Artikel Ilmu Komunikasi

Judith N. Martin And Thomas K. Nakayama
(Salam)

Conversations about race in the United States at the beginning of the 21st century reflect the contradictory status of race in society. On the one hand, the conversations seem to be ubiquitous-discussions of affirmative action policies in hiring and education, equal access to voting during national and state elections, and persistent racial disparities are often in the news. In the other hand, conversations about race in workplace and social setting often are uneasy or simply absent. Examinations of the racial dimensions of our own discipline ore no different. On the one hand, adversement seek faculty of color, but, on the other hand, there is little discussion about how communication is raced, what this means, and the implications of this racialization for students and faculty.
There are at least three ways to view the relationship between communications and race:
1. Racial histories and demographics inform and reflect communication behaviors
2. The conceptualization and study of communication is raced-historically and contemporaneously
3. The field of communication is raced

In this essay, we’ll first define what we mean by race and then describe these three approaches, focusing primarily on the third.
Scientists today largely have discredited traditional physiological/biological notions of race, noting that there is more genetic variation within racial groups than between them (Omi & Winant, 1994; Wells, 2002). They, along with communication scholars, emphasize instead the social construction of race and the fluidity of racial categories. For example, scholars have shown how the category “white” evolved over the years in the united states, expanding to include people of Irish, Jewish, and southern European descent-all previosly excluded as not quite white (Brodkin, 1999; Ignatiev, 1995;Jacobson, 1998). Race, then is a social construction, but it has a very real, material impact on our everyday lives. It is a fiction, but it is real and it is this cultural contradiction that undergirds our conversations on race and its place in communication studies.
Communication Behavior Is Raced
A first view of communication as raced examines how racial characteristics inform communication habits. Stated simply, communication is an intensely racialized practice. With whom we communicate with them, and how much we communicate with others follows largely racialized formations. Communication scholars for years accepted that race influences the communication behaviors of “others”, but only racently have we turned the spotlight explicitly on the communication of white people. The research exposes the underlying racial hierarchy and describes how the connection between race and communication for white people largely goes unrecognized (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995). Though people who are not white see that distinctness, dominance, normalcy, and privilege are characteristics of whiteness, and hence influence the communication of white people, white people themselves often do not recognize or see these connections (Bahk & Jandt, 2004)
In their study of student communication at a multiracial campus, Halualani, Chitgopekar, Morrison, and Dodge (2004) highlight the general features of this link between race and communication, reflecting larger societal patterns. That is, those students (like most individuals) largely communicate with other in their own racial group, despite living in an increasingly multiracial/multiethnic society. Individuals do not, however, simply choose to communicate with members of a particular racial or ethnic group. Instead, these communication patterns reflect larger social organizing about where racial groups predominately live and the kinds of workplace encounters they are likely to have, as well as the leisure aspects of our racialized society. In short, we argue that it is imperative to place our communication practices within the context of a highly racialized society in order to better understand everyday communication practices. Yet, to understand why the relationship between race, power, and communication is often obviated, we also need to axamine the historical development of the study of communication.
The Study of Communication Is Raced
A second view suggests that the very study of communication it self is raced. From its origins in 5th century BCE Greece, the study of communication (then called rhetoric) focused almost exclusively on the communication patterns of those in power. Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and other were interested in empowering Greek and Roman citizens, although ignoring the ways that communication might help slaves, women, and other noncitizen advocate for their interest, needs, and desires. The practice and study of communication was by and for those already empowered in society (Crowley & Hawhee, 1999; Dues & Brown, 2004).
This elitism was not easily translated into the development of communication studies in the United States. The drive for democratic participation in society was a major motive for the development of “speech” courses for those students who did not come from privileged backgrounds (Cohen,1994). Even today, communication studies is largely missing from elite institutions such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Chicago, and Emory, but remains prominents at less elite ones.
We must note, however, that this democratic drive was marked by the racialized society in which it occurred. When the then new land grant institutions were established by the 1862 Morrill Act, public speaking was taught mainly to empower its white male students largely from farming families and other nonelite backgrounds to participate in democratic institutions; the study of communication (speech), meanwhile, remained in largely segregated context.1 The Second Morril Act established “1890s institutions,” which are today known as historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Theses schools, thought undoubtedly important, offered segregated and sometimes second-class educational opportunities for their students.
