Understanding Communication

The Signifying Web

David Crowley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138941557
• eBook ISBN: 9781317367307
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Originally published in 1983. The conventions, institutions and practices of communication today are issues of great concern to all. Using a dual approach, this book evaluates communication today in all its facets. On the one hand, an investigation of communication can be viewed as an intellectual task –thus emphasizing basic issues of the human condition; on the other hand, communication can be examined in a practical manner, in the context of current social problems, operational decisions, and questions currently facing researchers. This text brings these two together so that the practical issues of communication can be viewed as they relate to the human condition itself.

PART ONE

The Foundations — Feedback and Reflexion

1. The Idea of Feedback

2. Interdependency and Human Needs

3. Reflexion and the Social Order

4. Modes of Human Communication

PART ONE

“There are,” the psychologist Paul Watzlawick says, “many different versions of reality, some of which are contradictory, but all of which are the results of communication and not reflections of eternal objective truths.”¹

Therapists like Watzlawick commonly deal with people who are trying to sort out and come to terms with “troubled” versions of reality. Yet, the act of sorting out and coming to terms with reality (sometimes including therapy) is part of a continuous daily process, full of struggle and conflict, at every level of human existence. In the chapters to follow this process of working out and coming to terms with reality through communication is introduced by way of the concepts of feedback and reflexion.

CHAPTER 1

The Idea of Feedback

1.1 Nature, Machines, and Culture

In 1856, while recovering from malaria in the rain forests of Indonesia, Alfred Russel Wallace wrote to Charles Darwin, then at work on Origin of the Species, about his own inelegant analogy for explaining natural selection. The principle of natural selection, he wrote, “is exactly like that of the centrifugal governor of the steam engine, which checks and corrects any irregularities almost before they become evident; and in like manner no unbalanced deficiency in the animal kingdom can ever reach any conspicuous magnitude because it would make itself felt at the very first step, by rendering existence difficult and extinction almost sure to follow.” Darwin was no doubt quick to grasp the significance of Wallace’s analogy, but so cunning in his portrayal of man as risen from monkeys and savages that it has been largely overlooked how the proposition of natural selection may have been developed by analogy with those rotating governors perched atop the steam engines of the British industrial midlands.¹

It was, of course, the self-regulating feature of James Watt’s steam engine that attracted Wallace’s attention — that precise capacity of the governor to automatically adjust fuel to the work requirements of the machine so that the turning output always remains within the desired limits; and without the need for constant human monitoring. There must be in nature, Wallace speculated, a stabilizing process something like that of these machines, a way in which nature manages to keep evolutionary changes within tolerable limits. But, apart from a few items of correspondence there is little evidence to tell us whether Darwin ever seriously entertained Wallace’s idea. In fact, the link between the stabilizing process in nature and the function of the governor in some machines remained little more than an unusual analogy until almost a century later when a New England mathematician, Norbert Wiener, suggested how machines and nature both depend upon forms of information processing to monitor and stabilize their activities. Wiener’s work, called cybernetics — the science of communication and control in animals and machines — represented the first partly successful effort to fit the role of communication into the framework of nature and society.

1.2 Feedback

1.2.1 Steering — Wiener

There was, Wiener found, a principle of conservation at work in nature, in some technologies, and in all cultures by which they could allow dynamic activity yet remain within stable limits.² The human body, for example, must be highly efficient in maintaining a steady temperature. Sweating and shivering are normal and acceptable responses to changes in our environment, but fevers and chills are more drastic responses and, if unchecked, damaging, even fatal, to the organism. For centuries, in fact from ancient times, it had been known that the human body maintained a steady heat level through an internal process of adjustments to changes in the outer environment. By the nineteenth century this process had been identified with the function of the hypothalmic gland and labelled homeostasis. When the environment around it cools, the human body expends energy to raise its temperature; and when the temperature rises too high the body corrects itself through a variety of responses for cooling down. The result is homeostasis, not a steady temperature state but a perpetual oscillation, a sort of tightly controlled zig-zag pattern through an ideal setting (98.6 Fahrenheit, 37.2 Centigrade) by which an approximation of stability is maintained.

