What is the international controversy about the origin or genre of communication?

Communication was born in the United States. American scholars have explored the theory of communication from different angles and put forward various communication modes, such as those expressed by words, figures and mathematical formulas. Communication scientists use different models to explain the mechanism and essence of information communication, prompt the process and effect of communication, and predict the trend and structure of future communication. It is generally believed that communication has five founders:

1, Harold Dwight lasswell and lasswell (1902- 1980) are one of the founders of modern American politics. The famous communication 5w model is put forward.

2. Kurt Lewin, Lu Yin (1890- 1947), a German Jew. The concept of "gatekeeper" in information dissemination is put forward.

3. carl hovland hovland (1921-1961), professor of experimental psychology at Yale University. The introduction of psychological experimental methods into the field of communication reveals the conditions and complexity of the formation of communication effects.

4. paul F Lazarsfeld, lazarsfeld (190 1- 1976), an Austrian Jew. Rogers pointed out that lazarsfeld led communication to the direction of empirical research more than anyone else.

5. American Shi Lamu wilbur schramm (1907- 1988) established the first communication college in the world and edited the first batch of German communication textbooks. It has opened up several new research fields, such as the influence of television on children. He is regarded as a master.

It originated in the United States because in the first half of the 20th century, Eurasia suffered two world wars in succession, and the United States became a haven for many scientists because of its unique geographical advantages. And because the United States itself has not been destroyed, the invention and application of technology have always been in a leading position. For example, the opening of 1920 Pittsburgh Radio and Television Station, the establishment of 1926 NBC and so on.

From the social situation, there is a tradition of attaching great importance to mass media in American political and social life. In the political mechanism, mass media is one of the forces to balance the legislature and government agencies. The newspaper was once called the second Congress.

From the academic tradition, American pragmatism philosophy prevails, and academic research places special emphasis on solving practical problems. A lot of practical information is used by people, which facilitates people's life, work and social operation. However, there are also a lot of commercial sales, political propaganda, deception, pornography, violence and other cultural rubbish. These problems or potential problems have become a subject that American academic circles must face and study.

All the above conditions determine that communication originated in the United States.

After the advent of communication in the United States, it soon spread to Western Europe and Japan. British communication has developed vigorously since the 1960s, and its methodology can be divided into four schools: the social school headed by mcguire; Social psychological card represented by Hololoren; Political and economic cards represented by Cheeseman and Garnham; Functionalism school represented by TV Research Center of Leeds University. The study of communication in Japan began after the Second World War and has two major characteristics: first, it follows the theoretical system of foreign countries, mainly the United States, and pays attention to the development of social participation theory that emphasizes the audience's right to directly participate in the communication process; Second, practice takes precedence over theory. Since the 1960s, the Soviet Union began to attach importance to the study of communication theory. Soviet scholars put forward their own communication modes based on their own research, among which Firsoff and Aleksev are the most famous.

It should be noted that the research of western communication scholars has obvious limitations. For example, they inappropriately put communication in the first important position of human beings, thus rejecting the main symbol of human productivity; They attributed the occurrence and development of communication behavior to human instinct and the progress of science and technology respectively, but did not relate it to social production mode. When studying the social control of communication, it is often impossible to fully reveal the profound contradictions within society.

Communication was born in 1930s and 1940s. As a new discipline, it is developed on the basis of three theories (information theory, cybernetics and system theory) and sociology, psychology and politics. So far, communication can be divided into three basic schools: cybernetics, empirical function and structuralist symbolism. Cybernetics school attaches importance to the rational functional design of human-computer communication, empirical functional school examines the persuasion and suggestion to the public for established political and economic purposes, and structuralist semiotics discusses the interaction between symbols, cognition and power.

First, the empirical functional school:

The media is regarded as a new tool of modern democracy and a decisive mechanism of social adjustment, thus becoming a theory advocating the value of western social system and the reproduction of existing things, which is called "management research".

Focus on quantitative analysis, mainly using field investigation, laboratory observation and other ways to carry out research.

Represented by American studies, emphasizing media and structure is just one of many units. They form alliances with other units in society, such as political and economic systems, or fight for their own interests. Media play different functions according to different social situations and conditions. It is believed that modern society is a pluralistic society, and no social unit can monopolize all resources or power. Sometimes the political system may be dominant, but sometimes the economic role is the most important. A pluralistic society is characterized by the emergence of many different interest groups, including the media. When these groups fight for their own interests, they form an inclusive, consultative and free society. In a pluralistic society, the media is not only a tool for rulers, but also has other functions. The study of "media effect" is the central topic of this school.