It is instructive, then, to examine how the study of communication continues to be raced today in our research, teaching, and practice. This examination follows a trend set by other disciplines as well as several subdisciplines within the field of communication. For example, anthropologists have recognized anthropology as currently one of the “least integrated or whitest professions” (Shanklin,2000,p.99). More important, Shanklin goes on to explore the implications of this whiteness that anthropology delivers “inchoate messages about anthropological understanding of race and racism in introductory texts and that anthropologists do not participate actively in public discussion” (p.99).
Similarly, the accrediting Council for Education in the field of journalism and mass communication notes that the standard failed most frequently in accreditation in this disciplines Standard 12 is that which calls for racial integration of faculty and students and the inclusion of women. (De Uriarte, Bodinger-de Uriarte, & Benavides, 2003). The second most failed standard is Standard 3, which calls for diversity in curriculum. Where diverse curriculum exists, it is rarely a required course (pp.vii-viii). In 2000, minorities earned only 25% of all BA degrees and 10% of all MA Degress in U.S journalism programs. Figures remain miniscule for PhDs, now almost universally required for a tenured position as a journalism educator (p.viii).

The Field of Communication is Raced
Can the same be said for the field of communication? Are we largely a white profession, white in racial composition of faculty and students, white in curiculum, white in research interests and theorizing, and largely silent when it comes to the public debate on race and communication?2
Taking a quick look at intitutional data on communication majors highlights the whiteness of our disciplines and its attraction to white students out of proportion to their demographic numbers. We highlight the two institutions at which we currently work. At Temple University, 59.4% of the students are white, but 65.6% of the communications and theater students are white. Ar Arizona State University, 67.8% of the student body is white and 77.4% of the communication students are white (only 17.7% of communication students are minority students the remaining are either unknown or international). Set againts the number of minority students, the predominance of white students highlights the disparity. While we know of no national study on communication students , we speculate that this is a national trend. Yet, as a discipline, we remain unreflexive about the whiteness of communication studies. Our point is not simply that communication has many more white students than its general demographics would indicate, but to question the ways in which the study of communication continues to empower white people, while at the same time unwittingly remaining unresponsive to the needs of the rest of society.
Ashcraft and Allen (2003) argue that introductory textbooks are one important venue for understanding the ways that race functions in the communication discipline, in that they “disseminate a field’s canon of knowledge” (p.7) and socialize graduate students and faculty members who teach from them. Thus, they not only reflect the discipline but also help reproduce it. Ashcraft and Allen’s content analysis of organizational communication textbooks led to the indentification of the following themes in the treatment of race:
1. Race is separate, singular concept that is relevant only under certain circumstances.
2. Race is relevant insofar as it involves cultural differences, which can be identified, valued, and managed to improve organizational performance.
3. All cultural differences are synonymous with international variations.
4. Racial discrimination is a function of personal bias, interpersonal misunderstanding, organizational failure to manage cultural differences, and disproportianate demographics.

While these observations are specific to the field of organizational communication, they seem to hold true for theory and research in interpersonal communication, intercultural communication, and rhetoric the arcas we are most familiar with and are likely to hold true in other areas as well. The common thread here is the focus on communication at the individual level, with little regard for the larger contexts in which power and historical relations might enter. In a reflection of Ancient Greek concerns about communication, we can see that contmeporary communication concerns center around ways to help white people deal with racial difference, whether for organizational effectiveness, interpersonal efectiveness, or managing differences. Interpersonal communication skills (e.g., studies identifying components of communication competence) are presented in such a way that they seem to help white individuals deal with others who are assumed to be white.
Studies of intercultural contact reflect this same centering of whiteness (Cooks, 2001). Halualani et al. (2004) note that “the most glaring short coming in intercultural contact literature is the predominant focus on majority (or white/European American) attitudes toward interacting with minority groups” (p.274). Again, communication studies clearly is in the service of white people at the expense of racial others.
Our call here is for communication scholars to begin taking our racialized history and contemporary context seriously, so that we can begin to service the diversity of U.S. society and its future outlook. As long as we ignore race or work primarily to serve the needs of white Americans, our undergraduate communication major, graduate students, and faculty will become increasingly isolated from engaging contemporary social issues, whether in health care, education, business, or elswhere. It is only “by examining the racial

Communication as Embondiment
(Rahman)

This chapter will be a discussion of two powerful instrument of communication, body and text, and their long and difficult embrace. By body , I mean our biological res extense the heat-seeking skin packages that all living human beings inhabit. By text, I mean whatever detaches the body from its message. We chiefly think of texts as a graphic representantion of spoken lenguange or number from which the living body is extracted. Visual image, too, can be thought of as texts that keep bodies at a distance, distilling them as analog or digital lines or dots set into a receptacle medium such as stone, cellulosa, celluloid, or ellectrical current. The long process of displacing and concealing bodies by texts that chacratherizeds modernity has been virtually unplumbed by communication scholars, a remarkable omission in our efforts to understand how human societies develop and engage media. But perhaps this is not very suprising at all. The cultural reflex that regards text as mind’s trace divorced from any coporeal arigins reflects an aspiration to transcend bodies that has been centuries in the making. In the modern social imaginary, the body is at best superfluoes to communicative exchange at worst a moral impediment to thought.
