COMMUNICATION AS COLLECTIVE MEMORY
By. Carole Blair
(Dewi)
Collective memory is an increasingly important area of inquiry in a number of academic fields, including communication. Contemporary communication scholars have studied memory in relation to political speeches, feature films, music, television newscasts, museum display, public policy debates, image on postage stamps, iconic photographs, commemorative monuments, scrapbooks, theatrical performances nursery rhymes, and social protest demonstrations. They have understood memory as significant to virtually all forms of communication practice.
Indeed, students of communication have long understood memory to be important, at least in the context of massage production. The ancient Greeks and Romans are credited with inventing and developing memory systems that enable public figures to speak at length without consulting notes. As Frances Yates (1966) argued,
The first basic fact which the student of the history of the classical art of memory must remember is that the art belonged to rhetoric as a technique by which the orator could improve his memory, which would enable him to deliver long speeches from memory with unfailing accuracy. And it was as a part of the art of rhetoric that the art of memory traveled down through the European tradition. (p.2)
Public speakers were instructed to associate ideas they wished to recall for their speeches with specific geographical images-physical landscape features or buildings-so that they could remember their ideas concretely and in sequence. This early art of memory was systematic and teachable, and its value was demonstrated by the development of communication technologies-from the printing press to the teleprompter-this art fell into disuse because nearly everyone, including public speakers, had memory aids ready at hand.
Today we understand memory and its relationship to communication quite differently, particularly in recognizing that memory is not simply a mental operation that a person uses or that she or he can refine and improve. It is, instead, a phenomenon of community –hence the nation of collective memory. As Barbie Zelizer suggests (2001,p.185), memory may be lodged in a number if kinds of groups, families, nation-states, or professional organizations. This collectivized understanding of memory goes by a number of monikers, including public memory, cultural memory, and social memory. These different names should not be ignored; they signal some significant differences of intellectual assumption and emphasis. However, what that perspectives represented by these different names have in common is their focus on memory as a collective or communal phenomenon, rather than as an individual, cognitive function. Perhaps the simplest example is the idea of a generation memory. We worry about what will happen when the World war II generation passes away. Who will remember the reasons for entering that conflict? It’s battles and turning points? The conduct of citizens at home? The ravages of the holocaust? The continued racial segregation of the U.S military? More important, how will these aspects of wartime of remembered? Whatever their particular emphases, these different perspectives on collective memory also take one of the most basic predicates of communication-representation-to be at the heart of how groups of people remember. As Andreas Huyssen (1995) suggests, memory is based on the capacity to re-present an- event , a place, a person, or an idea that one has already encountered: “ The past is not simply there in memory, but it must be articulated to became memory” (p.3)
The example of the World War II generation’s memory should not be lead us to equate collective memory and history. Although memory and history are related, they are very different, as Pierre Nora (19989) points out:
Memory is life, born by living society founded in its name. it remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived. History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is not longer… memory insofar as it is affective and magical, only affects those facts that suit… history, because it is an intellectual and secular production, calls for analysis and criticism … Memory takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images and objects; History binds itself strictly to temporal continuities, to progressions and to relations between things. Memory is absolute, while history can only conceive the relative …(pp.8-9)
One might say simply that history is the production of historians, while memory is a performance of social collectives. History claims for itself a legitimacy based on research norms. Collective memory, by contrast, is an overtly political and emotionally invested phenomenon. The most basic assumption of memory studies, under whatever name, and in whatever field it is practiced, is that collective memory serves interests of the present.
There are at least six senses in which communication may be said to be collective memory, or at least, to be inherently and intricately related to collective memory.
First, communication depends on people’s pre understandings of language or other social codes or symbol system. We are born into language, it predates and prefigures us. Our native language, whether Hmong or American English, allow us to participation communicative exchange with others who speak that some tongue. But, our languages carry with them vestiges of the past and very partial understanding of the world they allow us to give voice to. The “truths” we are able to utter them. Friedrich Nietzsche (1873/1989) put the matter directly in suggesting that it is “the legislation of language (that) enacts the first laws of truth.(p.247). He continued:
What is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphism, in short, a sum of human relation which were poetically and rhetorically heightened, transferred, and adorned, and after long use seem solid, canonical, and binding to a nation. Thrush are illusions about which it has been forgotten that they are illusions, worn-out metaphors without sensory impact, coin which have lost their images and now can be used only as mental, and no longer as coin. (p.250)
Nietszche’s focus here on forgetfulness is telling. Perhaps it is necessary amnesic fiction to take language as a neutral and transparent instrument for representing experiences to others, but it is still a fiction. Our language comes to us pre owned, and what we represent of our past in language is thus also, in a sense pre owned. If we remember by means of language, we remember selectively and partially, according to the resources and constraints of our language. And it is important to note, we remember collectively, by means of our inheritance of the languages and other symbol system we use to communicate.
