Understanding Culture,
Understanding Communication
Szerző: Lázár Imre
Lektor:Mile András
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Introduction
• In this unit students will become familiar with the history of cultural concepts and
their natural, social, technological and ideological contexts. In the second part we
will explore the dimensions of human communication, with its ethological and
evolutionary background, and reveal its social, cultural and technological contexts
with special regard to textual communication, visual and media rhetoric and its
discourse context.
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Content
• First part : Understanding Culture
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What is culture?
The stages of development of the German concepts of culture
Semantic history of the word ‘culture’
English and American concepts of culture in Humanities
Broad anthropological definitions
Multidimensional anthropological concepts of culture
Emphasis on Nature
Emphasis on social structures and Interactions
Emphasis on ideas
Emphasis on culture as technology
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Content II.
• Part two: Meaning, Culture and Communication
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What is communication?
Communication in 4T framework
The natural context of communication
Schools of Communication in Social Context
Cross-cultural encounter: identity and homogenization
Communication and Culture
Textualist Approaches of Communication
Mixed Culturalist and Textual Approach
Language, where culture and communication meets
Image as text
Communicative operations with meaning in images
Texts: language, image and film
Media texts in discourse context
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First part
Theories of culture
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What is culture ?
• Early definitions before the advent of cultural anthropology:
• While travelling, having realized that all those who have attitudes very different from
our own are not for that reason barbarians or savages but are as rational or more so
than ourselves, and having considered how greatly the self-same person with the selfsame mind who had grown up from infancy among the French or Germans would
become different from what he would have been if he had always lived among the
Chinese or the cannibals . (Descartes, Discourse on Method [cit. by Kroeber,
Kluckhohn, Untereiner, and Meyer] 4.)
• Voltaire stated, “first put aside dynasties, king lists, and battles, and sought what is
essential in history, namely culture, as it is manifest in customs, in beliefs, and in forms
of government.” (Gustav E., Klemm. 1854: Allgemeine Culturwissenschaft.)
• Present day definitions, applied by organizational science:
• “Culture is the collective programming of the human mind that distinguishes the
members of one human group from those of another. Culture in this sense is a system
of collectively held values.” (Geert Hofstede)
• “Culture is the deeper level of basic assumptions and beliefs that are shared by
members of an organization, that operate unconsciously and define in a basic ‘taken for
granted’ fashion an organization's view of its self and its environment.” (Edgar Schein)
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Early stages of development of German concepts of Culture
• Historical, universalist frames (late XVIII. century: Herder)
• Herder construed Cultur as a progressive cultivation or development of faculties.
• In Herderian context culture means progress in cultivation toward enlightenment, but
the idea of progress is well tempered by an intrinsic interest in the variety of forms
that culture has assumed with comparative, almost ethnographic accents inclined
toward relativism. This Herderian heritage strongly influenced Boas through Wundt.
• Wilhelm von Humboldt called for an anthropology that would synthesize Kant's and
Herder's interests.
• Culture with universal roots
• Adolf Bastian proposed that a scientific comparison of all human societies would
reveal that distinct worldviews consisted of the same basic elements. According to
Bastian, all human societies share a set of "elementary ideas”; different cultures, or
different "folk ideas”, are local modifications of the elementary ideas.
• The historical overview of culture is partly based on the work of Kroeber, A. L., Kluckhohn,
W. A.,Untereyner, A.G., and Meyer, 1952: Culture. A Critical Review of Concepts and
Definitions.Vintage Books.
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Semantic history of the word ‘culture’
• Culture, in terms of intellectual as well as technical context.
• Klemm created an ethnographical frame of concept of culture with contemporary
accents predating Tylor’s concept of an in-between stage, but he never formally
defined culture in its modern sense.
• Kant uses the term Cultur with the meaning of cultivating or becoming. “We become
cultivated through art and science, we become civilized [by attaining] to a variety of
social graces and refinements [or decencies]”.
