Mediated communication

How the language chosen becomes a concrete media utterance? Such media ‘utterances’ are
communicative acts, or events. They depend on some specific situational relationship
between participants in given setting.

We
o Describe different kinds of ‘communicative event’,
o Show how they relate, in different ways, to the ‘canonical speech situation’
traditionally described in linguistics, and
o Explore what is sometimes called the departure from ‘co-presence,’ or
‘spatiotemporal distanciation,’ of media discourse: the fact that media language is
often received at a distance from the situation in which it is produced and often fixed
or recorded and then consumed at a different time from the time of production.

Different kinds of defined ‘communicative event’ helps us to understand variations in

language use that are specific to media styles.

Canonical situation of utterance

Some of the key features of media communication events are developments from a default
structure of face-to-face interaction, which is commonly described as communication taking
place in a ‘canonical speech situation’.

In Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, linguistic interaction is famously

depicted as a diagram of two heads facing each other and exchanging messages.

John Lyons (1977) explains that canonical speech situation involves:

“the participants present in the same actual situation able to see one another and to perceive
the associated non-vocal paralinguistic features of their utterances, and each assuming the
role of sender and receiver in turn. […] Many utterances which would be readily interpretable
in a canonical situation-of-utterance are subject to various kinds of ambiguity or
indeterminacy if they are produced in a non-canonical situation: if they are written rather than
spoken and dissociated from prosodic and paralinguistic features which would punctuate and
modulate them”

Roman Jakobson (1987) maps principal function associated with each key aspect. In his
description, the ‘context’ dimension of a communication plays an important role in how
 information is
conveyed. The
‘conative’, or
persuasive,
functioning of
a

communication results particularly from how the addressee is approached or appealed to. The
‘code’ aspect can have attention drawn to it if we comment on or discuss what words were
used, or how words were used.
These functions are not mutually exclusive. In any given text, they function together. But
they form a changing hierarchy in different texts, with different degrees of prominence. In
one text, one function will be emphasized or more prominent; in another text, a different
function.

The same communication model has been developed in different ways in other discipline.
Harold D. Lasswell (1948) develops, so called, ‘Lasswell Formula’ to apply in marketing and
political science.

A convenient way of describing an act of communication is to answer the following

questions: Who? Says what? In which channel? To whom? With what effect? Where
Lasswell feels answers will be found to each of these questions is indicated by the different
approaches to analysing media texts he names beneath the boxes.

Media communicative events

Media discourses are significantly different from canonical speech situations. ‘Mediated’
communication involves specialized adaptations of the resources of face-to-face verbal
interaction.

Communicative events in media take many forms, at one end of a scale, they can still be
‘dyadic communication’ (two-way conversation on phone) and at the other end is what
people traditionally think of as ‘mass communication’ (radio or television broadcasting).

Communication theorist Denis McQuail (1969) has distilled characteristics of mass

communication into following features:

1. They normally require complex formal organisations.

2. They are directed towards large audiences.
3. They are public – content is open to all.
4. Audience contains many different kinds of people.
5. Mass media can establish contact simultaneously with very large numbers of people at
a distance from the source, and widely separated from one another.
6. Relationships between communicator and audience are managed by people who are
known only in their public role, as communicators.
7. The audience for mass communications involves people coming together because of
some common interest, even though the individuals involved do not know each other,
have only a restricted amount of interaction, do not orient their actions to each other,
and are either not at all or only loosely organized as a group.

Non-reciprocal public address – Mass communication from some central point of production
to large, dispersed audiences who have limited or no scope to reply.

In between one-to-one dyadic (or dialogic) interaction and one-way mass communication can
be found varying structures of ‘mediated communicative event.’

Present communications media vary on a range of dimensions:

 Role-reversibility: this means whether it is possible to be alternately speaker and

addressee, or whether you can only listen or watch.
  Co-presence/distance: most media technologies – from letters to telegraphy through to
instant messaging and mobile phones – permit messages to be communicated at a
distance, subject to network and cost considerations. By contrast, face-to-face speech
doesn’t.
 Co-temporality: this means whether there is a ‘live’ link, creating communication
simultaneously in real-time, or whether communication is reproduced or time-shifted.
 Fixation/relative permanence: this means whether media discourse exists only at the
moment of its utterance – as was the case earlier for nearly all communication – or
whether it has been fixed in permanent, or at least durable, textual form.
 Spontaneity/rehearsed and scripted: this means whether the discourse is
simultaneously planned, executed and monitored, or whether it is prepared and
scripted.

What makes media discourse distinctive?

Reification of spoken communication:

‘Reification’ means turning something that is a process or set of relationships into something
fixed, a product or thing. Reification of spoken vernal discourse is sometimes called
‘fixation’. It transforms spoken communication into an object or kind of commodity.

Speech can be captured as writing – writing could be turned into printed text

Both formats convert the evanescent character of speaking into something permanent and
reproducible.

Media ‘speech’ is also reproducible in different circumstances. It has spontaneity of speech

but takes many characteristics of writing; spoken media discourse, unlike speech, is planned,
and it is a co-ordinated production rather than a product of an individual.

In broadcast form media speech tends to require a scale of investment from which financial
return or benefit will be expected.

Different capabilities that create interactivity:

‘Interactivity’ is associated with most contemporary media technologies, which are typically
to some degree ‘interactive.’

Being interactive is rather like ‘reciprocity’ in the canonical situation of utterance: it involves
turn-taking – and so interaction – rather than only one-way transmission of a communicated
message.

The degree of interactivity varies. It may involve recipients of a media text simply reacting,
or making their own sense out of some piece of media content. Such reception is called
‘active reception’ but there is little feedback into or control over the content or direction of
the message.

Alternatively, interactivity may refer to a process of using media. The user interacts by
choosing targeting and selecting material, for example, using google searches, message alerts.
Such usage is still passive to the extent that it doesn’t affect the content being presented. Such
interaction involves interaction with textual material presented by the machine, rather than
interaction with other users.
Other kinds of interactivity again involve interaction between users, creating two-way forms
of communication.

In all cases of interactivity what is involved is some combination of the following:

 The degree to which two or more parties to a communication event act on each other,
 How far their interaction affects the unfolding direction of the communication, and
 How far such mutual influence is synchronised.

Private and public communications

The mediated character of verbal discourse being described here contributes, over time, to a
fundamental redrawing of lines between personal and public.