According to lasswell's 5W model, the school of functional analysis divides communication into five areas: control research (who), content research (what), media analysis (on which channel), audience research (to whom) and effect research (with what effect), among which effect research is the most important.

1, control research:

(1) gatekeeper research

(2) Shi Lamu and others' "Four Theories on Newspapers" vigorously advocated "theory of social responsibility of Newspapers".

2. Content research: readability measurement.

3. Media analysis:

(1) Media Type Analysis

(2)

4. Audience research

5. Effect study:

(1) In the 1920s and 1930s, the magic bullet theory, also known as hypodermic injection theory, emphasized the absolute effect of communication (propaganda), and the audience was like a fallen target.

(2) In the 1940s and 1950s, limited effect theory,

(3) After 1960s, moderate effect theory and strong effect theory.

Second, structuralism-symbolism school:

The symbolism school of structuralism, commonly known as the critical school, is a communication school that rose in Europe after the 1960s and 1970s, aiming at reflecting and criticizing the existing capitalist society. The critical school is mainly composed of Frankfurt School, Cultural Studies School, Political Economy School and Cultural Imperialism School. The critical school pays attention to the process of production, distribution and consumption of information in capitalist society, and how communication can cooperate with the continuation, regeneration and expansion of capitalism. Critical scholars not only pay attention to the operation of media, but also pay attention to the influence of media on productivity, production relations, social class and hegemonic culture. This school believes that the current society is a class society, and any communication study can not be separated from class analysis. As China scholar Chen said, scholars of western critical school criticized the market logic of capitalism and hegemonic power politics most severely, exposing the inequality of communication between developed and developing countries.

Frankfurt school

Frankfurt School pays attention to the media power in the context of nationalism and capital power, and reveals how the mass media and its "cultural industry" serve the essence of ideology in capitalist countries as accomplices. According to richard johnson, Frankfurt School pays attention to "the grand criticism of the political economy and cultural pathology of mass media".

By discovering "cultural industry" and paying attention to the phenomenon of alienation in the cultural field, Frankfurt School realized that "popular culture" is nothing but a thing that enslaves, oppresses and binds people, a spiritual yoke and a cultural opium. Cultural industry is an industry with cultural label, which is market-oriented, industrialized and profitable, rather than a culture that gives meaning to life and provides spiritual home. In the developed capitalist society, this cultural industry has played a highly controlling role and has become a spiritual shackle that binds people.

On behalf of:

1, Hawke Hamo and Adorno in their book Dialectics of Enlightenment revealed the truth that the ruling class used mass media to oppress and fool people, and mercilessly lashed the mass media as an accomplice of wrong ideology, which was actually a criticism of the abuse of media power by the ruling class.

2. Marcuse pointed out that the spread of capitalist social culture through mass media led to the emergence of a one-dimensional culture, which was stuffed into people's minds like witchcraft, but caused people's spiritual depression.

3. Habermas regards mass media as a public sphere, but this field which should play its role is occupied by nationalism and capital forces. Therefore, the mass media has a dual identity, which is not only a national ideological tool, but also a cultural industry, which can only lead to structural transformation and the disintegration of the public sphere.

School of Cultural Studies

The school of cultural studies rose in the 1960s and 1970s, overcoming the cultural pessimism of Frankfurt School. The media power in his field of vision has become a kind of meaningful and pleasant economics, focusing on the factors that produce the meaning of media texts and the audience's ability to actively interpret media texts.

On behalf of:

Raymond Williams pointed out the double meanings of culture in Culture and Society (196 1): one is culture as a way of life; The second is the culture as a critical standard, that is, the most outstanding thoughts and artistic classics of mankind. Obviously, it is the former definition that makes the study of media culture possible.

Williams pointed out in The Long Revolution (1965) that the basic contradiction in the process of interrelated changes in the economic, political and cultural fields since the British Industrial Revolution is the contradiction between the productive forces liberated by capitalism and the essence of human communication. The reproduction of labor relations hinders people's opportunities to learn and create culture. In Williams' view, the working class, the main force of liberating culture, has been accommodated by the capitalist system. The leading value of capitalism is to advocate a superficial and false mass culture. Popular culture either marginalizes serious art or makes it an elite culture only belonging to the upper class.

In the book Communication from 65438 to 0965, it is proposed to reform the social communication system and create conditions for freedom, openness and truthfulness of speech. To this end, Williams briefly summarized four communication systems:

(1) autocracy simply conveys various instructions of the ruling group;

(2) Paternalistic system aims at protecting and guiding, not maintaining the rule;

(3) The commercial system provides a considerable degree of freedom, but it confuses the demand for democracy and the demand for goods, and excludes cultural goods that cannot be sold quickly.