Second, communication depends on shared background assumptions. It is a commonplace that any two or more participants in a conversation must share at least some assumptions. For example, even a couple engaged in a relational shouting match probably shares at least the belief that is good to air their differences, the understanding that verbal combat is better than physical struggle, and the idea that is better to argue than to break up. These shared assumptions are a product of how we learn form and understand the past, whether they are assumptions about interpersonal relationships or national identity. Communication always makes claims on the past at least implicitly. We must assume that our understandings of past are shared by others to some extent. Indeed, we depend heavily upon such understandings whenever we form communicative message. A number of communication scholars have noted that we are strongly genre-dependent (e.g.,Campbell & Jamieson,1977). That is, we seek counsel for how to deal communicatively with a particular problem by looking toward similar challenges of the past, how others dealt communicatively with such challenges, and how we can adapt their communication solutions to the particulars of our currents situation.
Third, communication is cumulative. In other words, a message refigures what has gone before it. This claim is one of the most central to collective memory studies in its emphasis on the reconfiguration of understandings of the past based on the interests and resources of the present. Michael Foucault (1972) made the argument for this position succinctly:
Every statement involves a field of antecedent elements in relation to which it situated, but which it is able to reorganize and redistribute according to new relations. It constitutes its own past, defines, in what precedes it, its own affiliation, redefines what make it possible or necessary, exclude what cannot be compatible with it. And it poses this unappreciative past as an acquired truth. (p.124)
In other words, each message that enters a communication context changes our understanding of that context and of the messages that have come before. Every message presumes particular relationships with other messages that have preceded it. Each message defines what has come before it in relation to legitimacy, astuteness, ethical defensibility, soundness, or their opposites. So, the interest marked in communication of the present moment intervene in contexts, defining and assessing, defining and reevaluating those contexts and their elements. For instance, as Zelizer (1995, p.222) notes, the term World War I did not enter common parlance until long after the war was over. Until the mid-20th century, it was commonly referred to as “the Great War” or even sometimes as “the war to end wars”. Both names became untenable, largely because of world war II. Most obviously, the first World War had not indeed war. Not could it be referred to as “great” in terms of scope (the military engine of war or the number of casualties) or of just war doctrine, in comparison to its successor.
Fourth, communication constructs and refigures identities according to “membership” in collectives often have strong, narratively constructed memory associations. For example, during the recent war with Irak, American reporters often interviewed soldiers from the unit they referred to repeatedly as “the storied 101st Airborne Division” of the U.S Army. The temptation to think of the interview as a fearless, heroic paratrooper, based upon memory associations, would be strong for anyone knowledge able about the 101st’ s role in past wars. An example closer to home might be the changes we see (or think we see) when the first of our high school friends gets married. In Western culture, we tend to think of marriage as a primary determinant of identity, based upon our society’s inherited ways of understanding the institution. Persons with us spouses are typical considered more socially stable, more mature, more responsible, more attractive job prospects, and so forth. To their immediate social group, newly married persons also may be considered more aloof, less social, more sedate, or less spontaneous than before. Regardless, our viewpoint is shaped by collective residues of tradition and what we are supposed to think, given cultural norms, about marriage.
Fifth, communication depends upon material supports or technologies. That is, we make use of various “technologies”-understood broadly-to communicate with others: e.g., language, ritual behavior, visual symbols, electronic or virtual media, and so forth. This material dimension of communication has a number of implications for collective memory (for elaboration, see Blair, 1999), the most obvious of which is the capacity for some material supports to preserve our communicative massage. Even oral language has the capacity for preservation. Consider societies that depend on what we call “oral traditions” to maintain cultural mores and beliefs or even their religious doctrine. Those societies have well-developed narratives by which to remember and maintain stories of heroes and religious figures, periods of war and peace, standards for civilized behavior, and rules for living. The invention of alphabetic and symbolic written languages allowed our ancestors-and will allow us-to record our thoughts on paper and to preserve them long after our own demise. Film and videotape revolutionized the:
(Nita)
• Mass Communications: Social identification with a particular demographic group and portrayals of that group on specific television programs influence television viewing. For instance, Harwood (1997) shows that young people faced with a particular television show are more likely to watch it if the cast is young than it is older. Harwood (1999) demonstrates that this preference is modified by the extent to which being young is important to a particular individual. Individuals who identify strongly with “youth” will be drawn to shows with casts and themes that reinforce their age identity. Traditional approaches to mass communication take a more individualistic approach to gratifications, and hence are less able to account for rewards sought and obtained at the collective level (see Harwood & Roy, 2005; Mastro, 2003).
