How To Talk About Communication Problems (draft, work in progress, part 1)

[Note: This is a preliminary draft of work in progress. Any feedback would be much appreciated. --RTC]

Introduction

The mid-twentieth century pragmatist philosopher Richard McKeon boldly declared, “All problems can be stated as problems of communication” (McKeon, 1957, p. 91). This was not only an analytical claim, and, as such, potentially the foundational premise of a practical discipline of communication; it was also a socio-historical claim that, if true, would support a rationale for the importance of that discipline in a communication-conscious era such as McKeon’s (and ours). 

McKeon observed that his post-World War II society was preoccupied with “communication” (in quotes), which had become a vogue word increasingly used to explain both the nature of problems and the means of their solution. "'Communication,'” he wrote, “does not signify a problem newly discovered in our times, but a fashion of thinking and a method of analyzing which we apply in the statement of all fundamental problems" (p. 89). This heightened awareness of communication was “a result of the invention of instruments of communication and the massive extension of their use" (p. 92)—needless to say, a trend that continues. For McKeon, the importance that was attributed to communication was well warranted by an historical situation in which problems were complex and interrelated but there was no agreed-upon framework of laws or values for resolving them, a world in which the social cooperation necessitated by growing global interdependence was too often impeded by cultural and ideological conflicts. All problems were communication problems insofar as they were best resolved peacefully by the effective use of means of communication to develop tenuous agreements in pluralistic, democratic communities. 

McKeon’s analytical claim was that all problems “can be stated” as communication problems. He was not claiming that all problems inherently are communication problems but that they can be stated as such; nor was he claiming that they must be stated that way but that they can be, which implies, of course, that problems can be stated in other ways. He was talking about how we talk about, or frame, problems in society, and he was claiming that we can always choose to express them as problems of communication. This is so, he explained, because: 

The nature of a problem may be explored by examining what we are talking about or the warrant for asserting anything we propose to say about it; it may also be explored by considering the conditions of stating the problem or saying anything whatsoever about it. A problem is determined not merely by what is the case, or by what is understood to be the case, but also by what is stated and by communication elucidating what is said. (McKeon, 1955, p. 91)

Not only can we choose to talk about any problem in this way; for McKeon, in a pluralistic society, we often should do so. “When problems are broad and complexly interrelated, the initial distinctions” (the starting points for deliberation) are not objectively given in advance but “must be found in communication itself” (p. 91), that is, in a process that considers “what is said and how what is meant might be influenced by communication” (p. 92). 

For a recent example, consider the controversy surrounding public health measures such as masking and social distancing that arose during the Covid-19 pandemic. Such measures were obviously correct as “objectively given” epidemiological means for reducing disease transmission until effective vaccines could be developed, but the complexity of a pluralistic society revealed itself in the myriad conflicting opinions, protests, and cries of pain that emerged in response. Arguably, an essential failure of public health policy was not to have approached the pandemic from the outset as a communication problem, not just an objectively given technical problem in virology, epidemiology, or medicine. 

To frame a problem like the pandemic as a communication problem in McKeon’s sense would require that we avoid reducing communication itself to a technical science of designing messages to produce predicted effects. While we might be tempted by the spectacular ongoing development of the technical means of communication to embrace what McKeon called “the mechanical analogy” (p. 92), doing so would be counterproductive because “[c]ommunication can be controlled only when communication in any true sense has failed" (p. 98). Rather than technical control, communication in a pluralistic society should cultivate the “attitudes and abilities” needed for democratic deliberation to flourish. "Communication is an art, and it must develop powers as well as achieve effects" (p. 97). For McKeon, the practical discipline of communication that was both analytically possible and urgently needed by a modern pluralistic society would be founded upon the classical art of deliberative rhetoric.  

This paper [work in progress] develops McKeon’s theme in the current intellectual and socio-historical context. That communication was becoming a preoccupation of society in the mid-20th century is confirmed by scholarship showing that the idea of communication was both increasingly prominent and dynamically evolving in that period and since. Therapeutic and technical strands in the idea of communication emerged in the post-war period (Peters, 2008). From the 1950s on, “communication” as a category of knowledge (in library catalogs, academic programs, etc.) greatly expanded and differentiated (Craig & Carlone, 1998). By the late 20th century, what Cameron (2000) referred to as a “communication culture”—a cultural trend that emphasizes the importance of good communication in all spheres of life—had progressively deepened and globalized (e.g., Boromisza-Habashi, 2016). By then, the idea of communication had become, indeed, “a registry of modern longings” (Peters, 1999, p. 2). We do still talk a lot about communication problems, and our common ways of doing so are both worthy of cultivation and subject to criticism on various grounds.  