• According to Wundt the word “Culture” is derived from latin ‘colere’, while the term
“cultus” comes form “cultus deorum”. From this there developed the mediaeval
cultura mentis; from which grew the dual concepts of geistige and materielle Kultur.
• Wundt’s influential concept of collective representations as part of a collective
“psyche”, like language, myths and religion became a starting point for those
anthropologists, who attended him in Leipzig, like Boas, Malinowski, Durkheim or
Mauss. According to Wundt culture tends to isolate or segregate itself on national
lines, civilization to spread its content to other nations; hence cultures which have
developed out of civilizations, which derive from them, remain dependent on
other cultures. Wundt, 1920: Kultur und Geschichte, Völkerpsychologie 10 Vol.
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English and American concepts of Culture in Humanities
• Matthew Arnold: a pursuit of total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the
matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.
(Arnold, M. 1869: Culture and Anarchy)
• F. Znaniecki: We shall use the term "culturalism" for the view of the world which
should be constructed on the ground of the implicit or explicit presuppositions involved
in reflection about cultural phenomena . . . The progress of knowledge about culture
demonstrates more and more concretely the historical relativity of all human values,
including science itself.
(Znaniecki, F. 1919: Cultural Reality)
• Ernest Cassirer: Human culture taken as a whole may be described as the process of
man's progressive self-liberation. Language, art, religion, science are various phases in
this process. In all of them man discovers and proves a new power —the power to build
up a world of his own, an "ideal" world.
(Cassirer, E. 1944: Essay on Man. 228)
• T. S. Eliot: . . . culture is not merely the sum of several activities, but a way of life. The
conscious self-cultivation of the individual, his attempt to raise himself out of the
average mass to the level of the élite; the ways of believing, thinking, and feeling of the
particular group within society to which an individual belongs; and the still less
conscious ways of life of a total society.
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Broad Anthropological Definitions
• Culture can be understood as a comprehensive totality, implying an enumeration of
aspects of culture content.
• Tylor, 1871: Culture, or civilization, . . . is that complex whole which includes
knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits
acquired by man as a member of society.
• Benedict, 1929: . . . that complex whole which includes all the habits acquired by
man as a member of society.
• Boas, F. : Culture embraces all the manifestations of social habits of a community,
the reactions of the individual as affected by the habits of the group in which he lives,
and the products of human activities as determined by these habits.
• Malinowski, B.: It [culture] obviously is the integral whole consisting of implements
and consumers' goods, of constitutional charters for the various social groupings, of
human ideas and crafts, beliefs and customs.
• Kluckhohn and Kelly: Culture is that complex whole which includes artifacts,
beliefs, art, all the other habits acquired by man as a member of society, and all
products of human activity as determined by these habits.
• The knowledge of ways of adjusting to our surroundings, both human and physical;
language, customs, and systems of etiquette, ethics, religion, and morals that have
been built up through the ages.”
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Multidimensional anthropological concepts of culture
Marxist, neo-marxist anthropologies
Economic anthropology
Applied anthropologies
Emphasis on Culture asTechnology
Culture as mean of biocultural
adaptation
Culture in frame of interpretive
anthropology (Geertz)
Cultural materialism (Marvin Harris)
Cognitive anthropology
Culture in context of environmental
possibilism
Symbolic anthropology
Emphasis on Ideas
Culture in context of environmental
determinism
Anthropology of religion
Culture in frame of symbolic
interactionism
Culture in context of
neoevolutionary frame
Ecological anthropology
Emphasis on Nature
Emphasis on Social Structures
and interactions
Culture in frames of social anthropology
Political anthropology
Anthropology of law
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Emphasis on Nature
• Cultural ecology is the study of human adaptations to social and physical
environments. Human adaptation refers to both biological and cultural processes that
enable a population to survive and reproduce within a given or changing
environment. Julian Steward, was one who, interpreted the patterns of human
behavior/culture associated with using the environment and assessing these patterns
of behavior influencing belief system, and other parts of the cultural complex.