A much differend view regards bodies as the stubborn, ineradicable foundation of human communication and a powerful underlying subject of all mediated comunicatin. Proposes that bodies have modified texts in significant ways and have been importantly modified by them in return, notwithstanding a conventionl narrative that assigns them a gradually disappearing role in the historiy of media. This more complicated view takes seriously the fundamental corporeality that undergirds communication and challenges a dominating ethos in which only whatis textualy expressible is socially valued. In the world view of textual dominance, the activity of bodies is often presented in extreme terms-beyond notice on the one hand, pathological on the other. Bodies are burshed aside as ineffectual and decorative until they surface too insistently and become orminously threatening. The notion in both views, that bodily absence is a virtue, is a central assumptions of contemporary communication and greatly influences how we think about and organize social relations.
By contrast, text is presumed to have only strong effects. A tradition that extends from Eric Havelock (1963) to Elizabeth Eisenstein (1979,1980) and Ernest Gellner (1983) attributes tectonic cultural shifts to the assimilation of texts, especially written ones. In broad strokes, these include the destuction of customary social life, rearrangements of the sensory “mix” and the origins of individualism. Printing, writing’s industrial handmaiden, is given credit for launching and sustaning the Renaissance and for laying the foundatiens of modern science and nation-state. The fate of communicating bodies have been mystified, segregated, bunished, buffered, and positioned; and how they have accommodated, resisted, and fougth back as bodies rarely have been explored. Nor has the evolution of structures of feeling that organize relations amongs embodied persons in textualized world.
We certainly think we know about text, the medium scholars swim in. It is, oddly, the body that needs anchoring. Since incarnation is the very condition of human life this seem starling. Gesture, the set of observable signals that coordinate bodies with one another, is our origin communication, however unthinkingly we may dismiss it. Gesturu, which is harder to ignored because it is gloriously axaggerated in dancing, military drill, group festivity, music making religious ceremony, and public assembly, treated as embellishment if we think of it at all. Classic insights about the communicative dimensions of gesture—Marcel Mauss’s notion of a social repertoire of “body techniques” and George Herbert Mead’s (1934) account of lenguange as “vocal gesture” are two—have lain dormant and undeveloped.
But these are stubborns ideas. Robin Dunbar (1998) has argued that spoken lenguange arose to improve the efficiency of social grooming, the gestural communication of solidarity that cements social bonds for the survival of primate groups. Dunbar’s claims offer a useful frame for James Carey’s (1975) well-know distinstion between ritual (which can be describes as gesturally embodied) and transmission (which is textually disembodied) communication. Though widely admired, this distinction never has been seriosly taken up in the field and, as we might say, fleshed out.
The standard historical narrative offer a story of technological and moral advancement that progressively strips bodies from the arenas of important communication and invests all past communication with the dream of bodilessness (Peters, 1999). Textualization is presented as overcoming the material and moral limitations of the human body. Of course, media can never eliminates bodies. In fact, lthough we are at pains to deny it, all media ever mediate are bodies (often in layered fashion by mediating that mediate bodies). In this light, media history appears less a chronology of textual innovations leaping across the finitude of bodies. It appears, rather, as an antogonistic encounter between bodies and texts in a high-stakes struggle to allocate purity, honor, and power. (See Marvin & Ingle, 1999; Marvin 1994,1995, 2004). If the are of Western history looks like an unbroken string of textual triumphs from the first striings of bureucracy in the 11th century, these victories have never been total not secure. This is because the textual class requires bodily power to enforce its dominion, a point that will be developed.
Our own text-centric model of culture does seem provincially modern. In absolutist Europe, peasants were the feet and body of society, mobility its arms, the clergy its head, and the king the embodiment of the whole. Elsewhere and at other times, the communicating world has been a dream, a dance, a chain of being, or a battle. Every model of culture elaborates a relationship of the body to the society around it. To imagine culture as text is altogether different of imagining it as dance. In one, the body remains separate from culture and ontologically distinct entry. In the other, culture is actively constituted in bodily participation.