As communication has grown as a practical category in society, it has grown too as a conceptual category in theory, research, and education.  Communication and media scholars professionally talk and write about communication problems—observing, interpreting, and critiquing ordinary metadiscourse (ways of talking about communication) and contributing new forms of metadiscourse based on systematic research and theorization. This ongoing engagement with the metadiscourse on communication problems and practices in society is, arguably, the essential business of a communication discipline (Craig, 2018). And for conducting that business we have at our disposal a wide range of empirical and theoretical resources.  While McKeon proposed the classical art of deliberative rhetoric as the normative basis for a communication discipline, in the current context rhetoric should be regarded as one of several traditions of communication theory in which problems are framed with different assumptions and vocabularies, each tradition having a specific practical relevance and normative rationale (Craig, 1999). Moreover, the rising global awareness of communication has given voice to many culturally specific communication practices and concepts that further constitute alternative ways of framing problems (Carbaugh, 2017; Craig & Xiong, 2022; Miike & Yin, 2022).  

Thus, although it may be analytically true, as McKeon claimed, that all problems can be stated as problems of communication, there are potentially many ways of doing so. An analysis that begins with “what is said,” as McKeon recommended, often encounters a plethora of competing claims that reveal tensions among different communicative as well as non-communicative accounts of a situation. No real-world problem is uncontestably a problem of communication in whatever version, if only because, as McKeon implied, any problem can also be stated in other ways, and, in a pluralistic society, someone is likely to do so. Even in a communication culture, communication statements of problems compete with other, non-communication problem frames that may have equal or greater cultural authority in some situations. Deliberating on a problem thus often unavoidably requires deliberating among competing problem frames, and communication becomes a meta-frame for deliberation on how to talk about problems that may or may not be framed, in the end, as communication problems. 

The remainder of this essay [work in progress] begins to explore the field of communication and competing problem frames, first by introducing a broad theoretical distinction between communication and non-communication frames as expressions of conflicting cultural and institutional discourses, then by further elaborating the dialectics between communication and each of four competing discourses: economic, biological, agonistic, and dogmatic. The essay concludes with the suggestion that McKeon's art of deliberative rhetoric for a pluralistic society should be expanded to include a meta-level of deliberation on problem framing. How to talk about problems in a pluralistic society is itself a complex communication problem that can be usefully illuminated by a pluralistic field of communication theory.  

(to be continued)

References

Boromisza-Habashi, D. (2016). What We Need Is Good Communication: Vernacular Globalization in Some Hungarian Speech. International Journal of Communication, 10, 4600-4619. https://doi.org/1932–8036/20160005 

Cameron, D. (2000). Good to talk? Living and working in a communication culture. Sage. 

Carbaugh, D. (Ed.). (2017). The Handbook of Communication in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Routledge. 

Craig, R. T. (1999). Communication theory as a field. Communication Theory, 9(2), 119-161. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.1999.tb00355.x 

Craig, R. T. (2018). For a practical discipline. Journal of Communication, 68(2), 289-297. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqx013 

Craig, R. T., & Carlone, D. A. (1998). Growth and transformation of communication studies in U.S. higher education: Towards reinterpretation. Communication Education, 47(1), 67-81.  https://doi.org/10.1080/03634529809379111 

Craig, R. T., & Xiong, B. (2022). Traditions of communication theory and the potential for multicultural dialogue. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 17(1), 1-25. https://doi.org/10.1080/17447143.2021.2009487 

McKeon, R. (1957). Communication, truth, and society. Ethics, 67, 89-99. https://doi.org/10.1086/291096 

Miike, Y., & Yin, J. (Eds.). (2022). The handbook of global interventions in communication theory. Routledge. 

Peters, J. D. (1999). Speaking into the air: A history of the idea of communication. University of Chicago Press. 

