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Summary SOCIOLOGY 242 NOTES
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SOCIOLOGY OF COMMUNICATIONWEEK 1
Lecture 1: Introduction and Overview
Lecture 2: What is Communication?
Mobile Telephone
- Mobile movement
- Tele distance (technologies)
- Phone sound
o Spoken language
o Other “media”
When to begin?
- 1439 Gutenberg’s printing press
- 1793: Claude Chappe's optical telegraph (semaphore) inaugurated in France
- 1844: First intercity telegraph system in 1844 between Baltimore and Washington
(USA)
- Arguably the most sociologically significant development during this period was “the
effective separation of communication and transportation” (Carey, 1983: 3).
Meanings of ‘communication’?
- A very polysemous word
- Latin word “communis” (common)
- Broad distinction
o Common meanings (e.g. in dictionaries)
o Specialist senses (in academic/professional discourses)
- Polysemy in English (OED) via French (c.1200)
Three broad Categories of Senses
1. Senses relating to affinity or association.
2. Senses relating to the imparting or transmission of something.
3. Senses relating to access (transport).
,Academic Writing Note
- BEWARE of dictionary definitions…
- Historical dictionaries (like OED & WAT) are better than desktop dictionaries for
learning about concepts.
- BUT historical dictionaries cannot give you a sense of how a word is used in a
contemporary academic discourse community.
An example of “communication” in a discourse community
- Epidemiologist: someone who studies diseases and how they are found, spread, and
controlled in groups of people source; NICD… see PDF version of lecture slides to
access links).
Communication as “Transmission”
C19 Communication and Transport
- Arguably the most sociologically significant development during this period was “the
effective separation of communication and transportation” (Carey, 1983: 3).
Fiske
Communication
i. Senses relating to affinity or association what Carey (2002) calls communication as
ritual (ritueel).
ii. Senses relating to the imparting or transmission of something.
iii. Senses relating to access (physical links… transport).
Communications
- Rise of “communications” (technologies)
o Mechanical… electronic… digital…
- Complex interplay of new forms of
o communication (media)
- E.g. Printing… telegraph… newspaper…
Internet… online publishing…
- “Communities” imagined at larger
- scale (Anderson… nations &
- empires)
, WEEK 2
Lecture 3: Language, Communication + Media
Harari Y. (2014) “The Tree of Knowledge” (Chapter 2), in Sapiens: A Brief History of
Humankind.
The Story of Nim Chimpsky
- Project Nim: an attempt to teach a chimpanzee
- How to teach a chimp to speak
o Maybe we could use another “channel” of communication
o Sign language (hand signals)
- And this was tried, but it was not very successful.
Who are “we”?
- Homo sapiens” = “Wise humans”
o Homo (genus)
o Sapiens (species)
- 100 000 years ago
o Appr .6 homo species
o Today “we” are one species
Recent insight & not all believe this!
- Role of language?
Harari: “Years before the present
- 70 000: The Cognitive Revolution; emergence of fictive language; beginning of
history; Sapiens spread out of Africa
o “Fictive language” as a new form of thinking speaking…
- 12 000: The Agricultural Revolution; domestication of plants and animals; permanent
settlements
- 5 000: First kingdoms; script and money; polytheistic religions
o Writing… recorded history? Printing c. 1450?
- 500: The Scientific Revolution
- 200: The Industrial Revolution
, Fictive language
Why did language evolve?
- Communicating information about the environment (“Careful! A lion”)
- A Communicating information about “our” social world
o “gossip” … complex social networks (Dunbar 150?)
o Fictions: “socially constructed things”
Large “communities” (e.g. nations)
Sapiens Language and Languages
- “What was so special about the new Sapiens language that it enabled us to conquer
the world
o Here and in the following pages, when speaking about Sapiens language, I
Hindi, and Chinese are all variants of Sapiens language. Apparently, even at
the time of the Cognitive Revolution, different Sapiens groups had different
dialects
- Language vs dialects?
o This argument is too cognition orientated, i.e. it glosses major language and
communication developments over the last 200 years…
Languages and Media
Presentational Media
- Speaking
- Body Language
Representational Media
- Roman Alphabet
- Printing
- Skype
- Cell Phones
- Radio
- Television
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