Its remain hard work to stake out a bodily focus for communication in a field that has its center in text-focused media regimes. Our first task is to reconsider mediation it self. Instead of implying a historical progression of textual artifacts on a one way mission to leave the body behind, mediation is more accurately characterized as any packaging of the communicative body expressed in one of two modes. Dramatization works to enhance the potency of the communicative body. Clothes, ormamentation, masks, perfurne, cosmetics, armor, dancing, singing, feasting, and oratory are dramatizing media that take the communicative power of the physical body seriosly and amplify its aura, the sense of its communicative presence.
Textualizatin work by evacuating the body from communication and impoverishing this aura. It does not get rid of bodies (though this happens as Henri Levebvre says [1991], the text kills) so much as it cover up and disguises them, or attempts to turn them into text. Print, musical notation, film, telephony, and video are textualizing media that fragment and reconstitue the body’s message in simplified form. Sociologically, textualization gives rise to two great classes. One of these commands text the other is comanded by it.
The textual class (it includes, no surprise, academics) is skilled at producing and using texts. It is also the class most entitled to shield and preserve the bodies of its members from physical hardship and danger. This is its privilege, to withdraw the physical body from the fray while deploying those for whom withdrawal is not an option. The body is the emblem of those who lack textual credentials, whose bodies are available to be used up by society, and whose powers of social participation derive from whatever value their bodies wave for cultural muscle work, the most dramatic expression of which is war. In modernity, all bodies are disciplined by texts: some to use them, some to stay away from them (Marvin, 1994, 1995) Textualization is the indispensable act of modern power in which every aspect of our lives is implicated. It confers personhood and social status through textual identification and credentialing. It saturates the imaginative environment with information, advertising, and entertaiment, all of which overwhelm the authority of bodily experience.
To portray the textual class as the seat of modern power may seem ludicrous to academics who find it difficult to imagine themselves in any such position. They are, of course, only handmaidens. In the social ecology of text body relations, academics are textual functionaries who recruit and train new text class members while convicing the body class to hold textual institutions in awe.
What does it mean, then for the textual class to rule? Consider how U.S. presidents, who dress in the uniform of textual professionals and rarely display the emblems of combat familiar to traditional societies, wage war. A president goes to war not by raising his sword, but by signinga text. No guns move without signed orders, though the president’s power lies in the readiness of these guns to respond and in the belief of these who stand behind them in the Constitutional text that authorizes the governmental system. Much cultural energy is devoted to concealing this absolute radiance of the textual class on its bodily substratum and to eliminating opportunities for it to move againts the textual class. This antagonism toward the body class it the deep conradiction at the heart of textual sensibility and power.
The impoversihment and delegitimazition of bodily experience generate nostalgia for the romance of face-to-face communication among some textual class members, but this nostalgia is more self indulgent than serious. To privilege the body genuinely is to embraceits defining power, which is the exercise of physical force. The textual class abhors bodily force, its greatest that and the enforcer of its authority. The remote object of textual class affections is more nearly constituted in mediated bodies, such as those disseminated in the romantic reconstructions of journalists and anthoropologists and in glossy images of advertising and tourism. When, to the everlasting dissapointment of guardians of text-based hierarchy, removing the body altogether from communication turns out to be impossible, whole campaigns are mounted to make it less visible. This is done by restricting and stigmatizing its actions, by making it more like text, by directing attention away from it. Yet bodies fight back, reasserting themselves in bodily spetacles, war, and contests of secular and religious morality.
Body and text are not absolute analytic categories but relative positions on a calssifying continuum in which each may that defer to dictionaries and other artifacts of textually disciplined language present themselves as more text-like than bodies whose colloquial speech bears the oral empress of neighborhood origins. Pornography and popular novels are lower on the scla of cultural esteem than the theoretically driven, relatively more disembodied text of physicists, lawyers, and engineers. In principle, images fall more often than written text on the bodily end of the textual spectrum. The more texts float free of the bodies that produce them, the higher their cultural standing and that of the bodies associated with them. This variable classification calls to mind Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1984) division between the grotesque body-overflowing, stinking, fecund, vulgar and the body of calssical sculpture smooth, unorificed, decorous, self-contained. To smooth and cover the orifices of the grotesque body is to narrow its communicative channels, to make it more like text.
