COMM 10

• Writing vs oral


  • Writing things down in the form of images
  • Once things are written down, they are "set in stone"
• Traditional vs new media


  New media is more ubiquitous than traditional media nowadays
• We should not put one (writing or oral) over the other
• Communication is a reflection of

  • Thoughts & worldviews
  • Societal structures
  • Values, norms, & system of rewards
• Primary oral culture


  • Learning is through apprenticeship, discipleship, listening, and repeating what is said
  • Actually doing what is to be learned (practical learning)
• Greek philosophers: Socratic method


  • A dialogue between teacher and students, instigated by the continual probing questions of the teacher, in a concerted effort to explore the underlying beliefs that shape the students views and opinions
• Listening is important in primary oral culture
• Before sophisticated forms of organizing knowledge, our ancestors relied on storytelling
• Development of drawing & writing

  Technologizing of the world has become more sophisticated with the introduction of tools
• Having written words for oral speech


  Communication has evolved beyond its need for survival, we now need to improve our quality of life
• Orality & literacy


  Have a (???) relationship
• Media Development


  • Greatly affected the individual & society
• Storytelling lost its value given literacy
• Storytelling preserved from oral cultures
• Tools (e.g. printing press, digital media)

  Enabled storytelling to spread information widely
• Media


  Crucial tool for communication & dissemination of information
• Culture cannot exist in the absence of communication; communication is language
• Power is possessed by those who can share their stories to a larger group through mass media (traditional & new media)


  • Human capital
  • Platform, following
• Beauty influencers


  • Challenge the beauty standards / narratives
  • Creating new narratives
• Different news companies allow us to contrast data
• Not about reality in itself, but how they frame reality
• Each society has its regime of truth
• Post structuralism


  Expresses the belief that individual meaning and values are taken from their milieu and the common meanings of a group of individuals, so that their reality is contextualized and socially constructed, and mediated by language and discourse
• Challenging claims to absolute truth
• The power to shape culture


  Those who could read & write, access to mass media & mediated means of communication
• Capacity to communicate is power

  Populist leadership
• Discursive & participate nature of today's media

  Consume, create, & challenge content
• Media & communication tools primarily make use of written & oral language
• Dissemination of information is a form of power by those who have control of & access to mass media
• Present media as a discursive & participative nature that democratizes it
• Rhetoric


  • Author & purpose
  • Audience
  • Message
  • Setting
• Rhetoric according to Aristotle

  • Logos (content, structure, and logic)
  • Ethos (the character and credibility of the speaker)
  • Telos (purpose of the speaker)
  • Pathos (appeal to emotion)
  • Kairos (timeliness of an argument)
• Modern day: The rhetorical situation

  • Text (the medium being used and the actual message across)
  • Author (the speaker or deliverer of the message)
  • Audience (the recipient of the message)
  • Setting (the circumstances surrounding the communication, high-stakes)
• Application of rhetoric


  • Advertising & marketing (convincing consumers to buy a product)
  • Persuasion (communicating with a friend or a parent)
  • Job applications & interviews (convincing your potential employer)
  • Creative industry (sending out a message in a poignant way)
• Identity


  • Formed through interactions with others
  • Not stable & unitary
  • Shifting and multiple
  • Our self-concept & others' conception of us are not necessarily one & the same
  • A person's identity is shaped by their relationships with others
  • Fluid rather than fixed, & it is political as well as personal
  • Dynamic rather than static
  • Multiple rather than singular
• How identity is formed

  • Direct construction of identity through communication (we employ linguistic codes, such as naming & kinship terminologies, to describe & assign macro & micro characteristics to ourselves, others, & groups of people that also serve as our orienting grid)
  • Indirect construction (communication defines us when we internalize judgements of ourselves, others, & social groups based on ways of expressing ourselves)
• Communication theory of identity

  • Personal (concerns self-cognitions or sense of being)
  • Enacted (performative side of who we are)
  • Relational (explains identity is embedded in our relationships with others)
  • Communal (characteristics of communities)
• Collective identities


  • Identity is based on social categorization and shared group memberships
  • Societal norms and practices are internalized in the form of social identities based on social categories (especially in ingroup/outgroup distinctions)
  • Includes racial and ethnic identity, national identity, religious identity, and organizational identity
• Ethnic identity


  • A set of ideas about one's own ethnic group membership
  • Includes self-identification, knowledge about the ethnic culture, and feelings about belonging to a particular group
• National identity


  • Constructed and conveyed in discourse, predominantly in narratives of national culture
  • Nations as "imagined communities" (belongingness is conceived in the mind)
  • Socially constructed and conceived in language rather than blood (from media & education)