a wire, the signal an electrical current in it, and the transmitter and receiver are the telephone handsets. In conversations, the mouth is the transmitter, the signal is the sound waves which pass through the channel of the air, and the person's ear is the receiver. Noise Noise is anything that is added to the signal between its transmission and reception that is not intended by the source. This could be distortion of sound or cracking in a telephone wire, static in a radio signal, or “snow” on a television screen. Any signal received that was not transmitted by the source, or anything that makes the intended signal harder to decode accurately. Semantic noise is defined as any distortion of meaning occuring in the communication process which is not intended by the source but which affects the reception of the message at its destination. Noise always confuses the intention of the sender and thus limits the amount of desired information that can be sent in a given situation in a given time.

We can use the unit “bit” to measure information. Bit means in practise a yes or no choice. These choices are the basis of a computer language. Closely related to the word information is the word redundancy. Redundancy is that which is predictable or conventional in a message. The opposite of redundancy is entropy. Redundancy is the result of high predictability, entropy of low predictability. A degree of redundancy is essential to practise communication. Speech needs to be more redundancy than writing because the hearer cannot introduce his or her own redundancy as a reader can by reading something twice. Channel, medium & code The channel is the physical means by which the signal is transmitted. The main channels are light waves, sound waves, radio waves, telephone cables, the nervous system and the like. The medium is basically the technical or physical means of converting the message into a signal capable of being transmitted along the channel. My voice is a medium, the technology of broadcasting is what constitutes the media of radio and television. We can divide media into three main categories: 1. The presentational media: the voice, the face, the body. They use the natural languages of spoken words, expressions, gestures and so on. They require the present of the communicator, for he or she is the medium. They are restricted to be here and now, and produce acts of communication. 2. The presentational media: books, paintings, photographs, writing, interior decorating and so on. There are numerous media that use cultural and aesthetic conventions to create a “text” of some sort. They are representational, creative. They produce works of communication. 3. The mechanical media: radio, telephones, television, telexes. They are transmitters of category 1 and 2. The main distinction between category 2 and 3 is that the media in 3 use the channels created by engineering and are thus subject to greater technological constraints and are more affected by level A noise than those in category 2. The categories do leak into each other and you may find it convenient at times to merge them into one. Categorization involves identifying differences, but it is as important to think of the similarities between media as the differences. People tend to use newspapers, radio and television to connect themselves to society, but use books and films to escape reality for a while. The better educated tended to use the print media, those with less education were inclined towards the electronic and visual media....