Communication in the 2020s

Viewing Our World Through the Eyes of Communication Scholars

Christina S. Beck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781032115634
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000578799
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Teaching Arts & Humanities
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book provides an inside look at the discipline of Communication. In this collection of chapters, top scholars from a wide range of subfields discuss how they have experienced and how they study the crucial issues of our time.

The 2020s opened with a series of events with massive implications for the ways we communicate, from the COVID-19 pandemic, a summer of protests for social justice, and climate change-related natural disasters, to one of the most contentious presidential elections in modern U.S. history. The chapters in this book provide snapshots of many of these issues as seen through the eyes of specialists in the major subfields of Communication, including interpersonal, organizational, strategic, environmental, religious, social justice, risk, sport, health, family, instructional, and political communication. Written in an informal style that blends personal narrative with accessible explanation of basic concepts, the book is ideal for introducing students to the range and practical applications of Communication discipline.

This book comprises a valuable companion text for Introduction to Communication courses as well as a primary resource for Capstone and Introduction to Graduate Studies courses. Further, this collection provides meaningful insights for Communication scholars as we look ahead to the remainder of the 2020s and beyond.

1 INTRODUCTION

Christina S. Beck

DOI: 10.4324/9781003220466-1

Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes

Five hundred twenty-five thousand moments so dear

Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes

How do you measure? Measure a year?

In daylights,

In sunsets,

In midnights,

In cups of coffee,

In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife

In five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes

How do you measure a year in a life?

(“Seasons of Love” by Jonathan Larson)

We write a family Christmas newsletter every year. In 2019, as always, we invited our readers to pour a cup of hot chocolate, pull up a chair, and enjoy our annual year in review. However, I remember thinking that the 2019 edition had a more bittersweet tone than most. Even though good things certainly happened, it had been a tough year. Grandma P. fell in early February, 2019, breaking her arm and never quite recovering from the trauma before she passed away at age 90 that June. In March, my husband, Roger, caught the flu at an indoor softball tournament (along with our youngest daughter, Ellie-Kate, who was playing with her travel team). Shockingly, in less than 24 hours, his flu symptoms morphed into full-blown pneumonia and then septic shock. He spent days in the ICU, fighting for his life.

As we got ready to welcome 2020, I was eager to get back to our normal lives, filled with the usual blur of work, church, sports, and 4-H. We looked forward to travel with Ellie-Kate’s basketball and softball teams and visits to our college student daughter, Emmy, for Parent Weekends. By the time that we put the 2020 calendar on the wall on January 1, we had already filled many of the blocks with tournament names, hotel reservation numbers, special occasion details, 4-H meetings, and orthodontist appointments.

As 2020 ensued, though, we crossed out most of those calendar notations, and our annual family newsletter described a year that was anything but “usual.” No spring softball season or sixth-grade graduation for Ellie-Kate. Emmy came home from college for spring break, finished her courses online, and mourned the cancellation of cherished campus events and traditions. Our second-oldest daughter, Chelsea, a consultant for a Big Four accounting firm in New York City, quarantined with a group of friends in the city, worked from home, and, mercifully, remained safe while in the spring epicenter of the pandemic. Our oldest daughter, Brittany, a fifth-grade teacher, figured out how to teach online while my husband and I did the same for our courses at Ohio University.

Those 525,600 minutes of 2020 proved to be impactful for my family and life-altering for our world. The year 2020 turned out to be overwhelming, exhausting, and frightening (see, e.g., Roberts, 2020). Individuals around the globe experienced life disruptions, isolation, loss, anger, and grief (see, e.g., Von Drehle, 2020; Zacharek, 2020). We witnessed shocking instances of racial injustice, some captured by horrified spectators on their cell phones, that compelled many to raise their voices and march in the streets against systemic racism and police violence (see, e.g., Worland, 2020). Residents scrambled to save their homes and lives from unprecedented, catastrophic wildfires in Australia, California, and Colorado and a record number of hurricanes hitting the U.S. Gulf Coast. Mainstream news outlets chronicled political turmoil and the health risks and economic impacts of a global pandemic while users flooded social media platforms with conspiracy theories and debates over which posts should be treated as “fake news” (see, e.g., Barry, 2020; Faris, 2020; Picheta, 2020). This turbulent year underscored the critical importance of communication for us to work, educate, advocate, celebrate, mourn, connect, inspire, protest, call to action, remain healthy, and save lives.

The year 2020 taught us just how much that we rely upon communication in times of strife. It also reminded us of just how much that communication permeates our daily lives. Through communication, we enact who we are, express our ideas, relate to others, make a difference, and decide what to believe. In this book, we discuss the legacies and lessons of 2020 for understanding communication as we now go through the decade of the 2020s. We hope that our experiences and reflections help our readers to learn more about communication and its centrality to how we construct and present ourselves, navigate relationships, and strive to be part of an ever-changing, dynamic world.

The Centrality of Communication

We have a sign that hangs in our living room: “This Family has a Season Pass for Sports.” We love going to the NCAA Women’s Basketball Final Four when it’s within driving distance, and we get extremely competitive during our annual family NCAA basketball tournament bracket contest. One of the very first words that Ellie-Kate uttered was “ball.”

Thus, in early March 2020, when Roger questioned the wisdom of traveling out of state with Ellie-Kate’s team to an indoor softball tournament in Indianapolis because of COVID, my jaw dropped. “It’s a huge facility,” I responded. “It’s not like the tiny one that smelled like mold.” The one where you caught the flu and almost died last year … I didn’t say that last part out loud.