• Group Communication: Group leaders are evaluated not only on their leadership traits and abilities, but also with regard to their group prototypically (how similar are they to the “ideal member” of the group?). Leaders who conform to the group prototype more closely, for instance, are paradoxically able to “get away with” more nonprototypical actions as leaders (see Hogg & Timdale, 2005). Small-group scholars tend to focus on interpersonal dynamics. Neglecting the collective level of group identification results in ignoring a fundamental motivation for group participation and interaction. Research such as that describer by Gogg and Tindale provides interesting illustrations of how the processes of “small groups” and “big group” (i.e., large-scale social such as ethnic groups) can be quite similar. Small-group researchers would do well to examine how and when individuals identify with their groups and how they evaluate their fellow members as conforming to the group prototype.
• Family Communication: Identification with the family as a group is a key element in determining family harmony and positive communication. For instance, in stepfamily relationships, the greater the extent to which members of both constituent identity with the new family unit, greater the out other social categorizations (and hence identities) exist within the family. For instance, age is a defining characteristic of certain family relationships; grandparents are inevitably significantly older than their grandchildren. Thus, grandparents and grandchildren may identify with one another as members of the same family, and also differentiate from one another on the basis of age. As families increasingly become sites for other forms of intergroup contact (e.g., via interracial marriages, interfaith marriages), a social identity approach will be crucial in understanding when and how these individuals categories as in group (family) versus outgroup (different races, faiths, ages, etc). Members and the influence of such categorizations family communication (Harwood, Soliz, & Lin, in press; Soliz, 2004).
• Instructional Communication: Within the classroom, students who perceive social group between themselves and their instructors have a greater tendency to positively evaluate those instructors (Edwards & Harwood, 2003). This effect should be stronger for the students who strongly identify with the pertinent social group. Identifying with the collective may also be crucial in class or group assignments. For instance, it is conceivable that identification with the class collective might be a crucial determinant of in-class participation.
• Intercultural Communication: Language is a fundamental dimension of ethnic and cultural identity. Individuals use language to signal and defend their identities, and people respond to language in their social identification. This is apparent in conflict over the use of French in Quebec, regional linguistic variation in Spain, the use of Spanish in U.S. public schools, and the preservation of Aboriginal languages in Australia. Work in Wales, for instance, has demonstrated that individuals whose Wels identity is threatened will respond with increasingly “Welsh” language use (presumably to emphasize their group distinctiveness and bolster identity). Similarly, the differential use of English versus Welsh can result in very different levels of compliance with a request for help, depending upon the recipient’s level of Welsh identity (Bourhis & Giles, 1977; Giles & Coupland, 1991). Intercultural communication cannot be understood fully without considering the extent to which the participants in that communication are invested in (identify with) the cultures under consideration.
• Communication and Technology: Individuals communicating through technological channels (e.g., e-mail), are often understood to be operating in an environment that is anonymous and hence free of traditional stereotyping processes. However, groups may become apparent in such contexts (e.g., via use of names indicating gender or culture, self-identification as a member of a particular group, or structural aspects of the context). Given that other cues in such contexts are restricted, when social categorizations do become apparent, they may gain more power and be more influential than in other contexts. Thus, online communication may be particularly characterized by group-level behaviors, collective identities, and group-based communication-quite the reverse of the scattered, dislocated, and isolated online experience sometimes imagined (Postmes & Baym, in press). Future work on technology, should understand the positive and negative implications of collective identify salience in computer-mediated settings.
Conclusions
From the preceding examples, it should be clear that communication is influenced by group identities, and that even in close personal relationships, such identities can influence important dynamics of interaction. Likewise, it is clear that communication shapes identities, raising or lowering the salience of particular group identifications and constructing the meaning of groups for members and nonmembers. Attention to such issues has been cursory in the communication literature, yet it is clear, from issues of ethnic conflict to concerns with small-group dynamics, that group identifications have an important role to play in understanding behavior. Put in straightforward form:
• The salience of social identities varies based on systematically identifiable features of individuals and situations. Communication phenomena such as language use will raise or lower the salience of particular categorizations.