(4) Williams' ideal democratic model requires the mass media to get rid of the commercial system and paternalistic system, and only the mass media divorced from the government and the market can contribute to culture.

Williams' later works put forward the theory of cultural materialism, rewriting the relationship between economic base and superstructure in traditional Marxism. Williams refused to regard the superstructure as a reflection of the economic base and turned to Gramsci's hegemonic theory. In Marxism and Literature, Williams defines hegemony as a continuous cultural process in which the ruling class creates "* * *" knowledge, which is a combination of three cultural processes: tradition and system (education and mass communication, etc.). ) and various forms of confrontation. Among them, although various forms of confrontation are antagonistic, they once again affirm the dominant ideology. Williams applied his cultural materialism to TV analysis. Television occupies the center of cultural life, because the interests of private capital dominate the development of communication technology. Television has become a pastime, not an important forum. Therefore, in Williams' view, it is doomed to fail to study the "scientific" exploration of spreading "effect" without the social material relationship that determines the development of TV!

2. On the basis of Althusser's ideological theory, Hall pointed out that mass media is the main ideological machine of contemporary capitalism. The media is a "field" with differences and struggles, which consists of the efforts of the ruling class to obtain ideological hegemony and the resistance of the ruled class to hegemony. In addition, Hall proposed three encoding/decoding methods:

(1) Hegemony-oriented decoding, in which the audience (decoder) interprets the message with the meaning preset by the encoder;

(2) Based on the negotiated interpretation, the decoder makes subtle bargaining with the message code;

(3) The antagonistic interpretation is incompatible with the will of the text (coder).

3. David Morley's research on TV viewers;

(1) Query on Hall's coding/decoding theory: First, the information content is subject to the conscious intention of the coder rather than the dominant decoding. Secondly, there is a continuous "conveyor belt" instead of three discontinuous decoding modes. Third, if there is no buzz between the text and the audience, its meaning will be ignored. Finally, the dominant meaning of single and closed narrative texts is easily perceived, and open texts such as soap operas may produce explanations that resist the dominant meaning.

(2) Study the gendered family viewing mode and the relationship between the inequality of family (private sphere) and the audience's decoding strategy.

Fiske revealed the public's resistance to media power to the maximum extent, and even put forward the potential of people's micro-political practice. In Fiske's view, social power and symbolic power are relatively independent. Although people can't do anything about social power, they can make full use of symbolic power to subvert the cultural leadership of the ruling class through antagonistic decoding practice, and then realize "all-round and free development of people" This tortuous way to achieve the goal is progressive in any case.

Fiske put forward the view that TV text is open and is a "producer's text" in the book TV Culture 65438-0987. Productive text and productive audience are like two sides of a currency, which complement each other and are indispensable.

The audience is the producer of meaning. The audience can reinterpret the text according to their own social experience and produce their own culture. The reading behavior of the audience is "to establish a connection between the existing cultural knowledge and the text". The subordinate position of the audience means that they can't create the resources of pop culture, but they do create their culture from those resources. In Fei's view, the audience is facing double oppression, on the one hand, it comes from top-down homogeneous forces, such as the wishes of communicators and ideological control. On the other hand, it comes from diversified forces from the bottom up.

(3) School of Political Economy

From the standpoint of classical Marxism, the school of political economics emphasizes the influence of social structure and productivity on communication activities and analyzes the ownership and control of media. It holds that mass media is a special capitalist production sector, and the ruling class has gained control over the dissemination of knowledge, information and social image, so they should protect their own interests and the social system that brings them benefits through the media. Their research perspectives can be divided into three types: liberalism, Marxism and institutional economics.

1, g. Murdoch

2.golding

3. Harold.

4. University of Glasgow Media Group, UK

The Media Group of Glasgow University studied the bias in TV news in 1970s and early 1980s. The conclusion is that television is dominated by middle-class media workers, so it reproduces the ideology of the middle class.

The expert group believes that the industrial TV news in the first 22 weeks of 1975 is biased in three aspects: (1) The strike report is inconsistent with the actual strike, and the strike report of auto workers is more than that of coal miners; (2) Strikes are never justified and workers are always wrong; (3) The mass media excludes the opinions of the working class. However, 1982' s report on the Falklands War focused on the feelings of soldiers' wives and suppressed opinions against national policies.