Less dramatic than the regulation of body temperature is the process by which men and women themselves act as governors to direct the performance of machines through changing environmental conditions. The internal combustion engine, for example, pushes car and driver along a highway at a constant speed barring changes in the outer environment such as hills, wind shifts, or other vehicles. Under such conditions car and driver may continue at a constant speed and with a constant use of fuel. Should the car encounter a hill, however, the load factor will immediately increase, the car slows and the driver, to recover the previous speed, will have to feed the engine more fuel until the previous speed is regained. This process of maintaining a steady relationship between an entity and its environment, whether guided by a mechanical governor, the hypothalmus, or the complex interplay of car, driver, and road conditions demonstrates the function of information feedback. Wiener defined feedback as the method of controlling a system by reinserting into it the results of its past performance.

Feedback is information from a changing environment; the concept of feedback helps us to see the process by which organisms and machines continuously engage in self-corrective moves through reacting to what actually happens and achieving thereby a sort of ongoing stability. It was on the basis of his description of how information feeds back from environment to the organism or the machine that Wiener was able to make his surprising claim that nature, some machines, and by implication man and his social world are stabilized through an aspect of their communication.

It is worth noting Wiener’s distinction between actual and intended performance. An intended action may be completed much as a stone may be thrown, without reference to an outside environment; but it will not be possible to determine whether the results attained were the same as the results intended — the broken window, for instance — unless a check is made with the actual state of affairs in the environment. This is why elevator doors do not open when the elevator’s drive system says the elevator should be at the twentieth floor, but only when the sensors on the twentieth floor indicate that it actually has arrived. Regrettably, people who walk into open elevator shafts are acting on the basis of an anticipated rather than an actual state of affairs.³

1.2.2 The Efficiency of Feedback — Deutsch

In activities controlled by feedback, efficiency depends upon minimizing mistakes, either the number or the extent or both. Consider the human pastime of shooting clay pigeons. The point of the sport is to hit the clay pigeon before it hits the ground. The rate of speed and the angle at which the clay pigeon flies can be controlled at launch; and for the experienced shot both the speed and the trajectory can be generally anticipated. Information is taken in visually by the shooter and coordinated into commands for aiming and firing. A clay pigeon moves rapidly so the shooter in following its flight must compensate for his own stationary position and for the lapsed time of his own responses by sighting the gun slightly ahead of the projectile. And since both the bullet and the clay pigeon travel at quite different speeds, this lead must be further calibrated to allow their paths to intersect at a projected point of impact.

The efficient reaching of any goal, like the shooting of clay pigeons, depends upon controlling mistakes. Karl Deutsch found that diminishing these mistakes depends in turn upon four factors:⁴

1.	LOAD	—	the extent and speed of change in the position of the goal desired
2.	LAG	—	the response time between reception of information and execution
3.	GAIN	—	the amount of actual change from the corrective steps
4.	LEAD	—	the distance of the predicted position from the position actually perceived

The factors of load, lag, gain, and lead all affect the outcome. Even for the skilled shooter, reducing mistakes depends upon the rapid and accurate calculation of all four factors. Design engineers have long recognized the limitations of training programs and the extent to which highly skilled tasks can be mastered. Increasingly today our technologies assign more and more of such calculation to computers, whether those of military weaponry or those of organized work. It is also why hunters, when faced with the crafty fowl instead of clay pigeons, still prefer birdshot to bullets.

1.3 Perception

1.3.1 The Ames Experiments

Adelbert Ames, Jr., was a New York ophthalmologist who worried his colleagues by his ceaseless efforts to create in normal people the sorts of perceptual distortion most specialists did their best to correct in their patients. Ames’ experiments were really demonstrations meant to show how seeing is based not on direct sensations of the world around us but on something like perceptual assumptions resulting from the sorts of experience we all universally share. In retrospect, the demonstrations are rich evidence for how feedback functions in perception to stabilize our visual relation to the world about us.

1.3.2 The Rotating Trapezoidal Window

In one of Ames’ demonstrations a trapezoidally shaped window is rotated slowly, at a speed where it is perceived as a rectangle, gently oscillating from side to side.⁵ When a straight rod is placed in the window it appears to fold around it; a box, when placed in one corner of the window, seems to sail off into space. As Ames explained the illusion, our past experience has made us familiar with a variety of rectangular forms — doors, windows, cupboards, books. Yet, for the most part the images formed on our eye’s retina by these objects is not rectangular, but trapezoidal. This is because we seldom approach rectangular forms in a direct frontal way, but rather encounter them at angles for which our vision must make some correction. Thus the trapezoidal form that appears in the retina is translated into a rectangular object seen in perspective. Through interpretation one compensates for degrees of trapezoidal distortion by adjusting the relation between the position of the form and the position of the viewpoint. Learning to act with regard to rectangular forms in perspective is what Ames meant by a commonly shared or nearly universal experience.

