Chapter Five The Message

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Chapter Five The Message

• The Sociocultural Tradition moves communicators
  from individual differences and cognitive
  processing to social linkages, groups, and
  meanings that are worked out through interaction.

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Chapter Five The Message

• Kenneth Burkes theory of Identification
• is the most comprehensive of the symbol theories
  and focuses on symbols, language and
  communication.
• 1. Actions consist of purposeful, voluntary
  behaviors while motions are non-purposeful,
  non-meaningful ones.
• 2. People filter reality through a symbolic
  screen.

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Kenneth Burkes theory of Identification

• 4. Language is selective and abstract.
• 5. Identification occurs when people have a
  common understanding.
• 6. Language can also create division or
  separation.
• 7. Sharing language in an easy manner is
  consubstantiality.

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Kenneth Burkes theory of Identification

• 8. Identification is created between two people
  in three instances.
• a) Material identification results from goods,
  possessions and things.
• b) Idealistic identification results from
  shared ideas, attitudes and values.
• c) Formal identification results from the
  arrangement, form or organization of an event.
• d) Identification is a matter of degree.
• e) Identification can be seen in a hierarchy.
• f) Guilt explains some identification.
• (1) Guilt is any feeling of tension within a
  person.
• (2) The second reason for guilt is the
  principle of perfection.
• (3) The third reason for guilt is the
  principle of hierarchy.

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Language and Gender relates to the sociocultural
tradition

• Cheris Kramarae says words and syntax within
  messages structure peoples thinking and
  interaction and impact how we experience the
  world and messages treat men and women
  differently.
• a) Kramarae believes English is a man-made
  language.
• b) It embodies the perspectives to the
  masculine more than the feminine.
• c) Men are the standard.
• (1) In many occupational categories such as
  waiter versus waitress, poet versus poetess.
• (2) Mr. does not contain information about
  marital status while Mrs. or Miss does.

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The theory of feminine style

• Jane Blankenship and Deborah Robson examined
  womens public policy discourse and characterized
  five overlapping properties.
• a) Concrete experience as a basis for
  political judgments.
• b) Inclusivity and connection.
• c) Public office as a place to get things
  done and empower others.
• d) A holistic approach to policy formation.
• e) Bringing womens legislation to the
  forefront.

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CH 5 cont

• The Sociopsychological Tradition turns its focus
  on the individual and contains theories that
  offer a cognitive explanation for how people
  integrate information and plan messages.

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Strategy choice models

• are theories that involve trying to get people to
  do what you want them to do or to stop doing
  something you dont like and focuses on
  compliance gaining messages.

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Compliance gaining

• one of the most common communication goals, is
  studied from a person-centered perspective.

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Compliance

• Compliance is an exchange for something else
  supplied by the compliance seeker and includes 16
  strategies.
• a) Promising something for compliance.
• b) Threatening something for noncompliance.
• c) Showing expertise about positive outcomes,
  how good things will be with compliance.

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Compliance

• d) Showing expertise about negative outcomes,
  how bad things will be with noncompliance.
• e) Liking, being friendly.
• f) Pregiving a reward before asking for
  compliance.
• g) Applying aversive stimulation, punishing
  until compliance.
• h) Calling in a debt, payment for past favors.
• i) Making moral appeals, complying is the
  right thing to do.

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Compliance

• j) Attributing positive feelings, telling the
  other person how good they will feel by
  complying.
• k) Attributing negative feelings, telling the
  other person how bad they will feel by
  noncomplying
• l) Positive altercasting, associating
  compliance with good qualities.

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Compliance

• m) Negative altercasting, associating
  noncompliance with noncompliance.
• n) Seeking altruistic compliance, compliance
  as a favor.
• o) Showing positive esteem, how much liked
  the person will be by complying.
• p) Showing negative esteem, much disliked the
  person will be by noncompliance.

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politeness strategies

• states that in everyday life we design messages
  that protect face.
• 1. A nearly universal concern in exchanging
  information and making disclosures is politeness.
• 2. All people have the need to be appreciated
  and protected, which researchers call face needs.
• a) Positive face is the desire to be
  appreciated and approved, to be liked and
  honored.
• b) Negative face is the desire to be free
  from imposition or intrusion.

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People can deliver potential face threatening
acts (FTA) in a number of ways.

• a) FTAs can be delivered baldly, without polite
  action.
• b) FTAs can be delivered along with some form
  of positive politeness.
• c) FTAs can be delivered along with some form
  of negative politeness.
• d) FTAs can be delivered indirectly, off the
  record.
• e) One can choose not to deliver an FTA at
  all.
• 4. The amount of facework (politeness)
  employed in delivering an FTA depends upon social
  distance, power, and risk.

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the Phenomenological Tradition

• Hermeneutics, the careful and deliberate
  interpretation of a text,
• A. Two general groups of hermeneutic scholars.
• 1. Textual hermeneutics examines texts,
• a) A text is any recorded artifact that can
  be examined, is.
• b) Cultural or social hermeneutics interpret
  human personal and social.

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hermeneutics

• B. Scholars from this tradition use the
  hermeneutic circle, alternating from the general
  to the specific and back to the general.
• C. Paul Ricoeur recognizes the importance of
  actual speech.
• 1. Speech is ephemeral while a text which
  lives on.
• 2. The separation of the text from
  situation is distanciation.
• 3. Explanation is empirical and
  analytical.
• 4. Understanding is synthetic.
• 5. Being open to the meaning of
  the text is appropriation.

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Hans-Georg Gadamer

• teaches that individuals do not stand apart from
  things in order to analyze and interpret them.
• Instead we interpret naturally as part of our
  everyday experience.

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Gadamer

• believes that one can only understand a text from
  within a tradition or perspective.
• (a) Traditions give us presuppositions or ways
  of understanding experience.
• (b) We are always part of a past as well as a
  present, and we interpret with an eye to the
  future.
• (c) Still, change does occur because people
  are distanced from the past and learn from new
  experience.

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Gadamer

• Interpretation is a process of dialogue with a
  text.
• (a) The text has meaning which interacts with
  the meanings of our culture.
• (b) We assign meaning to a text, but the text
  asks questions of us and may change us.

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Gadamer

• Experience is inherently linguistic, and we
  cannot separate interpretation from language.
• (a) Language and meaning are presented to us
  in the language we inherit.
• (b) Language prefigures all experience.