• Ecological anthropology is the “study of cultural adaptations to environments”. or
"the study of relationships between a population of humans and their biophysical
environment”. Roy Rappaport explored the relationship between culture and the
natural environment expressed by rituals in the processual relationship between the
two.
• Environmental determinism, also known as climatic determinism or geographical
determinism, is the view that the physical environment sets limits on human
environment. (Friedrich Ratzel, Ellen Churchill Semple).
• Cultural materialism "is based on the simple premise that human social life is a
response to the practical problems of earthly existence.” Marvin incorporated and
refined Marx's categories of superstructure and base, but in contrast with Marx
included demographic dynamics as determinant factors in socio-cultural evolution.
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Emphasis on Social Structures and Interactions
• Social Anthropology studies social structures and organization, customs, economic
and political organization, law, patterns of production, exchange, and consumption,
family structure and kinship, childrearing and socialization.
• Structural functionalism is a research and interpretive framework for society as a
system, where social structures shape society as a whole, exploring both social
structure and social functions embodied in customs, roles, institutions, and ruled by
norms and traditions.
• Symbolic interactionism offers social context to perceived reality developed by
interaction with others. Even physical reality does indeed exist by an individual's
social definitions, and that social definitions do develop in part or relation to
something “real.” Culture and behaviour is defined by a reflective, socially
understood meaning, people respond to reality via the social understanding of reality.
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Emphasis on Ideas
• (Ward 1903, 235) A culture is a social structure, a social organism, if any one
prefers, and ideas are its germs.
• (Wissler 1916, 197). . . . a culture is a definite association complex of ideas.
• (Blumenthal 1937, 3,12) a) Culture is the world sum-total of past and present
cultural ideas. b) Culture consists of the entire stream of inactive and active cultural
ideas from the first in the cosmos to the last.
• (Osgood 1940, 25) Culture consists of all ideas concerning human beings which have
been communicated to one's mind and of which one is conscious.
• (Kluckhohn and Kelly, 1945, 97). . . . a summation of all the ideas for standardized
types of behavior.
• By [holistic] culture as a descriptive concept, I mean all those mental constructs or
ideas which have been learned or created after birth by an individual. . . The term
idea includes such categories as attitudes, meanings, sentiments, feelings, values,
goals, purposes, interests, knowledge, beliefs, relationships, associations...
(Taylor, W.W. 1948: A Study of Archaeology. American Anthropological Association,
Memoir. 69)
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Emphasis on Ideas
• Symbolic and interpretive anthropology is the study of cultural symbols and how
those symbols can be interpreted to better understand a particular society.
• Interpretive anthropology is concerned with the operations of "culture" rather than
the ways in which symbols operate in the social process.
• Symbolic anthropology is concerned with the operations of "society" and the ways
in which symbols operate within it, and studies symbols and the processes, such as
myth and ritual, by which humans assign meanings to these symbols to address
fundamental questions about human social life (Spencer 1996).
• “Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun” (Clifford
Geertz Victor Turner, Mary Douglas)
• Structural anthropology is based on Claude Lévi-Strauss' idea that people think
about the world in terms of binary opposites — such as high and low, inside and
outside, person and animal, life and death—and that every culture can be understood
in terms of these opposites. Structuralist anthropology focuses on meaning, as
established by contrasts between various aspects of culture and sees actions as being
separate from the actors. (Ortner 1984). (Claude Lévi-Strauss, Edmund Leach, and
Rodney Needham)
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Emphasis on Culture as Technology
• (Ellwood, 1927, 9) [Culture includes] on the one hand, the whole of man's material
civilization, tools, weapons, clothing, shelter, machines, and even systems of
industry; and, on the other hand all of non-material, or spiritual civilization, such as
language, literature, art, religion, ritual, morality, law, and government.
• (Wilky, 1927, 500) …that part of the environment which man has himself created and
to which he must adjust himself.
• White and Childe stress modes of technology.