• When a particular identity is salient, our own communication and our interpretations and attributions about others’ communication are made in terms of that identity. Choices about language, tone, and even whether to initiate interaction will be made on the basis of self- and other-categorization.
• Communication constructs the meaning of particular social identities. Social interaction and, indeed, all forms of socialization contribute to our understanding of the nature of groups, their characteristics, and their function in society. Out racist, sexist, homophobic, ageist (to mention a few) attitudes are communicative constructions.
Attention to collective action and identity is important. Significant social problems (e.g., racism, war) are very clearly a function of individuals acting in terms of their group membership and treating others in terms of those memberships. Counting American casualties in Iraq one by one while guesstimating Iraqi casualties to the nearest thousand only makes any sense if we work from an intergroup perspective and understand the relevance of those casualties for an ingroup versus an outgroup. Of course, an intergroup perspective also helps us understand (more positive) behaviors like social groups joining the broad environmental consciousness that has emerged in the last 20-30 years. Again, it is easy to treat group-based cognition and behavior as a pathological state that results only in hatred and destruction, but taking such a perspective ignores the positive outcomes from group-level identities, as well as the fact that we all operate in terms of our group identities much of the time.
More fundamentally, we need to understand collective identities as a key aspect of human behavior, and we need to think about incorporating this higher-level sense of self into our communication research as a more routine issue. We are not random individual wandering the planet with no connections to others, and our connections t others cannot be understood purely our college alma mater because it will provide us with direct personal rewards, and we do not get a chill from singing a national anthem because we like the tune. The times when we communicate truly, as individuals unencumbered by one group membership or another are actually rare. To be a part of a group is to be truly human, and to ignore that is to sever ties that are very important to people. Even our closest interpersonal relationships are imbued with group identifications that both join us to those within our groups and separate us from those not in our groups. As we seek to understand how communication connects and separates us, social identity processes deserve considerably more attention than they have been afforded by communication scholars.
(Dewi)
Collective memory is an increasingly important area of inquiry in a number of academic fields, including communication. Contemporary communication scholars have studied memory in relation to political speeches, feature films, music, television newscasts, museum display, public policy debates, image on postage stamps, iconic photographs, commemorative monuments, scrapbooks, theatrical performances nursery rhymes, and social protest demonstrations. They have understood memory as significant to virtually all forms of communication practice.
Indeed, students of communication have long understood memory to be important, at least in the context of massage production. The ancient Greeks and Romans are credited with inventing and developing memory systems that enable public figures to speak at length without consulting notes. As Frances Yates (1966) argued,
The first basic fact which the student of the history of the classical art of memory must remember is that the art belonged to rhetoric as a technique by which the orator could improve his memory, which would enable him to deliver long speeches from memory with unfailing accuracy. And it was as a part of the art of rhetoric that the art of memory traveled down through the European tradition. (p.2)
Public speakers were instructed to associate ideas they wished to recall for their speeches with specific geographical images-physical landscape features or buildings-so that they could remember their ideas concretely and in sequence. This early art of memory was systematic and teachable, and its value was demonstrated by the development of communication technologies-from the printing press to the teleprompter-this art fell into disuse because nearly everyone, including public speakers, had memory aids ready at hand.
