Intention and Interpretation in the Study of Communication

Abstract

In the writers' previous article (Thompson, Baggaley & Jamieson, 1975) the study of communication was discussed in terms of two concepts relevant to educational television: representation and review. In their second paper they explore the problems of television production further, introducing two new concepts, of intention and interpretation, and outlining the conflict that may arise between them in practice. INTRODUCTIONWhat counts as communication is a debatable issue; it is an area of study plagued with multiple ambiguities, many of which have been added by the communication experts themselves. The problem has been further complicated by the unjustified compounding of the words communication and mass. The term mass communication evokes an image of messages being transmitted from a central source for the consumption of docile or acquiescent populations; or an image of printing presses spewing forth news sheets for partially literate, non-responding populations.Yet as Raymond Williams so forcibly stated at the specially convened "Heathrow Conference on Communication Studies" (1973), "The study of communication was deeply and almost disastrously deformed by being confidently named as the study of mass communications". For these are images of "one-way traffic"; things going out, but nothing coming back. In another context, the process was described by Rowntree (1975) as "munication", that is, a truncation of communication obtained by the severance of "co", the prefix of co-operation.The "munication" problem also exists in education. Williams (1975) raised the point when he addressed the Liverpool Conference on "Communication and Learning". He said, "Broadcast television or radio, and educational films, tapes and records are truly one-way: there is no chance of the student questioning the teacher when the latter is preserved on celluloid. Those technologies which do provide feedback do so in an extremely limited way; programmed learning units and computer marked tests give the student no chance to question the teacher or ask him to elucidate his argument". However, if we restrict the term communication to cover only co-operative liaisons, we are left with the task of providing a lexicon for a wide range of situations possessing information-flow but lacking a co-operative element. And to seek a solution to this problem we need to turn not to the "communication industry" but to the communication theoreticians, foremost among whom has been MacKay.MacKay, very perceptibly, detected the confusion in communication terminology several years ago. He suggested (1972) that a more accurate description of the communication process might be gained by the use of concepts such as signals, symptoms, and information flow: