Communication

My first scholarly interpretation of communication originated from a text I read in Professor Fischer's summer course, "The Transmission Model of Communication." Through this text I gathered that communication is an intricate process of presenting and then interpreting, or extracting meaning from, a message. It is important to understand that meaning is "not ‘extracted’, but "constructed;" meaning requires context; an understanding that within each side of the communication lies varying ideologies, attitudes and expectations (Chandler). Communication through various forms of media, or mass communication, creates a "working reality that defines relations among people and events;" what is generated through the media becomes the narratives that viewers/listeners/readers follow and often times believe to be what is important and true (Hardt 1).

Mass communication, however, raises some concerns and complications. Hardt explains that mass communication, as enabled by the printing press, “construct ways of seeing individuals as masses” (Hardt 1). So mass communication, though it spreads ideas quickly and further than possible beforehand, limits the power of individual communication; a direct and more pure transfer of ideas or as Hardt puts it, “balance between the authenticity of individual expression and the inauthenticity of institutionally manufactured articulations of reality” (Hardt 2). Mass communication introduces the need to meet commercial demand and therefore the need to operate under commercial agendas, hindering truthful reporting (Hardt 3).

Chandler, Daniel. The Transmission Model of Communication. 1994.

Hardt, Hanno. Myths for the Masses. An Essay on Mass Communication. Oxford, England. Blackwell Publishing. 2004.