CMNS 110-3 INTRODUCTION TO COMMUNICATION STUDIES

COURSEWHERE (Fall 2007)

Sonja Weaver's blog
Weekly reading guides

Introduction
For the most part, the courseware for CMNS 110 is drawn from Wikipedia entries; there are a number of links that go to other sources as well, although Wiki predominates. The “Table of Contents” (ToC) below, your “coursewhere,” follows the course schedule in the syllabus. Briefings presented in tutorials are also drawn from the ToC, and will be assigned in Week 2. Students can download and print the material or may use it off the screen. No hardcopy of the ToC contents is available (unless you make one).

[Rest of introduction moved to bottom of document]


TABLE OF CONTENTS (ToC) for a non-existent and un-citable book (and reading/briefings schedule & menu)

Week 1. Introduction

Week 2. Media studies, history & and “critical determinism” (AKA “Toronto School,” “comparative media theory,” “transformation theory”)
1. (a) Harold Adams Innis (1894-1952), (b) Empire and Communications, (c) Robert Babe
2. (a) Ian Angus and (b) John Durham Peters on Innis
3. (a) Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911-1981), (b) Specters Of McLuhan
4. (a) Proxemics and (b) body-as-medium
5. Eric A Havelock (1903-1988), mimesis
6. Walter Ong (1912-2003), oral culture & print culture
7. (a) Rhetoric, (b) Silva Rhetoricae,(c) poetry, and (d) Ars Memoria
8. (a) Kenneth Burke (1897 – 1993), (b) Definition of Man AKA Definition of Human
9. Neil Postman, media ecology paradigm
10. (a) Joshua Meyrowitz, (b) Medium Theory

Week 3. Communication and (a) human ecology: the (b) Chicago School, (c) Symbolic Interactionism, & (c) American Pragmaticism,
1. William James (1842 – 1910)
2. John Dewey (1859–1952),
3. George Herbert Mead (1863 –1931) (a) 'I' and the 'me' & (b) “generalized Other”
4. Charles Horton Cooley (1864-1929)
5. Robert Ezra Park (1864–1944)


Week 4. (a) Phenomenology and (b) drama of the social world
1. (a) Alfred Schütz (1899-1959), (a) social constructivism, Peter Berger & Thomas Luckmann
2. Phenomenology Online
3. (a) Erving Goffman (1922–1982), (b) frames and (c) impression management
4. Harold Garfinkel (1917 - )
5. Pragmatics of communication: Double bind & chorus line
- (a) Paul Watzlawick (1921 - ) (b) Double Bind
- Ronald David Laing (1927 – 1989)
- Anthony Wilden
(a) Bullying
(b) Coercive persuasion
(c) Mobbing
(d) Racism
(e) Rape
(f) Relational aggression
(g) Sexual harassment
(h) Shunning
(i) Workplace bullying

Week 5. (a) Social psychology and the management of (b) crowds
1. Mass society: (a) anomie and (b) alienation
2. Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931)
3. (a) Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904),(b) imitation, (c) diffusion
4. Elias Canetti (1905-1994)
5. Serge Moscovici (1925 - )
6. The public sphere, public opinion
7. Charisma, Charismatic authority

8. The Wisdom of Crowds

Week 6. (a) Propaganda, (b) indoctrination and (c) PR: Methods and theory, controlled and uncontrolled experiments
1. Ivy Lee (1877 – 1934)
2. Walter Lippmann (1889 - 1974)
3. Edward Bernays (1891 –1995)
4. The Committee on Public Information, AKA the CPI and the Creel Committee (1917-18)
5. John Grierson (1898 – 1972)
6. Harold Lasswell (1902 — 1978)
7. Carl Hovland (1912-1961)
a. Indoctrination
b. Sleeper Effect
c. Groupthink
d. Exposure Effect
8. (a) Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann (1916 - ), (b) Spiral of silence
9. Jacques Ellul (1912 – 1994)
10. (a) Manufacturing consent and the (b) propaganda model of Mass Media
11. Corporatocracy

Week 7. Empirical, “administrative,” and quantitative research: Evidence of the 2-step flow, communities of interest, and capillary and limited effects; Big bang of information
1. Paul Felix Lazarsfeld (1901-1976)
2. Two-step flow of communication (AKA "theory of intermediaries"); diffusion of innovations
3. Herta Herzog
4. Elihu Katz (1926- )
5. George Elton Mayo (1880-1949)
6. Carl Iver Hovland (1912-1961), context
7. Uses and gratifications
8. The War of the Worlds (radio) October 30, 1938
9. Mid-range theories, Robert King Merton (1910–2003)10.
10. (a) Information and (b) systems theories
11. Norbert Weiner (1894 – 1964)
12. Claude Shannon (1916 – 2001)
13. Gregory Bateson (1904 – 1980)