The Zulu people are an exception. The Zulu of the Bantu culture have less experience with man-made rectangles than the rest of us. They live in round huts, arranged in circular forms, have round stockades for animals, and cultivate fields that conform to the contours of the land. As if to complete the circle, they eat from round bowls, use rounded utensils, enter and exit through oval-shaped doors and have neither windows nor words for windows. Thus, when two Americans, Allport and Pettigrew, went to southern Africa and showed them the trapezoidal window trick, the indulgent Zulu did not see the illusion as frequently as people elsewhere. Different cultures create differences in cumulative experiences which, Allport and Pettigrew conclude, can create subtle differences in the way reality is perceived.⁶ It may also be a case of the exception proving the rule; hence Ames’ use of the phrase “commonly shared or nearly universal experience.”

1.3.3 The Trapezoidal Room

The anthropologist Gregory Bateson was invited to look into one of Ames’s trapezoidal rooms. First Bateson studied the room from above, constructed as it was to dollhouse size, and noted the rakish angles and distortions which Ames had included in the interior design. Then Bateson looked through a peephole at one end of the room with the help of a pair of prismatic glasses which distorted his binocular vision. The room appeared perfectly normal. Ames asked Bateson to touch a pointer to a sheet of paper fastened on one wall and, when he had done that successfully, to move the pointer to another piece of paper on a seemingly opposite wall. Bateson tried and tried, helplessly thumping the pointer each time into the wall at a point far from the paper. Others, Ames noted ruefully, sometimes learned to adjust for this distortion of visual experience and improve their aims accordingly, but the famous anthropologist never did. The difficulty of changing the settings of our perception, even in the case of easily acknowledged distortions, can be very difficult.

1.3.4 The Honi Phenomenon

Ames finally got a little of his own back when he asked a newly-wed couple to participate in another one of his experiments. He had constructed a monocular distorted room which appeared normal when viewed with one eye. Since the room was in fact distorted, a familiar face when seen through a window in the room would appear expanded or contracted. Alas, when Ames asked the husband to appear in the window while his new wife looked into the room from the other side, she reportedly saw only the perfect face of her handsome and loving man.⁷

When what we encounter fails to confirm our commonly held assumptions about how things are, we can have trouble accepting such a state of affairs. Or, we can fail to see these new facts at all. The importance of feedback control in maintaining a stable relationship between our perceptions and our experience seems partly confirmed by the efforts of Adelbert Ames to undermine our confidence in this process. Our perceptual assumptions, it seems, develop out of our cumulative and common experiences which, in turn, become the basis for our shared frames of reference on a reality that otherwise seems to be so convincingly “given” and “out there.” In this intertwining of commonly shared experiences and perception it is the role of feedback to continuously re-assure us about the status of our perceptual assumptions.

1.4 Interaction

1.4.1 Amplifying and Goal-Changing Feedback

In addition to the feedback functions discussed so far — which is known technically as self-corrective or negative feedback — there are thought to be two other types. It is sometimes forgotten that the stabilizing function of feedback depends upon set-limits or goals being built into the relationship with the environment in some prearranged way. In the absence of such goals or limits — for instance, in the absence of a thermostat set to 20 degrees centigrade or the engine throttled to a given speed — the system in question may simply proceed until it breaks down or until it encounters other defining limits. Uncontrolled, engines and furnaces break down at high levels of activity; and both will cease to function completely when the fuel runs out. Likewise, forest fires will continue to consume all that there is to burn. And since the availability of fuel represents the limits of the fire, it is common practice for fire fighters to fight fire with fire, starting controllable counterburns to deprive the larger blaze of its fuel. This sequence of events, where the relationship between fire and fuel is not subject to regulation, but becomes in fact an escalating sequence of events, is a case of amplifying feedback, where more of one thing leads to more of another. Amplifying feedback, as the example of forest fires demonstrates, often results in some form of countermoves by others, usually competitive in appearance and intended to be cancelling or offsetting.

Occasionally, it becomes necessary to reexamine the goals or the settings of a system with an eye t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction to the Series
• Introduction
• PART ONE: The Foundations — Feedback and Reflexion
• PART TWO: The Empirical Enclosures — Modes of Reality Integration
• PART THREE: Intersubjectivity — Modes of Symbolic Interaction
• PART FOUR: Bias — The Semiotic Web
• PART FIVE: The Production of Culture
• PART SIX: Principles and Practices
• Bibliography
• Notes