Today we understand memory and its relationship to communication quite differently, particularly in recognizing that memory is not simply a mental operation that a person uses or that she or he can refine and improve. It is, instead, a phenomenon of community –hence the nation of collective memory. As Barbie Zelizer suggests (2001,p.185), memory may be lodged in a number if kinds of groups, families, nation-states, or professional organizations. This collectivized understanding of memory goes by a number of monikers, including public memory, cultural memory, and social memory. These different names should not be ignored; they signal some significant differences of intellectual assumption and emphasis. However, what that perspectives represented by these different names have in common is their focus on memory as a collective or communal phenomenon, rather than as an individual, cognitive function. Perhaps the simplest example is the idea of a generation memory. We worry about what will happen when the World war II generation passes away. Who will remember the reasons for entering that conflict? It’s battles and turning points? The conduct of citizens at home? The ravages of the holocaust? The continued racial segregation of the U.S military? More important, how will these aspects of wartime of remembered? Whatever their particular emphases, these different perspectives on collective memory also take one of the most basic predicates of communication-representation-to be at the heart of how groups of people remember. As Andreas Huyssen (1995) suggests, memory is based on the capacity to re-present an- event , a place, a person, or an idea that one has already encountered: “ The past is not simply there in memory, but it must be articulated to became memory” (p.3)
The example of the World War II generation’s memory should not be lead us to equate collective memory and history. Although memory and history are related, they are very different, as Pierre Nora (19989) points out:
Memory is life, born by living society founded in its name. it remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived. History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is not longer… memory insofar as it is affective and magical, only affects those facts that suit… history, because it is an intellectual and secular production, calls for analysis and criticism … Memory takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images and objects; History binds itself strictly to temporal continuities, to progressions and to relations between things. Memory is absolute, while history can only conceive the relative …(pp.8-9)
One might say simply that history is the production of historians, while memory is a performance of social collectives. History claims for itself a legitimacy based on research norms. Collective memory, by contrast, is an overtly political and emotionally invested phenomenon. The most basic assumption of memory studies, under whatever name, and in whatever field it is practiced, is that collective memory serves interests of the present.
There are at least six senses in which communication may be said to be collective memory, or at least, to be inherently and intricately related to collective memory.
First, communication depends on people’s pre understandings of language or other social codes or symbol system. We are born into language, it predates and prefigures us. Our native language, whether Hmong or American English, allow us to participation communicative exchange with others who speak that some tongue. But, our languages carry with them vestiges of the past and very partial understanding of the world they allow us to give voice to. The “truths” we are able to utter them. Friedrich Nietzsche (1873/1989) put the matter directly in suggesting that it is “the legislation of language (that) enacts the first laws of truth.(p.247). He continued:
What is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphism, in short, a sum of human relation which were poetically and rhetorically heightened, transferred, and adorned, and after long use seem solid, canonical, and binding to a nation. Thrush are illusions about which it has been forgotten that they are illusions, worn-out metaphors without sensory impact, coin which have lost their images and now can be used only as mental, and no longer as coin. (p.250)
Nietszche’s focus here on forgetfulness is telling. Perhaps it is necessary amnesic fiction to take language as a neutral and transparent instrument for representing experiences to others, but it is still a fiction. Our language comes to us pre owned, and what we represent of our past in language is thus also, in a sense pre owned. If we remember by means of language, we remember selectively and partially, according to the resources and constraints of our language. And it is important to note, we remember collectively, by means of our inheritance of the languages and other symbol system we use to communicate.
Second, communication depends on shared background assumptions. It is a commonplace that any two or more participants in a conversation must share at least some assumptions. For example, even a couple engaged in a relational shouting match probably shares at least the belief that is good to air their differences, the understanding that verbal combat is better than physical struggle, and the idea that is better to argue than to break up. These shared assumptions are a product of how we learn form and understand the past, whether they are assumptions about interpersonal relationships or national identity. Communication always makes claims on the past at least implicitly. We must assume that our understandings of past are shared by others to some extent. Indeed, we depend heavily upon such understandings whenever we form communicative message. A number of communication scholars have noted that we are strongly genre-dependent (e.g.,Campbell & Jamieson,1977). That is, we seek counsel for how to deal communicatively with a particular problem by looking toward similar challenges of the past, how others dealt communicatively with such challenges, and how we can adapt their communication solutions to the particulars of our currents situation.
Third, communication is cumulative. In other words, a message refigures what has gone before it. This claim is one of the most central to collective memory studies in its emphasis on the reconfiguration of understandings of the past based on the interests and resources of the present. Michael Foucault (1972) made the argument for this position succinctly:
Every statement involves a field of antecedent elements in relation to which it situated, but which it is able to reorganize and redistribute according to new relations. It constitutes its own past, defines, in what precedes it, its own affiliation, redefines what make it possible or necessary, exclude what cannot be compatible with it. And it poses this unappreciative past as an acquired truth. (p.124)
In other words, each message that enters a communication context changes our understanding of that context and of the messages that have come before. Every message presumes particular relationships with other messages that have preceded it. Each message defines what has come before it in relation to legitimacy, astuteness, ethical defensibility, soundness, or their opposites. So, the interest marked in communication of the present moment intervene in contexts, defining and assessing, defining and reevaluating those contexts and their elements. For instance, as Zelizer (1995, p.222) notes, the term World War I did not enter common parlance until long after the war was over. Until the mid-20th century, it was commonly referred to as “the Great War” or even sometimes as “the war to end wars”. Both names became untenable, largely because of world war II. Most obviously, the first World War had not indeed war. Not could it be referred to as “great” in terms of scope (the military engine of war or the number of casualties) or of just war doctrine, in comparison to its successor.