For two days, we scoured the internet and watched the news. COVID-19 sounded scary, but was it truly unsafe to go when only a few cases had been reported in Indianapolis? If we did not go, what message would that send about our commitment to the team? Would we just seem paranoid? Alternatively, should we raise our concerns for the greater good?

Watzlawick et al. (1967, p. 49) made the important observation that “one cannot not communicate.” We implicitly send messages through our verbal and nonverbal actions (and choices not to speak or act), even if we might not intend (or want) to do so. When we post on social media, text a friend, give a speech, or even ask a question, our message contains content. However, as Watzlawick et al. noted, through that message, we also do the work of informing, persuading, supporting, and constructing our realities, identities, and relationships (see also Gergen, 1991, 1994). Of course, anything that we do or say (or do not do or say) becomes available for interpretation and reaction from others who hear our utterances, read a post, or observe an action or lack thereof. As Sigman (1995, p. 2) emphasized in his book, The Consequentiality of Communication, “Communication matters.”

Ellie-Kate’s softball team decided to drop out of the tournament after a few parents—not just us—expressed concerns. Instead of driving to Indiana on March 13, 2020, we stayed home—where we would remain for nine weeks. The NCAA cancelled March Madness, and the NBA and MLB stopped playing (see, e.g., Wertheim & Apstein, 2020). Our “family season pass for sports” grew dust.

As we learned more about COVID-19 and watched the pandemic sweep through the greater New York area—where Chelsea was sheltering in place—we realized that we had to take it seriously. We heard about hospitals and nursing homes not allowing visitors as patients suffered and died alone, and images from 2019 flashed through our minds. I remembered anxiety-filled days at Roger’s bedside in the ICU as he battled septic shock, asking questions, holding his hand, advocating for him. I recalled trying to get Grandma P. to eat just one more bit of food in the nursing home as she recovered from her broken arm. The mere thought of a loved one landing in a medical facility and not being with them fueled my motivation to keep our family out of what we determined to be harm’s way from COVID-19.

We did not expect our position to be controversial. However, the behaviors that we adopted (wearing a mask, not gathering inside with others beyond our home, etc.) communicated our orientation to COVID-19 as a legitimate threat, and, through their reactions to us (and posts about their own practices on social media), we soon grasped that some friends and family members envisioned and treated the possible threat of this novel coronavirus far differently. Those revelations came to affect our interactions and relationships.

I am connected on social media with a wide range of people with an equally varied array of perspectives—friends from high school and college, colleagues in the Communication discipline, members of my church family, parents of my daughters’ friends and teammates, friends from 4-H, Girl Scouts, and my daughters’ schools. As Gergen (1991, 1994) explained, in contemporary life, we juggle a multiplicity of identities and relationships, complicating communication on social media and actions in public (even as simple as wearing a mask).

We navigated what to say, how to say it, and what not to say (see related work on Communication Privacy Management Theory, e.g., Petronio & Child, 2020). We proceeded cautiously, carefully considering what we would do (or not do) in public or share on social media, realizing that posts about the pandemic could (and did) prompt scoffs, praise, anger, support, political debates, and questions about our priorities, commitments, and even our faith.

We balanced assessment of health risk with possible relational ramifications. We permitted Ellie-Kate to re-join her softball team when it resumed practices in May 2020, with the condition that she keep her distance in huddles and remain away from teammates who cheered at the dugout fence. As much as she has always loved to play ball, I have never seen her smile as much as when she ran back on to the field after nine weeks of quarantine.

Our joy in watching Ellie-Kate play again came with twinges of anxiety. Were we putting our family’s health in jeopardy? What did her teammates and coaches make of her distancing? In what ways would those implicitly communicative choices be consequential for her relationships and status on the team?

Of course, in the grand scheme of all happening concurrently beyond our home at that same time, a kid playing softball could easily be dismissed as insignificant or trivial—something that simply doesn’t merit a second thought. As I recall how we navigated that situation, though, I realize what we communicated to Ellie-Kate by allowing her to play at all, given how we had talked at home about approaching the pandemic. I know that another choice would have sent a different message, with all kinds of relational ripple effects. This example illustrates that even the seemingly less important interactions and decisions involve (and necessitate) complex, interwoven moves that constitute significant and consequential symbolic activity.

Those who lived through 2020 understand that such “minor” moments occurred within the context of a year with far more monumental ones. The year 2020 prompted “new normals” in terms of our family life, as we relied on phone calls instead of holiday visits to support older family members who felt lonely and isolated in their homes out of state. I felt blessed and privileged that, as educators, we could stay safe and work from home. Nearly two years later, I am wondering if our turn to technology has forever changed how we enact university life with Zoom or Teams as a viable option to face-to-face conversations. I experienced deep sadness and anger that some “friends” on Facebook continued to echo former President Trump’s racist reference to COVID-19 as the “China virus,” even after I argued that using such a label could endanger Ellie-Kate (who was born in China) and other Asian Americans. However, although challenging for our family, even these situations do not at all equate to the trauma, heartache, and life-altering circumstances that many around the world confronted during 2020.

Book Overview

At times, the clock seemed to take forever in clicking through the 525,600 minutes of 2020—minutes that were monumental, mundane, and somewhere in between. According to Bogel-Burroughs (2020), “After prose...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• SECTION I Through Communication, We Enact Identities and Reveal Priorities
• SECTION II Through Communication, We Relate to and Connect with Others and Our World
• SECTION III Through Communication, We Can Transform What Has Been into What Can Be
• Index