• J. Folsom states, culture is the sum total of all that is artificial. It is the complete
outfit of tools, and habits of living, which are invented by man and then passed on
from one generation to another. (Folsom, J. 1928: Culture and Social Progress. New
York)
• Culture is not any part of man or his inborn equipment. It is the sum total of all that
man has produced: tools, symbols, most organizations, common activities, attitudes,
and beliefs. (Folsom, J. 1931: Social Psychology. New York)
• In Marxism, the concepts devised to express the totality of all social phenomena in
their interrelation is not culture, but the mode of production, with its two important
sub-concepts, the forces of production and the social relations of production.
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Dimensions of Culture
• Hofstede G. : Cultural dimensions
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Power Distance Index (PDI) is defined as “the extent to which the less powerful members
of institutions and organisations within a country expect and accept that power is distributed
unequally”.
Individualism (IDV) Hofstede defines this dimension as follows: “individualism pertains to
societies in which the ties between individuals are loose: everyone is expected to look after
himself or herself and his or her immediate family.
Masculinity (MAS) focuses on the degree to which ‘masculine’ values like competitiveness
and the acquisition of wealth are valued over ‘feminine’ values like relationship building and
quality of life.
Uncertainty Avoidance Index (UAI) focuses on the level of tolerance for uncertainty and
ambiguity within the society.
Long-Term Orientation (LTO) (formerly called Confucian Dynamism) focuses on the degree
the society embraces, or does not embrace, long-term devotion to traditional values.
• Hall ET
• Iceberg Model
• Monochronic versus Polychronic Cultures
• High context/low context culture
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Meaning, Culture and Communication
• Culture is a system derived from meaningful human activity, while communication is
the domain of the intended or unintended exchange of meanings between social/
cultural agents.
• The processes of communication produce meanings; cultural production brings into
existence meaningful objects, which in their turn communicate their meanings. The
concepts of meaning therefore inextricably links these two aspects of the one domain.
• Every act of communication is a cultural event. The structures, processes and
contents of communication are given by culture. Nothing outside culture can be a
part of communication.
• Culture generates a framework for communication, and creates constraints for what
can be communicated, what is communicable, and for how it is communicated.
• “On the one hand, anything outside the scope of communication is non-cultural. On
the other hand, as communication is a cultural process, new cultural meanings are
constantly produced in the processes of communication.”
Kress, G. 1988: Communication and Culture: An Introduction.
New South Wales University Press.
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Iceberg and Onion modells of Culture
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Hall’s Iceberg Model
Schein’s Iceberg Model
Goldman’s Iceberg
Hofstede’s layers of culture
• Trompenaars’s cultural layers
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Literature
• Benedict, R. 1929: The Science of Custom, The Century Magazine, Vol. 117. 641649. Reprinted in The Making of Man. edited by V. F. Calverton, Modern Library,
805-817.
• Cassirer E. 1944: Essay on Man. New Haven, Yale University Press.
• Hall E.T. 1976: Beyond Culture. Anchor Books
• Kress G. 1988: Communication and Culture: An Introduction .
New South Wales University Press
• Kroeber, A. L., Kluckhohn, W. A. Untereyner, A.G., Meyer, 1952: Culture. A
Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. Vintage Books
• Ortner, Sherry B. 1984: Theory in anthropology since the Sixties. Comparative
Studies in Society and History. 26.126-166.
• Schein E.Organizational Culture and Leadership in http://www.fsrpsychologie.unijena.de/fsr_psychologiemedia/-p-102.pdf?rewrite_engine=id
• Spencer, Jonathan. 1996: Symbolic Anthropology. In Encyclopedia of Social and
Cultural Anthropology. Alan Barnard and Jonathan Spencer ed. Pp. 535-539. London
and New York, Routledge.
• Taylor, W. W. 1948. A Study of Archaeology. American Anthropological
Association, Memoir 69.
• Wundt W. 1920: Kultur und Geschichte, Völkerpsychologie 10 Vol.
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Part two
Meaning, Culture and Communication
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What is communication
• Communication is the activity of conveying information through the exchange of
thoughts, messages, or information between a sender, and a recipient, where the
receiver need not be present or aware of the sender's intent to communicate at the
time of communication. Communication requires that the communicating parties
share an area of communicative commonality.