How are we to understand the obvious point that posttraditional societies, however awash in rapidly multiplying texts, are preoccupied with sex, fashion, sports, creature comforts, and sensational crime – bodily concerms, all? The bodily melodrama of popular culture constitutes a kind of rebel beachhead againts the discipline and pace of contemporary textualization. In a textual world, of course, nothing is so simple. The popular bodies that command the greatest prestige are the very ones that have been most successfully transformed into texts. Extravagant social and cultural rewards flow to athletes and performers not for their corporeal virtuosity alone, , but to those whose bodily achievements lend themselves to the widest possible dissemination through textual reproduction. This is the licensed carnival of the textual class.
An adequate account of the historical impact of textualization will not be a matter of grand theory. It is not subtle enough. Only extended and patiently detailed investigation can convey how body-based communities have textually remagined themselves again and again. The conquest of the New World and the Inquisition area part of that story. So are humbler smaller scale stories social relationships, and status rearrangements bitterly struggled over. Grand theory can open up directions of inquiry and suggest provocative hyphotheses. But, in the and, it only signals where to begin looking.
With that thought in mind, the Reformation offers it self as a seismic center of the shift from bodily to textual magic that so profoundly marks the modern West. Religion has always addressed bodily experience, especially its most deeply felt moment of suffering and death. The Church Universal, dominant in the West, is a shockingly corporeal faith, its central event the brutal sacrifice of a god who agrees to take on ultimate bodily pain. With the Reformation, the relationship of believers ti the deity ceased to be mediated through the body of the priest and come to be mediated through individual Bible reading. This and accompanying text-body struggles (Muir, 1997; Duffy,1992’ but seek stock, 1983, who traces this process to the 11th century) over the magicaly bodily potency of icons; statues; and rituals of gesture, song, and dance profoundly transformed the West. (Capitalism, the cultural successos of the Reformation, appears as the most spritually ascetic of arrangements, having evacuated material things of their meaningful connections with bodies while transforming both into an etherealized text stripped of experience, connection, love, and existential groundedness the bottom lines).
The 19th century was a great accelerator of textualization. Lawrence Levine (1998) has traced the division of high, and low culture to the segregation of elite and popular bodies in opera, theater, and museum audiences. Where bodily improvisation had been the anticipated proregative of performers and noisy evaluation the norm for audiences, high culture was reimagined as sacred canon of inviolable texts of music, dance, and drama from which performers must not deviate. Audiences for the so called high arts became progressively less sensuous and more intimidated, their responses less confidents and less performed. The mutually constrituted tasks of cultural judgment and participation were severed, the former surrendered to an emerging class of textual critics who took upon themselves the task of maligning the newly distinguished popular arts as well.
Concurrently, Progressves sought to break up urban political machines heavily dependent on the mobilization of bodies and to promote the notion of well-behaved “independent-minded” literates as the only fit civic participants (Marvin & Simonson, 2004). “Informed” and “Deliberative” voters read newspaper and kept their voices down in political discussion, which they favored over an older notion of politics as a team sport. Poor, immigrant, African American, and other bodies that troubled textual elites were disenfranchised for failing to achieve the literacy levels of the educated middle class. Alcohol-laced, physically exuberant rallies; military marches; and bonfires were discredited adn sometimes outlawed. These occasions of broad sensual appeal had regularly drawn the body class together to present it self as a political and physical force to be reckoned with. Increaingly deprived of political muscle and lacking textual credential, the body class became ever more detached from the political process, which is its condition today.
There is an ominous saying that a regime’s success can be measured by how many people survive it. Nothing demonstrates more clearly that bodies are the raw material of society and incarnations of our core moral situation. To this end, the basic job of society is to reproduce, organize, deploy, and dispose of bodies. The job of culture is to justify, cope with, and teach those arrangements. Modern societies seek to sustain the burdens of child rearing, work, and war through a consensus that partly depends on collective denial and evasion of the inequities of any particular distribution of these sacrifices. Textualization is central in making this happen. It encouragers the immaterial accounting of burdens in highly filtered words and images, and in statistics safely received in environments to which those especially burderned the poor, diseased, unemployed, and imprisoned have little access.
Textualization therefore creates the modern dilemma in which the textual class risks losing touch, and everything that term implies, not only with the real conditions that sustain their society but also with their own moral commitments as willing bodies, for which there is no substitue, to the survival of the group. The textual class encounters the world through vicariously distant representation and simplifying abstractions. It is challenged not only to empathize with the real condition of the body class on with it builds it power but by the temptations of a moral relativism that dilute its convictions. The body class places the bodies of those it loves on the line for community. In this sacrificial embodiedness, moral relativity is not possible. Moral dogmatism is the dilemma of the body class. Both views are responsible for their share of the world’s horors and its finest achievements. To understand the complexities that beset these two communicative world views and the consequences of their entwined fate, is a grand sober challenge for scholars or communication.