Fourth, communication constructs and refigures identities according to “membership” in collectives often have strong, narratively constructed memory associations. For example, during the recent war with Irak, American reporters often interviewed soldiers from the unit they referred to repeatedly as “the storied 101st Airborne Division” of the U.S Army. The temptation to think of the interview as a fearless, heroic paratrooper, based upon memory associations, would be strong for anyone knowledge able about the 101st’ s role in past wars. An example closer to home might be the changes we see (or think we see) when the first of our high school friends gets married. In Western culture, we tend to think of marriage as a primary determinant of identity, based upon our society’s inherited ways of understanding the institution. Persons with us spouses are typical considered more socially stable, more mature, more responsible, more attractive job prospects, and so forth. To their immediate social group, newly married persons also may be considered more aloof, less social, more sedate, or less spontaneous than before. Regardless, our viewpoint is shaped by collective residues of tradition and what we are supposed to think, given cultural norms, about marriage.
Fifth, communication depends upon material supports or technologies. That is, we make use of various “technologies”-understood broadly-to communicate with others: e.g., language, ritual behavior, visual symbols, electronic or virtual media, and so forth. This material dimension of communication has a number of implications for collective memory (for elaboration, see Blair, 1999), the most obvious of which is the capacity for some material supports to preserve our communicative massage. Even oral language has the capacity for preservation. Consider societies that depend on what we call “oral traditions” to maintain cultural mores and beliefs or even their religious doctrine. Those societies have well-developed narratives by which to remember and maintain stories of heroes and religious figures, periods of war and peace, standards for civilized behavior, and rules for living. The invention of alphabetic and symbolic written languages allowed our ancestors-and will allow us-to record our thoughts on paper and to preserve them long after our own demise. Film and videotape revolutionized the:
(Nita)
• Mass Communications: Social identification with a particular demographic group and portrayals of that group on specific television programs influence television viewing. For instance, Harwood (1997) shows that young people faced with a particular television show are more likely to watch it if the cast is young than it is older. Harwood (1999) demonstrates that this preference is modified by the extent to which being young is important to a particular individual. Individuals who identify strongly with “youth” will be drawn to shows with casts and themes that reinforce their age identity. Traditional approaches to mass communication take a more individualistic approach to gratifications, and hence are less able to account for rewards sought and obtained at the collective level (see Harwood & Roy, 2005; Mastro, 2003).
• Group Communication: Group leaders are evaluated not only on their leadership traits and abilities, but also with regard to their group prototypically (how similar are they to the “ideal member” of the group?). Leaders who conform to the group prototype more closely, for instance, are paradoxically able to “get away with” more nonprototypical actions as leaders (see Hogg & Timdale, 2005). Small-group scholars tend to focus on interpersonal dynamics. Neglecting the collective level of group identification results in ignoring a fundamental motivation for group participation and interaction. Research such as that describer by Gogg and Tindale provides interesting illustrations of how the processes of “small groups” and “big group” (i.e., large-scale social such as ethnic groups) can be quite similar. Small-group researchers would do well to examine how and when individuals identify with their groups and how they evaluate their fellow members as conforming to the group prototype.
• Family Communication: Identification with the family as a group is a key element in determining family harmony and positive communication. For instance, in stepfamily relationships, the greater the extent to which members of both constituent identity with the new family unit, greater the out other social categorizations (and hence identities) exist within the family. For instance, age is a defining characteristic of certain family relationships; grandparents are inevitably significantly older than their grandchildren. Thus, grandparents and grandchildren may identify with one another as members of the same family, and also differentiate from one another on the basis of age. As families increasingly become sites for other forms of intergroup contact (e.g., via interracial marriages, interfaith marriages), a social identity approach will be crucial in understanding when and how these individuals categories as in group (family) versus outgroup (different races, faiths, ages, etc). Members and the influence of such categorizations family communication (Harwood, Soliz, & Lin, in press; Soliz, 2004).