• Communication is 'social interaction through messages' (Fiske 1990)
'a process in which participants create and share information with one
another in order to reach a mutual understanding‘ (Rogers 1995: 35)
'a process in which there is some predictable relation between the message
transmitted and the message received' (Graber 2003).
• Transactional model of communication: individuals are simultaneously engaging
in the sending and receiving of messages.
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Communication in 4T framewok
• All linguistic action exerts social and cultural effects, where language used is under
influence of power relations, or social and political group resistance, being both a
means of control and a means of evading control and of effecting change.
• Innovative social (sociospherical) and cultural (infospherical) and/or
technological (technospherical) dynamics imbedded in the constant and changing
natural context and environmental settings’ text dynamics
is also reflected by linguistic changes framed
by changing cultural and social context.
Even traditional key terms of a given
language may gain new meaning,
and some of the older terms may be
abandoned.
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Natural context of communication
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Darwin, Ch.: The expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
Nonverbal communication, Where Nature Meets Culture
The Evolution of Communication
Key fields connected with animal communication: Animal communication,
• Animal cognition, Emotion in animals, Behavioral ecology, Cognitive ethology, Instinct,
Neuroethology, Sociobiology
• Human Ethologists dealing with field · Charles Darwin, Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt ,
Konrad Lorenz, Desmond Morris, Nikolaas Tinbergen, Richard Dawkins, Wulf Schiefenhüvel
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Forms of communication
Gestures
Facial expression
Gaze
Vocalization
Olfactory communication
Body language
How to read body language : videos on the theme
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Schools of Communication in Social Context
Communication studies of interdisciplinary
ventures, drawing from sociology, philosophy and
literary studies - informed by Marxist theory as in
the case of researchers in Contemporary Cultural
Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham –
were established in Britain in the 1970s. (Raymond
Williams and Jacques Derrida )
The Frankfurt School, under the leadership of
Jürgen Habermas and Theodor Adorno, although
developing separately from the CCCS, followed a
parallel
neo-Marxist
approach
aimed
at
investigating the ideological overtunes and
undertunes of communication and media activities,
especially as they relate
to political factors,
governmental regulation and public policy and the
public sphere, and such new territories of
communication studies like social media.
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Cross-cultural encounter: identity and homogenization
• Relative isolation keeps a community within their own culture. The degree to which this
identity and cultural character is shared by neighboring local groups depends largely upon the
means and extent of inter-communication.
• Ease of communication and (tele)communication and geographical mobility may produce
considerable cultural similarity over wide areas generating important social cleavages which cut
across local groupings, as in the case of social classes. For most of the peoples of the earth,
however, the community has been both the
primary unit of social participation
and the distinctive culture-bearing group.
Figure
Ling FYY, Ang AMH, Lim SSY (2007)
"Encounters between foreigners and Chinese:
Perception and management of cultural differences",
Engineering, Construction and Architectural
Management, Vol. 14 Iss: 6, pp.501 - 518
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Communication and culture
• Culture includes everything that can be communicated from one generation to
another. The culture of a people is their social heritage, a "complex whole" which
includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, techniques of tool fabrication and use,
and methods of communication.
• Culture is historical or cumulative:
- in that it is communicated through education, and its content is encased in patterns
(that is, standardized procedures or idea systems),
- it is also dogmatic as to its content and resentful of differences,
- its contribution to the individual is absorbed largely unconsciously, leading to a
subsequent development of emotional reinforcements, and that the raising of these
into consciousness is less likely to lead to insight and objective analysis than to
explanations ad hoc.
• “Those patterns of group life which exist only by virtue of the three-fold
mechanism—invention, communication, and social habituation—belong to the
cultural order. . .” (Warden, C.J. 1936: The Emergence Of Human Culture. Macmillan Co.
