Discovery

Discovery

Sunday, August 31, 2014

Cary, J - A Cultural Approach to Communication - Dewey - Week 02

Carey, J. (n.d.). CHAPTER 1 A Cultural Approach to Communication. Retrieved May 11, 2014, from http://www3.niu.edu/acad/gunkel/coms465/carey.html
Dewey on Communication:
-       Experience and Nature: Of all things communication is the most wonderful.
-       Society exists not only by transmission, by communication, but it may fairly be said to exist in transmission, in communication.

Author considers the quotes:
-       Dewey new there were two understandings for communication.

Transmission:
-       Dominates modern discourse.
-       Giving information to others.
-       The desire to increase the sped and effect of messages.
-       Started with migration to the new world.
o   Transmission and expansion of the word of god.
-       Fell into the realm of science.

Became the modification of matter and transmission of thought.

Ritual view of communication:
-       Linked to sharing, participation, possession of common faith.
o   The representation of shared beliefs.
o   Drawing together of people in fellowship.
o   Construction and maintenance of an ordered, meaningful cultural world that can serve as control and container for human actions. (controlling human experience.)

Ritual view of communication speaks to culture.
-       Americans use culture to define others and groups.
o   But they don’t look at culture as applied to them,
o   Because of individuality.

Newspapers act as ritual communication.
-       The individual is involved and reading the stories as others.
-       It is a presentations of reality that gives form and order.

News:
-       A cultural form that attracts “hunger for the experience.”
-       Created by the middle class and reflects styles.
o   Not universal tastes.
-       It survives as long as the class that sponsors it, wants it.
-       It does not portray information, but drama.
o   The opposing forces in the world.

Dewey:  Communication is the most wonderful because it is the basis of human fellowship.
-       It produces social bonds.
-       Shared culture demands consensus by communication.

Part II
-       Communication is a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired and transferred.
o   The process of communication are so ordinary, it is hard for us to give them attention.

Art – Making the phenomena strange.
-       Things become so familiar we no longer see them.

Dewey:
-       Knowledge grows when things become problematic.
-       Information gaps are a call to action.
-       Sometimes we can only see the information gaps when we remove the mundane.
There is reality and then, after fact, an account of it.
-There is a world of objects, and there is language to describe it.

Reality is produced by communication, by the use of words.
-       Our brains literally create our own world.
o   “History of order” the forms in which people have endowed significance., order and meaning by their own intellectual processes.

Displacement – The ability to talk about something thought its not there.


A finite set of symbols, or phenomena, can produce an infinite set of sentences.

Thought is generally considered private in “in the head.”
-       The author suggests its public because it is based on cultural symbols and notions.
o   We have the ability to form multiple scenarios and run them forward to see what might work best.
o   We produce our world and then we live it.
§  The magic of self-deception.
§  We also have to maintain our world.
§  Reality breaks down and it must be repaired.

To study communication is to examine the social process of where symbolic forms are created.

Models, any models, represent what the process is, but they also produce the behavior they describe.

Problems associated with communicators are linked to problems in community and culture.

Our lives are shaped by our perceptions of experience.

Interest in Communicator derives from arrangement of our models of communication and communication.
-       Which derives from transmission theory which is based in power/anxiety models.
-       That is why we tend to look at communication as a network of power, administration, decision, control – A political order.

However, life consists of:
-       Aesthetic experience
-       Religious ideals
-       Personal Values and Notions.
-       These are ritualistic views and notions.


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