Communication Theories(With Corrections)

Communication has been a problem for scientists all over the years.

How to communicate something, and how to do it right were the main concerns in this area of studies.

We, communicators, understand Communication is not a singular, but a plural process between two or more persons, and so the exchange of messages is only a minor part in this complex and interesting process.

Different Schools:

Mostly, theories in Communication didn’t appear until the 1930’s, before the Second World War began. Consolidation of new states, countries and goverment systems was taking place in Europe as a result of the imperialistic system started by Adolf Hitler. Here, we are in front of a new concern for world leaders: communication, and its matter, society.

Marxist Theories

Marxist Theories took place after the consolidation of the URSS. The main characteristics of this movement were: -All messages given by powerful men were use to increase that power. -Also, mass media were used for the same purposes. Marxist Theories changed the European map completey, and they were the beginning for Criticism, Intellectual Movements, and social struggles.

Marcuse Marcuse was one of the most important men in the Critic Marxist Intellectual Movement. He started the idea of an “Industrial Culture” that captured men leaving no way out to process their own ideas. Industrial Culture was just an example of a realistic situation in Europe. All men who participated in the Critic’s movement took refuge in the USA escaping from Nazism. This is an important step foreward in the Social Communication Studies, because it takes the idea of a “manufactured message” and unrealistic information given by mass communication.

Psychology School provided a more open, humanitarian and cultural way to understand the communicative process. This apparent “reflexion of truth and reality” that mass media give to all possible receptors is actually a simple perspective. What’s more, mass media are only a “window” for people to look ouside, but it is still a human characterisctic to wish or not to wish look through that window, believe something that the media said or do as madia does.

For the American School, mass media only provide an Agenda, that is, a specific treatement on what a media should or should not send to the audience. But still, people have the power to think as they want and to feel as they want. This is possible because an old theory called “Hipodermic Needle” is no longer a valid theory. This old theory used to explain how people are directly affected by media, brainwashing them and controling their ideas and feelings. But this new theory is also incomplete.

Nowadays we are facing a different cultural, social and communicational change. We can keep believing what media says or does, but we have to look better at what the whole society is going through to have a more desicive idea to help us to complete the complex puzzle that society is.

Jael L. Ferrari