Addtional readings
Clanchy, M. (1993). From memory to written record: England 1066-1307. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. (Original work published 1979)
Caplan, J. (Ed.) (2000). Written on the body: The tattoo in European and American history. Princenton, NJ: Princenton University Press
Thornton, T.P. (1996). Handwriting in America: A cultural history. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Muir, E. (1997). Ritual in early modern Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
Torpey, J. (1999). The invention of the passport: Surveillance, citizenship and the state. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
References
Bakhtin, M. (1984). Rabelais and his world ( H. Iswolsky, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana Unversity Press
Carey, J. (1975). A cultural approach to communication. Communication, 2, 1-22.
Duffy, E. (1992). The stripping of the altars: Traditional religion in England, c. 1400-1580. New Haven, CT: Yale Unversity Press
Dunbar, R. (1998). Grooming, gossip, and the evolution of language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Eisenstein, E. L. (1979, 1980). The printing press as an agent of change: Communication and cultural transformation in early modern Europe (Vols. 1-2). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
Gellner, E. (1983). Nations and nationalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press
Havelock, E. (1963). Preface to Plato. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press
Lafebvre, H. (1991). The production of space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell
Levine, L. (1998). Highbrow/lowbrow: The emergence of cultural hierarchy in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Marvin, C., & Ingle, D. W. (1999). Blood sacrifice and the nation: Totem rituals and the American flag. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
Marvin, C. (1994). The body of the text: Literacy’s corporcal constant. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 80(2), 129-149.
Marvin, C. (1995). Bodies, texts, and the social order: A reply to Bielefeldt. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 81(1), 103-107.
Marvin, C. (2004). Peaceable kingdoms and information technology: Prospects for the nation-state. In M. Sturken, D. Thomas, & S. Ball-Rokeach (Eds.), Technological visions: The hopes and fears that shape new technologies (pp. 240-254). Philadelphia: Temple University Press
Marvin, C., & Simonson. P.D. (2004). Voting alone: The decline of bodily mass communication in presidential elections. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 1(2), 127-150

Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self & society from the standpoint of a social behaviorist. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Muir, E. (1997). Ritual in early modern Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Peters, J. D. (1999). Speaking into the air: A history of the idea of communication. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Stock, B. (1983). The implications of literacy: written language and models of interpretation in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Princenton, NJ: Princenton University Press.

My ultimate wish is for a theory of the icon that does not depend upon iconophobia. As currently conceived, communication theory cannot deliver. I have suggested here that analogy may be one way to frame a noniconophobic theory of communication. An iconopholic theory of communication as vision would neither uncritilly “worship” images (idolatry) nor approach them out of fear (iconophobia). Rather, it would make space for communication scholars to embrace visual communication as analogy, as an “artful invention” to be engaged openly by active viewers.
Additional Reading
Barry, A.M.S.(1997). Visual intelligence:Perception, image, and manipulation in visual communication.Albany:SUNY Press.
Elkins,J.(2003). Visual Studies: A Skeptical introduction. New York. Rourledge.
Jay, M. (1993). Downcast eyes: The denigration of vision in twentieth-century Frech though.Barkeley: University of California Press.
Mitchel, w.I.T. (1994). Picture Theory: essays on verbal and visual representantion. Chicago. University of Chicago Press.
Staffod, B. M. (1999). Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the art of conneting. Cambridge. MIT Press.
References
Barry, A.M.S.(1997). Visual intelligence:Perception, image, and manipulation in visual communication.Albany:SUNY Press.
Debord, A. M. S. (1967/1995). The society of a spectacle. New York: Zone Bokks.
Dewey, J. (1927/1954). The public and its problem. Athens, OH: Swallow Press.
Elkins,J.(2003). Visual Studies: A Skeptical introduction. New York. Rourledge.
Staffod, B. M. (1999). Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the art of conneting. Cambridge. MIT Press.

Analogy is a core feature of human cognition. We think in analogies. For small children first acquiring languange, every round object is a “ball” until they learn to discern the differences amid the similarities: baseball, basket ball, orange. Analogy may be defined variously as the search for similarity amid otherness, the quest for proportion between object that are different, or the practice of making the strange familiar. Analogy has much to offer an iconophilic communication theory. In visual analogy consciousness as the art of conneting, art historian Barbara Stafford describes analogy as “a general theory of artful invetion” and “a practice of intermedia communication”.(1999,p.8). She suggest that analogy does not critically emphasize similarity to the exclusion of differences, but rather it teaches discernment (such as learning to tell the difference between a baseball and an orange). We treat visual communication analogically when we recognize conneting even in the midst of disjuncture.