• Instructional Communication: Within the classroom, students who perceive social group between themselves and their instructors have a greater tendency to positively evaluate those instructors (Edwards & Harwood, 2003). This effect should be stronger for the students who strongly identify with the pertinent social group. Identifying with the collective may also be crucial in class or group assignments. For instance, it is conceivable that identification with the class collective might be a crucial determinant of in-class participation.
• Intercultural Communication: Language is a fundamental dimension of ethnic and cultural identity. Individuals use language to signal and defend their identities, and people respond to language in their social identification. This is apparent in conflict over the use of French in Quebec, regional linguistic variation in Spain, the use of Spanish in U.S. public schools, and the preservation of Aboriginal languages in Australia. Work in Wales, for instance, has demonstrated that individuals whose Wels identity is threatened will respond with increasingly “Welsh” language use (presumably to emphasize their group distinctiveness and bolster identity). Similarly, the differential use of English versus Welsh can result in very different levels of compliance with a request for help, depending upon the recipient’s level of Welsh identity (Bourhis & Giles, 1977; Giles & Coupland, 1991). Intercultural communication cannot be understood fully without considering the extent to which the participants in that communication are invested in (identify with) the cultures under consideration.
• Communication and Technology: Individuals communicating through technological channels (e.g., e-mail), are often understood to be operating in an environment that is anonymous and hence free of traditional stereotyping processes. However, groups may become apparent in such contexts (e.g., via use of names indicating gender or culture, self-identification as a member of a particular group, or structural aspects of the context). Given that other cues in such contexts are restricted, when social categorizations do become apparent, they may gain more power and be more influential than in other contexts. Thus, online communication may be particularly characterized by group-level behaviors, collective identities, and group-based communication-quite the reverse of the scattered, dislocated, and isolated online experience sometimes imagined (Postmes & Baym, in press). Future work on technology, should understand the positive and negative implications of collective identify salience in computer-mediated settings.
Conclusions
From the preceding examples, it should be clear that communication is influenced by group identities, and that even in close personal relationships, such identities can influence important dynamics of interaction. Likewise, it is clear that communication shapes identities, raising or lowering the salience of particular group identifications and constructing the meaning of groups for members and nonmembers. Attention to such issues has been cursory in the communication literature, yet it is clear, from issues of ethnic conflict to concerns with small-group dynamics, that group identifications have an important role to play in understanding behavior. Put in straightforward form:
• The salience of social identities varies based on systematically identifiable features of individuals and situations. Communication phenomena such as language use will raise or lower the salience of particular categorizations.
• When a particular identity is salient, our own communication and our interpretations and attributions about others’ communication are made in terms of that identity. Choices about language, tone, and even whether to initiate interaction will be made on the basis of self- and other-categorization.
• Communication constructs the meaning of particular social identities. Social interaction and, indeed, all forms of socialization contribute to our understanding of the nature of groups, their characteristics, and their function in society. Out racist, sexist, homophobic, ageist (to mention a few) attitudes are communicative constructions.
Attention to collective action and identity is important. Significant social problems (e.g., racism, war) are very clearly a function of individuals acting in terms of their group membership and treating others in terms of those memberships. Counting American casualties in Iraq one by one while guesstimating Iraqi casualties to the nearest thousand only makes any sense if we work from an intergroup perspective and understand the relevance of those casualties for an ingroup versus an outgroup. Of course, an intergroup perspective also helps us understand (more positive) behaviors like social groups joining the broad environmental consciousness that has emerged in the last 20-30 years. Again, it is easy to treat group-based cognition and behavior as a pathological state that results only in hatred and destruction, but taking such a perspective ignores the positive outcomes from group-level identities, as well as the fact that we all operate in terms of our group identities much of the time.
More fundamentally, we need to understand collective identities as a key aspect of human behavior, and we need to think about incorporating this higher-level sense of self into our communication research as a more routine issue. We are not random individual wandering the planet with no connections to others, and our connections t others cannot be understood purely our college alma mater because it will provide us with direct personal rewards, and we do not get a chill from singing a national anthem because we like the tune. The times when we communicate truly, as individuals unencumbered by one group membership or another are actually rare. To be a part of a group is to be truly human, and to ignore that is to sever ties that are very important to people. Even our closest interpersonal relationships are imbued with group identifications that both join us to those within our groups and separate us from those not in our groups. As we seek to understand how communication connects and separates us, social identity processes deserve considerably more attention than they have been afforded by communication scholars.
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COMMUNICATION AS COLLECTIVE MEMORY
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