(4) Cultural imperialism:

Cultural imperialism (or media imperialism) discusses the influence of western (especially American) media operation and its products on the world pattern and human destiny from the perspective of international communication and global communication. With the warming of globalization, this issue has attracted more and more attention. For example, the study of American drama Dallas by E.Katz and the interpretation of American cartoon Donald Duck by A.Dorfman and A.Matterlart are all examples of this kind of research. As for the doctoral thesis "Cultural Imperialism" (199 1) by J. Tonlinson of Nottingham Trent University, England, although it refutes the argument of cultural imperialism from the standpoint of empirical school, it is a masterpiece for reference because of its detailed exposition.

1, Professor H.I. Schiller, University of California, San Diego, USA. Schiller has been regarded as a giant of critical school since his sudden emergence in the base camp of empiricism school in the late 1960s. His exposure and criticism of American media is famous for his sharpness and ruthlessness.

(1) 1969 The Mass Communication and the American Empire: This book critically discusses the structure and policies of mass communication in the United States and its important role in politics and economy. It is the first comprehensive and detailed study. In this book, Schiller focuses on his so-called "military-business complex", which is based on Amin, wallerstein and Frank's "dependency theory" (his latest book "Silver Capital" is a rare critical masterpiece). Industrial complex), this paper analyzes how the intertwined interests of the government, the military and private enterprises have contributed to the American mass communication power surpassing the world and how it has led to the loss of cultural sovereignty of other countries, especially developing countries.

(2) Since then, several of his works, such as Thought Manager (1973) and Communication and Cultural Rule (1976), have basically continued this idea, arguing around the rampant "free flow of information" and the increasingly unbalanced world communication pattern. With its indomitable figure and full enthusiasm and ideals, it is precisely. Through these processes, a certain society has been absorbed into the modern world system, and the controlling class of this society has been attracted, coerced, coerced and sometimes bribed, so that the social system they created corresponds to and even promotes the values and structure of the countries that are in the core and dominant position in the world system.

(3) After 1980s, with the development of various new communication technologies, especially the rise of multimedia, Internet and information superhighway, Schiller criticized various fashionable theories including globalization. Because, all these theories claim that new communication technologies will bring more democratic and pluralistic cultures to mankind all over the world. Schiller hit the nail on the head and pointed out that with the rapid expansion of the Internet, the power relations and market logic dominated by multinational corporations have not changed at all, but have further aggravated the already extremely unreasonable world political, economic and cultural order, including the information and communication order. A mountain of network information is full of western words, such as consumerism ideology.

(5) symbolism school

Look at communication from the perspective of studying communication symbols.

1 and Althusser (louis althusser, 19 18- 1990) believe that concepts and words are permeated with ideology in the process of continuous reproduction and reorganization (here refers to the norms, traditions and understandings of social relations that people consciously or unconsciously accept). Media is one of the ideological state machines, which urges people to think and act naturally in an acceptable way and legitimizes the ruling power of discourse.

2. roland barthes (19 15- 1980), a French structuralist thinker, embodied this pan-ideological view by studying symbols. He took newspaper photos as examples, such as a black soldier wearing a French military uniform saluting the French flag, a French general saluting a Senegalese with one arm, a nun handing a cup to a bedridden Arab, a white headmaster giving a class to a group of black children, and so on, all of which have obvious ideological colors. He called the fixed connotation of symbol "myth", and semiotics means "dispelling myth" to reveal the essential meaning of symbol.

3. The macro expression of culture can also be understood as a broad symbol. French scholar Michel Faucard (1926- 1984) expressed the view in a series of cultural semiotics works: the exercise of any power is inseparable from the extraction, possession, distribution and retention of knowledge. Through the manufacture and dissemination of knowledge, the right to exercise power has been obtained. Therefore, power is persuasive, and the knowledge and truth produced by human science are linked to power in a sense. "Power" here refers to domination and control in a broad sense. Power embodied in communication and daily life. The discourse rules of communication reflect the social structure of discourse, indicating who can speak, how much, what can be said and on what occasions. As long as we think about people's yearning for being photogenic on TV and the stars in the images, we can understand why "communication" is a "ceremony of power recognition".

4. Teun van Dijk (1943-), a Dutch semioticist, made a text analysis and a context analysis of the most common information "news" in the media, trying to explain the "ideology" in the news. The multi-level structure of news discourse determines that the audience can only get the interpretation framework provided by the established structure, and other interpretation frameworks will be used for negative interpretation. He pointed out that when making news according to professional news value standards, journalists are actually constantly copying social discourse, which invisibly contains political, economic and ideological values related to facts. "Our news, news production and newspapers have been deeply bound by the nets they weave, and they effectively collect daily news with fixed procedures."

However, the critical school's inherent position of "only breaking but not standing" makes the communication critical research school more like a social trend of thought and a freshener.

Third, the control school.