Week 8. M I D T E R M -- NO TUTORIALS


Week 9. Critical theory
- Freudo-Marxism, false consciousness, & the authoritarian personality; the "F Scale"
- Max Horkheimer (1895 – 1973)
- Theodore Adorno (1903-1969)
- Dialectic of Enlightenment
- Georgy Lukacs (1885-1971), Reification
- Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)
- Herbert Marcuse (1898 – 1979)
- Hanna Arendt (1906 - 1975)

Week 10. Structuralism, semiosis, semiurgy and semioclasis
- Ferdinand de Saussure (1857 – 1913)
- Edward Sapir (1884 - 1939)
- Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897 - 1941)
- Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (SWH)
- Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan (1901 – 1981)
- Claude Levi Strauss (1908 - )
- Roland Barthes (1915 – 1980)
- Louis Althusser (1918 – 1990)
- Semiotics for Beginners, David Chandler

Week 11. Cultural studies (CCCS, AKA “The Birmingham School”): Ideology, hegemony, class consciousness & resistance, appropriation and re-appropriation
- Culture
- Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)
- Raymond Williams
- Stuart Hall (1932 - )
- Dick Hebdige (1951 – )

Week 12. Political economy of media
- Dallas Smythe (1907 – 1992)
- Robert W. McChesney (first book, 1993)
- Manufacturing Consent
- Censorship
- Crawford Brough (C.B.) Macpherson (1911 - 1987)
- Concentration of media ownership
- Media democracy
- Media ethics
- Armand Mattelart

Week 13.
- Plato. “The Phaedrus,” Phaedrus & The Seventh and Eighth Letters. Translated by Walter Hamilton. London: Penguin, 1973, pp. 21-103. Fully annotated and introduced complete text, if somewhat dated translation, by Jowlett (1892).
The Gorgias, Aristotle’s Rhetoric.


ADDENDUM: CMNS Research Methods & Paradigms
- Audience response
- Coding
- Critical perspectives
- Critical realism
- Content analysis
- Discourse analysis
- Documentary film
- Ethnographic study
- Experiment
- Focus group
- Hermeneutics
- Interview
- Media effects glossary
- Methodology
- Paradigm
- Plagiarism
- Participant observation
- Positivism
- Qualitative research
- Quantitative research

A question for those who like a media conundrum . . . If we agree that Wiki isn’t exactly a “published” academic peer reviewed source – and anyway, it’s an encyclopedia – so it can’t/shouldn’t be cited, but if the Communication Theory is voted by the Wiki community as exemplary and installed as a Wiki book, is it citable?

Is an ebook a book?

These are indisputably REAL books:

Babe, Robert E. Canadian Communication Thought: Ten Foundational Writers. Toronto: University of Toronto, 2000.

Baran, Stanley J. Introduction to Mass Communication: Media Literacy and Culture. 3 ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2004.

______________, and Dennis K. Davis. Mass Communication Theory: Foundations, Ferment, and Future. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Pub. Co., 1995.

Bruhn Jensen, Klaus, ed. A Handbook of Media and Communication Research. London: Routledge, 2002.

Czitrom, Daniel J. Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982.

Crowley, D. J., and Paul Heyer. Communication in History: Technology, Culture, Society. 4 ed. Boston, MS: Allyn and Bacon, 2003.

Davis, Dennis K., and Stanley J. Baran. Mass Communication and Everyday Life: A Perspective on Theory and Effects. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Pub. Co., 1981.

Deacon, David. Researching Communications: A Practical Guide to Methods in Media and Cultural Analysis. London: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Mattelart, Armand. Theories of Communication: A Short Introduction. Sage Publications Inc., 1998.

Rogers, Evert M. A History of Communication Study: A Biographical Approach. NY: The Free Press (Macmillan), 1994.

West, Richard, and Jynn H. Hunter. Introduction to Communication Theory: Analysis & Application. 3 ed. New York: McGraw Hill, 2007.


INTRODUCTION (cont. from above)
Skimming the names and topics, at first you might (understandably) recoil: "What, and WHY, is all this stuff!?" Answer: Communication is an inescapably interdisciplinary field (which, some might say, proves we either got no logic or we ain't no field; If you're between disciplines, how can you possibly be a discipline, eh?). The aside, as most asides do, makes a good point. Yet, what is communication? Is it me, the writer? You, the reader? Perhaps the screen, machine, or sheet of paper? The alphabet, my lecture (content, performance, setting, effects), your reading and lecture notes? All these things are surely elements, but communication is a state of being -- a "moment" -- in which such elements are assembled into a circuit through which ideas, impressions, information, sentiment, attitude, the past, the future, the vivid present, flow, are exchanged and negotiated, and realized into a lived relation in a field of rules, rights and resources. It is this that we study, the elements and moments, and how they enable people to realize themselves, communities and social relations articulate themselves, and inhabitable worlds made.