• “Culture . . . is communicable intelligence. . . . In its material no less than in its oral
form culture is, then, as it were, the language of social life, the sole medium for
expressing the consciousness of our common humanity.” (Marett, R.R, 1928)
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Textualist Approaches of Communication
• The textual approaches were developed
in continental Europe, in Estonia, in
France, and in Scandinavian countries,
such as Denmark. Textual studies were
initially strongly language-based, and in
many institutions they were (and often
still are) integrated as a branch of
linguistics or anthropology.
• They are closely associated with the
work of structuralist semioticians, who
compared a variety of texts, in both oral
and written forms, to distinguish
common underlying patterns that might
not be obvious at a surface level. These
approaches
combined
linguistic
analysis with rhetoric, and concepts
from the philosophy of language, to
examine how and in which ways people
make sense of the world as inscribed in
language. (Jurij Lotman. Roman
Jakobson, Julia Kristeva, Algirdas
Greimas)
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Mixed Culturalist and Textual Approach
• Since the beginnings of textual
approaches in the 1960s, many scholars
have pursued their analysis from linguistic
texts to non-verbal behaviour, such as
dress, advertising and ritual, as well as
film.
• Such approaches cut across the other two
branches of communication studies in that
they are interested in both universal, cognitive aspects of communication (i.e.
how the human mind works) and the
cultural manifestations of these aspects
(i.e. what gives each text its particular
take on the universal, or its unique 'flair').
• Culturalist approaches maybe influenced
by textual studies as in case of French
structuralist scholars: Roland Barthes,
Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault.
They have strongly influenced the study
of ideology and power in social life by
British culturalists.
.
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Language, where culture and communication crosses over
• Social structures and linguistic forms such as language and culture are intimately intermeshed.
Every language implies a system of values, meanings, practices and structures of the society.
Based on Wundt’s concepts of Völkerpsychology, anthropological particularism created a
particularist framework dedicated to the systems of linguistic modelling of the (natural and
social) worlds theoretised by Benjamin Whorf and Edward Sapir. This framework is closed to
the meaning centred, interpretive approaches where language constitutes meaning, and meaning
is always and everywhere structured by differences of value systems (ideologies) and by
differences of power (emphasized in the critical interpretive schools) .
• Use of language is always social and sometimes a power practice: reflecting differences
between social groupings, genders, racial or ethnic variations, which are reproduced in forms of
language, registers, vocabularies. dialects encoded in linguistic forms.
• These social and cultural differences, status markers, socio-cultural barriers can be challenged,
confirmed, reproduced, subverted, by the use of linguistic forms.
• The notion of text as the result of language processes in given social contexts are necessary
for decoding the meaning of this text for sake of effective communication.
• Multiplicity of voices: the spoken texts are not restricted to the speaking communicator, but
usually reflect discourses, as the voices of social institutions (education, bureaucracies, work,
leisure, the mass media, religion, neighbourhood, or conventions and registers, and language
habits of gender, class) speaking through or with the individual speaker.
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Communication in technological context
• Techno-history of communication
• Information Technology
• Technology and
new social media
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Image as text
• Images are texts, in the sense , that images are interpreted on the basis of cultural
conventions, and codes used by the hermeneutic community. But even a text may
gain visual rhetoric content as in case of typography.
• Images contain ideological meanings just as verbal texts, and readers/viewers are
therefore positioned, as participants, in complex cultural and ideological structures
and processes.
• Visual rhetorical elements: depth and surface, surface structure, presence and
absence, metaphor, metonymy, colour symbolism, intertextuality. Research projects
are designed to explore the working dynamics of visual rhetoric.
• Visual metaphors, where “in certain cultural contexts, there are visual qualities that
lend themselves to symbolic use.” (Erich Gombrich, 1973)
• John Berger (Ways of Seeing) “Every image embodies a way of seeing. Images taken
as texts are built into similar structures as verbal texts. Verbal texts attempt to
construct reading positions providing a stance for readers. The same happens in case
of images as visual texts providing ‘viewing positions’.”