Cybernetics is at the core of the theory of technical cybernetics school. Cybernetics attaches importance to the decisive role of causes in results. The technocrats are concerned about how the changes in the media itself and media forms affect the development of people and society.

1, wiener: cybernetics

Weiner wrote: "Society can only be understood through the study of news and the study of social communication equipment." [6] He believes that communication is the nervous system of society and the cause of the result. From a person to a society is a system, the existence and maintenance of which lies in the flow of information. He used the concept of "feedback" to explain the characteristics of information flow, that is, through constant information "acceptance-feedback-acceptance" to adjust itself and maintain the existence and development of people or society. If a system can't or seldom communicate with the external environment, it may be in a state of internal chaos and disintegration. Therefore, an open system must have positive information exchange and constantly inject information that has not been reserved before. His view complements the link of "feedback" that Shennong's communication model lacks. When studying thermodynamics, he adopted the concept of "entropy" put forward by German physicist rudolf clausius. Entropy is represented by natural redundancy, information loss, noise, error or distortion. Only through the exchange of information can we get negative entropy, eliminate disorder and overcome the destructive trend of entropy. Therefore, entropy is a measure of the information organization level of a system.

Another concept of cybernetics is "system balance". If a system seriously deviates from the normal state due to environmental changes, then it needs full communication of information. For a society, social feedback is the essence of social control. A stable society is actually a society rich in information exchange. A key issue here is that communicators should make positive responses and adjustments to feedback, and any management procedure includes such constant responses and adjustments. "An effective life is to have complete and sufficient information," Matra wrote when describing cybernetics' understanding of information. "Information must be able to circulate. The information society can only exist if the information exchange is barrier-free. This definition is incompatible with prohibition or confidentiality, approaching the inequality of information, or turning it into a commodity. "

2. Shennong: Information Theory

1949, Shennong (19 16-200 1) demonstrated the computer principle being tested in the United States at that time in his paper "Mathematical Theory of Communication". This paper is considered as the basic work of information theory. He defined communication from the perspective of communication science and wrote: "The basic problem of communication is that one end of communication accurately or approximately reproduces the information selected by the other end." The mathematical theory of communication has played an important role in the mode transformation from precise science to communication field. He defined the concept of "information" from the perspective of communication: information is something that can be used to eliminate or reduce uncertainty. Therefore, he proposed a machine-to-machine or person-to-person communication mode, that is, the famous "5w+ noise propagation mode" from the source to the sink.

3. The system theory was first put forward by Austrian biologist ludwig von bertalanffy (190 1- 1972). It is the system theory that endows cybernetics and information theory with the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of their isolated parts, and regards the research object as a whole with dynamic response. Finding a holistic understanding is more important than simply decomposing physical or intellectual phenomena. In the study of political communication and international communication, system theory has played an important role in integrating communication phenomena. In the mid-1970s, Ithiel de Sola Pool further developed the system theory by analyzing the influence of cable TV technology on organizational social and political life.

4. Canadian scholar innis (1894- 1952). He graduated from the University of Chicago, and Parker is his teacher. His two books, Empire and Communication and Deviation of Communication, published in 1950 and195, talked about the horizontal reality from the perspective of economic history and civilization history, and repeatedly demonstrated a basic point: the advantages of a new media (including generalized language and written media) will lead to a new one. He believes that communication technology is the foundation of political and economic progress. This is the first time to study the communication phenomenon from the perspective of media technology.

5. McLuhan School

Canadian scholar McLuhan was popular in Europe and America in the 1960s. His main academic contributions are as follows: first, he put forward that the most essential thing in communication is the media itself; Second, apply the idea of technological determinism to the cultural analysis of society; Third, there is an American optimism marked by humanitarianism, mainly the concept of "global village".

6. American scholar Meyer Rowitz's book 1985 "The Disappearing Zone" demonstrates how the media itself becomes an environment by studying the form of television. For example, seeing the scene of the assassination of the president in TV news and seeing a celebrity being interviewed in entertainment programs has changed the importance of "personally participating" in experiencing social events, and people are subconsciously influenced by the situation constructed by the media. He wrote: "Electronic media has brought many different types of people to the same place, so many different social roles in the past have become blurred. This shows that the most fundamental thing of electronic media is not to influence us through content, but to influence us by changing the' scene geography' of social life. " It is no longer important for the public to know what is happening in the world or where to expect celebrities.

7. In the book Soft Edge published by 1997, Levinson, an American scholar known as the "media philosopher", compromised the view of communication technology determinism to some extent. He believes: "All information technologies invented by human beings cannot be compared with the language center of our basic human elements, unless it is a transcendence of language and a substitute of some way. However, these technologies still have a profound impact on our survival at a limited level. "

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