Consider one last time our hypothetical photograph. What would it mean to engange this photograph from a point of view that frames communication as anaogy? Its would mean searching foe conneting amid the differences we might locate within the image, as well as between the image and our experiances of the world. Unlike an orientation to surveillance that emphasized the disconneting of the police officer from the unemployed men, attention to analogy might entail recognizing how all the men (as well as the photographer and viewer) are implicated in broader questions about poverity. Attention to analogy might entail recognizing the unemployment line in something more than an image; it might even remind the viewer if the similar place located near where he or she lives. It might entail making associations with ways that poverity and state power have been illustrated in other media, both past and present. Ultimately, attention to analogy openss up, rather than closes off, avenues for interpretation because it leaves space fo the agency of the viewer. The viewer is neither the suspicious or oppresed viewer of the surveillance metaphor, nor the passive viewer of the spectacle metaphor. Instead, the analogical viewer is an engaged vierwer who sees connection, who uses her or his own knowledge and experience to make sense of what he or she sees and to put thins together. Unlike surveillance or spectacle, the metaphor of analogy does not discates the parameters of the viewing experience but rather makes it possible for the viewer to construct the viewing experinces for herself or himself.
While the other metaphor I have disscused construct a disempowered or passive audience for communication, analogy requires active, discerning, creatives audiences. Framing communication as analogy does not ignore aspect of surveillance and spectacle, but it is not limited to (or by) them. As a practice of “intermedia communication” analogy offer communication theory a way to liberity itself from the ichonophobia often found in communication scholarship on the visual. Visual communication conceived analogically is not something that happens to audiences (surveillance) or aparth from them (spectacle), but rather in communion with them. To paraphrase Dewey, analogy is a “participator”.
Indeed, analogy is more than a mere metaphor for communication. It is a perceptual process tied directly to how humans come to know and learn. It is a core part of communication scholar Ann Marie Seward Barry (1997) has called “visual intelligence”.
We must also that the principles of perceptual process are the keys to creative thinking as well—reaching out beyond our past and into the future, and in doing so to recognize in relationship implied in analogy, metaphor, and symbol the means to pennerate the mysteries of the universe.(p.67)
The editor of this volume undestand the foundational role of analogy, for the very desire the explore diverse metaphors for communication is analogical an impilicit search amid difference.
Perhaps the biggest drawback to relying upon analogy as a metaphor for communication is its potensial misapplication. Tipical views of analogy treat it solely as the search for similary. Arguably, one danger of emphsizing communication is analogy might be that our communication theories could devolve into pie-in-the-sky quests for possitive connetion at the expense of understanding differences, disjuncture, or seek to “overcome” it. Rather, it recognize difference and attempts creatively to negotiate it by juxtaposing it with point of connetion and similarity; “seeing is about being struck that something is, or can be conneted to somthing else” (stafford, 1999, p.138). if we are to have a communication theory that allow us to “see,” that accommodates the ful range of communicative phenomena, then we need theories that offer richer conceptions of the visual. Of the three metaphor for vision that I have presented here, analogy best allows for such as a conception.

Many culture critics suggest that we live in a “society of spectacle.” Indeed, spectacle seems an appropriate metaphor for exploring communication in a visual, digital culture that relies more on surface appearances than on the substance of rational argument or the intensity of emotional engagement. Guy Debord defines spectacle as “ a social relationship between people that as mediated by image” (1967/1999, p. 12). Spectacle acknowledges the fast-forward culture in which we live. It reminds us that not all communication is thoughtful, precise, and engaged. In fact, most of it is just opposite we hurtle through our multimedia universe absorbing image and information at a glance, scarcely able to reflect on what we see and hear.
One by product of framing communication spectacle, however is that audiences tend to be figured as passive viewers of the spectacle; they absorb but do not engange. Consider again our hypothetical photograph. From the point of view of spectacle, the photograph is not an image of poverty but an image of poverty; that is, the metaphor of spectacle turns our attention away from materialty. The photograph in this view becomes a constructed set of social relationship displayed through the medium of photography; the experience of poverty is replaced by its image. No longer a material condition, the poverty of the unemployed men leaves viewer of the photograph with nothing to do but watch. As Debord observes (eerily echoing Dewey) spectacle, “is the opposite of dialogue” (p, 17). One problem with the metaphor os spectacle, than, is it disempowers the audience for communication. It constructs audiences as passive or helpless in the wake of omnipresent, everciculating messages.