It is this very breadth of the elements involved, and yet the insuperability of the question of communication as that set of processes by which we enact our lived world, that both shapes the need for broad base of knowledge, and that attracts scholars trained and working in many other disciplines and paradigms to devote their energies to inquiries centred on communication. Communication, first and finally, is the articulation of relation -- that is, how things, people, events, circumstances, benefits and burdens correspond to one another. The value of paradigms, fields and disciplines notwithstanding, without communication,, we, as we know ourselves, in all our aggregations, forms and posturings, wouldn't be here at all.

About Wikipedia: It is generally considered poor academic form to cite any encyclopedias in scholarly writing. The same applies, perhaps even more so, to Wikipedia; ergo, NOT RECOMMENDED. While this is the case, nearly every Wiki entry offers a bibliography and additional links both providing points of departure for finding richer, fuller, and citable sources. That said, Wikipedia is itself a communication phenomenon, and very much in what has been called “the spirit of the web.” It is the on-going product and project of a community of interest, commitment and practice, to a great extent self-organizing, and in its product (in which all can participate) something of a profoundly political phenomenon, perhaps a foreshadowing.

Although the quality of the entries is debated (go to Google, ask: “What’s wrong with Wikipedia,” and you’ll get that side of the picture), most of the Wiki entries assembled here are very serviceable and good thumbnail sketches of the larger ideas involved. The ideas are often pared down to raw information, sometimes almost formulaic, offering few elaborations and examples. For elaborations and examples, as well as deepening and critique, we have the library and that wonderful sea of published ideas -- books and peer-reviewed journals. We might think of the Wikipedia entries as being in relation to our field of study like a map is to the territory it represents – very much reduced in scale and substance. A map is not the place, but can be very helpful when you’re first figuring out how to get around.

James Watson’s and Anne Hill’s, Dictionary of Media and Communication Studies. 6th edition has been added to the required texts as a check, or counterpoint to, the ToC. All the linked entries should be checked – at minimum – against Watson and Hill. Checking against Watson & Hill (who are from the UK and writing for a British market) may sometimes take some creativity, as the authors pay little or no attention to some of the topics, people, themes and issues we’ll be dealing with. You’ll find neither Innis, nor Ong in their dictionary, though they have much else that isn’t included in the ToC. Their book will be a useful resource for you in the years ahead regardless.

When Watson and Hill have nothing or little to report, there are additional places to check on the web: Martin Ryder’s Communication Theory (University of Colorado at Denver School of Education) Archives by Theory is useful, as is Communication theories, from The University of Twente, Netherlands. Theory Org out of the UK is s serviceable resource, as also the EServer Cultural Studies and Critical Theory Collection. A broad range of entries are also located at Cultural Theory, Cultural Studies.

There are many electronic resources available through the SFU library, of course. If lost, another place to check facts, names and interpretations is the Reference Desk, and Communication Librarians at Bennet. Or, for paper sources and leads, you might start by connecting with SFU Library’s Research Help.

In addition to articles and Wikipedia entries, there are a number of links to reference sites, e.g. Silva Rhetoricae, Phenomenology Online, and Semiotics for Beginners. You are not expected to work through all the contents of these sites, although you will find them helpful with definitions of terms, explanation of concepts, and when working on your research assignment. An addendum on CMNS research methods has also been provided and will be referred to throughout the course.

While this is not exactly a course on communication theory, the theoretical component plays a large role in its content. Students bent on getting most out course will find the Communication Theory book from Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection very useful. The table of contents can be used in conjunction with this ToC.

Reading this, you may wonder if our intent is to realize McLuhan's forecasting the "end of the book." Hardly. It will be virtually impossible to grasp course content or achieve a high mark without entering the world of books. Research assignments require use of printed texts -- scholarly books and journals, and we end the course on one of the earliest books in the Western tradition that takes communication as its subject matter -- Plato's Phaedrus. Additionally, some students find the Wikipedia format uncongenial for any number of reasons (hard to read off my lap top in the bath-tub etc). At the end of the syllabus, we've provided a bibliography of acceptable 1st year texts that can be found in the library. Providing one follows the sequencing of people and topics in the ToC, any of them may be used as a supplement, though you may need more than one of these texts to cover all the bases.

Finally, a nitty-gritty, if you will: I do not recommend building your own reading notes using the “copy-paste” method -- directly from Wikipedia or other web entries &/or sites in to your notes. You may end up with a pretty niftie-lookin’ set of notes on material you actually know little if anything about. Recommended, therefore: Write out your notes by hand, condense them, add such pertinent explanatory information as you dig up by following links, THEN input your notes. Takes longer, no doubt, but may have a very positive effect on the learning process.




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CMNS 110 F 07 TOC
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CMNS 110 F 07 TOC