• The images as “intertexts” in the sense Kristeva uses, are where one set of textual
elements is transposed into (or superimposed onto) another. Image as text can tell, retell and transform the meanings that already adheres to objects in a frame of given
cultural principles.
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Communicative operations with meaning in images
• The structure of presence/absence allows us to infer important meanings about the
ideological constructedness of a text.
• Visual metonymy uses relocation of meaning (and, in a way, a way of making
meaning harder to get at), but also of making only one meaning available,
unspeakable and obvious at the same time. Metonymy offers a privileged view that,
although available to everyone who sees it, manages to personalise the view for all
involved.
• Denotative and connotative operations with the image are culturally sensitive acts.
The image operates on a code that allows the viewer to skip from recognising ‘what
is there’ to recognising the meaning of ‘what is there‘, the photo as ‘a message
without a code’ (Barthes, Image-Music- Text)
• The structure of the image is an ideological one, where cultural and social meanings,
and the contingencies of the structures of the communicative situation exert their
effect.
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Texts: language, image and film
• All media texts are social, and constructed and perceived in a hermeneutic space of
producers and consumers of the given text. The complexities of the meanings of film
consist of language, visual images, music and other sound, colour and light, time and
narrative structures, at the same time produced and perceived to provide means of
understanding the process that lead to the production of these texts, and the equally
complex process of their reception, reading and reconstruction by the reader.
• Media texts can be understood by considering narrative structures, generic
conventions, ideological functions and social and cultural assumptions embodied in
the kinematographic, scenic and acoustic text of the media content shaped by the
moral-ethical production, its economic imperatives, and the ideological discourse.
• The media texts embodied in the structure, the kinds of characters and incidents
used, even patterns of dialogue are highly conventionalised, almost standardised
productions testing audience familiarity with these conventions, incorporating that
recognition into their construction of a text. These conventions organise texts into
particular classes or genres. Meaning arises in the complex interaction between text
or representation framed in the given genres, or in mixed genres carrying particular
significance(s) for the audience and interacting with other genres represented by the
audience, and the society in which it is viewed.
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Media texts in discourse context
• Discourses are systematically organised sets of statements that give expression to the
meanings and values of an institution, defining what it is possible to say and not
possible to say. A discourse provides a set of possible statements about a given area,
and organises and gives structure to the manner in which a particular topic, object,
process is to be talked about. In that it provides descriptions, rules, permissions and
prohibitions of social and individual interaction.
• Media texts may be taken as a dialogue or interference of such discourses
harmonizing or conflicting with each other.
• The intertextuality of media texts can have a subversive or radical function within a
text, because it can alert the critical viewer to similarities between genres which
apparently have very different interests and aims.
• Understanding the significance and meaning of the text status of those texts in
relation to the social formation of which they are at once product, process, expression
and reinforcement, needs analysis of financial determinants, production practices and
audience expectation.
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References:
• Barthes, R.: Image/Music/Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Noonday.
• Berger J. 1972: Ways of Seeing. London: BBC, Penguin Books.
• Graber, D. A. 2003: The power of communication: Managing information in public
organizations. Washington, DC: CQ Press.
• Gombrich, E. 1973: Illusion and Art. in R. Gregory and E. H. Gombrich (eds.)
Illusion in Nature and Art, London.
• Kress G. 1988: Communication and Culture: An Introduction. New South Wales
University Press.
• Kroeber, A. L., Kluckhohn, W. A.Unterreyner, A.G. Meyer, 1952: Culture. A Critical
Review of Concepts and Definitions. Vintage Books.
• Molnár P., Segerstralle U. 1997: Nonverbal Communication: Where Nature Meets
Culture . Erlbaum Ass. Pub.
• Ling F.Y.Y., Ang A.M.H, Lim, S.S.Y. 2007: Encounters between foreigners and
Chinese: Perception and management of cultural differences. Engineering,
Construction and Architectural Management, Vol. 14 Iss: 6, 501 – 518.
• Warden, C.J. 1936: The Emergence Of Human Culture. Macmillan Co.
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