The metaphor of spectacle itself is not necessarily iconophobic. In fact, it might even be viewed as idolatrous, or uncritically accepting of all image; after all, they are “only” representation, nothing to be afraid of. But framing communication in terms of spectacles promotes iconophobic because the metaphor serves as foil for those who wish to reveal the spectacle inadequacy. If we frame communication as spectacle, we are inevitably left with two uncofortable choices. Either we uncritically embrace the spectacle, its surface represetantions, and the audience’s passive role, or we step outside the metaphor entirely to critique it. Either way, the metaphor of apectacle offers little to an econophilic communication theory of the visual.

Jonathan Sterne
(Taya )
Before communication is inter subjective connection, coordination, ritual, meaning, culture, or anything else, communication is something that people do. At its core, communication is a special form of action. To use an antiquated phrase, it is a practical art, or rather a set of practical arts. This holds true no matter what favorite example we use for that massive and ambiguous thing we call communication: it is true in conversation, in large-scale media systems, is human-animal interaction, and in the most subtle dimensions of encounters with others. Communication is, above all else, a technique. In this chapter, I will outline what I mean by techne and then offer brief historical, political, and philosophical arguments for its use as a defining metaphor for communication. Techne is a Greek word, and it is addressed in the writings of many of the ancient Greek thinkers. To be fair, the word’s connotation is somewhat ambiguous depending on whom you read a text you choose (see, e.g., Parry, 1993). Hence, I will offer my preferred reading of the term, which is not to be mistaken with the single, historically correct definition. I want to argue about communication, not my interpretation of the ancient Greek.
Aristotle most famously designated techne as practical art and practical knowledge. For him, techne meant both the process of producing things in the world (crafts, for instance) and the capacity of knowledge of contingency – practical knowledge – that allows and accounts for that production straight gaze; those who enact the dominant gaze are those who possess the most power in given culture. Framing communication as surveillance emphasizes the disparities between those who have the power to gaze and those who do not.
Beyond the gaze, surveillance can also be imagined more broadly as visual practices of control. We are subjects of surveillance in many aspects of our everyday lives, yet we often internalize these practices without a thought. Think about the video camera in the corner of the local convenience store, or the number of visual documents we are required to carry: driver’s license, passport, student ID card. In the communication theories of surveillance, vision and the technologies of vision exit to produce and reproduce institutional control.
Imagine a documentary photograph of hundred of poor, scruffy-looking men in an unemployment line—a common image from our collective memory of the Great Depression in the United States. They wait to enter an employment agency under the watchful gaze of a tight-lipped, stiff-looking officer of the law. An analysis of such an image from the perspective of surveillance would pay attention to the power dynamic enacted in the picture. It would encourage us to think about the “haves” and “have not”. We might remark upon how to the unemployed men are subjected to the gaze of both the officer and the photographer. We might argue that the police officer, as a representative of the state, embodies the institutional power that both provides and limits opportunities for these men. And we might consider how the photographer, and by extension the viewer, participate in the subjection of this group of unemployment men simple trough the act of viewing and photographing them. Thinking about communication in terms of surveillance encourages us to think about power the required us to pay attention to the technologies of that power, such as the camera. It reminds as that society is often organized to reinforce these power dynamic despite our individual attempts to transcend them.
But we lose much if we theorize communication of vision solely in terms of surveillance. Returning to the hypothetical photograph, might we not imagine the relationships among the photographer, the police officer, and the unemployed men differently it. Might it not be possible that the photographer and the unemployed men are in fact complicit in the act of photographing this scene, both interested in displaying the misplaced nature of the uptight police officer’s anxiety? Focusing solely on traditional definition of the gaze might impede our ability to imagine these relationships in different ways. And, treating the image itself as a product of state surveillance might blind us to other interpretations, such as the use of the camera to create conditions for social justice. If we overemphasize the culture of surveillance, we miss the opportunity to explore modes of communication apart from those dictated by the inevitable influence of institutional power. The metaphor of communication as surveillance is, then, ultimately icon phobic. It frame vision and the products of vision as a dangerous one-way street of domination and does little to account for the countless ways in which people may step outside the boundaries of (albeit very real) power dynamic to enact their agency creatively.

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.