Peters, J. D. (2008). Communication, History of the idea. In W. Donsbach (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Communication (pp. 689-693). Blackwell Publishing.  https://doi.org/10.1002/9781405186407.wbiecc075 

Review of "Communication Theory: Mapping a Diverse Field" by Karsten Pedersen (Ethics International Press, 2025)

 

Image source: https://ethicspress.com/products/communication-theory

Karsten Pedersen, a professor at Roskilde University in Denmark, has written an engaging introduction to communication theory that prominently features, but is not exactly based on, my constitutive metamodel with its scheme of theoretical traditions. Rather, as he puts it, Pedersen uses the metamodel "as a sounding board in large parts of the book" (p. ix). In doing so, he engages deeply not only with the metamodel but with criticisms of it by Myers, Bergman, Cooren, Pablé, and others, and develops his own critical position, based on his own perspectivist "ontology" of communication.  

Pedersen agrees with some essential aspects of the metamodel, especially what I call theoretical pluralism—the pragmatic idea that many different theories of communication, including theories that may contradict each other—can all be valid and useful in different ways without necessarily being "true" or "false" in any absolute sense. Indeed, Pedersen's main criticism of the metamodel is that its pluralism doesn't go far enough. While he sees it as a useful starting point for bringing different perspectives into the discussion of communication theory, he says it necessarily misrepresents those perspectives and privileges some over others by simplifying them and forcing them all into a uniform social constructionist framework (the scheme of theoretical traditions). Since any "meta" model, however structured, is going to have some version of the same problem, the real question for Pedersen is whether we need a metamodel at all to engage with the diverse forms of communication theory. Although he vacillates on this question as he considers it from various angles, his answer in the end is no, we do not need a metamodel. Nevertheless, he finds the constitutive metamodel useful as a "sounding board" and has a lot to say about it and the traditions of communication theory throughout the book. 

While it offers an accessible introduction to communication theory that covers numerous theories and approaches, this is not a standard, systematically organized textbook. Rather, through its ten chapters it ruminates on its central themes—the diversity of communication theory, the importance of being able to see communication in different perspectives, and the subjective, "inside-out" nature of human understanding—through critical discussions of the constitutive metamodel and specific theories ranging from Lasswell's functionalist model to Bitzer's theory of the rhetorical situation to Luhmann's system theory, and many others. As it ruminates, the book returns again and again to certain issues and arguments (for example: Do we need a metamodel?) to consider them from different viewpoints. 

Chapter 1 introduces the idea that communication "can only be produced and understood from the inside out," that is, from our own individual perspective, and that communication theories can expand our perspective with the ability to approach communication flexibly from different vantage points. In this light, it's a problem that some theories present themselves as the one and only valid way of seeing communication, rather than as one perspective among many, and Pedersen points out how some critics of the constitutive metamodel, such as Myers and Pablé, have committed this error. 

Illustrating the book's non-linear organization, chapter 2 is titled "I Skipped Ahead, Here Is the Real Chapter 1: What Is Communication?" This chapter steps back to consider some of the many different ways that communication has been defined and conceptualized, including ways that focus on the message, signs and codes, thoughts or mental representations, and evolutionary narratives. Pedersen concludes that defining communication is problematic because every definition is incomplete, and a value of the metamodel is that it presents multiple definitions. 

Chapter 3 returns to examine criticisms of the constitutive metamodel in greater depth and detail than before. Pedersen distinguishes three types of critics: those who reject the metamodel entirely, those who supplement it with a different perspective on the traditions, and those who increase the metamodel's "complexity and descriptive power" by including more traditions. The chapter features an extended illustration of how discussion across theoretical traditions is possible when a common theme, such as the communicator, the message, or the channel, is approached from theories in different traditions. 

The next two chapters ruminate on the need for a metamodel. Chapter 4 is titled "We Need a Metamodel" and has two subsections, titled, respectively, "We Don't Need Craig's Metamodel," and "Or Do We?" Chapter 5 is titled "We Don't Need a Metamodel: Communication is Interdisciplinary Already" and includes an extensive discussion of an approach to communication analysis that Pedersen has introduced in an earlier book, which he characterizes as a way of using the traditions of communication theory without using the metamodel. The approach is to center the analysis on one tradition, for example the sociocultural, to focus on some phenomenon theorized in that tradition, such as discourse, and to bring in contrasting perspectives from other traditions in which the same phenomenon is theorized, such as semiotic, rhetorical, and critical theories of discourse. This is a way of pursuing discussions across traditions without reducing the traditions to the definitions given in the metamodel, which in my view is not actually a rejection of the metamodel but rather a good way of using it as a heuristic scheme for a specific purpose. 

Chapter 6 discusses the fields of epistemology (theory of knowledge) and ontology (theory of existence), argues that theories in those fields are all limited perspectives on the world, none exclusively valid, and presents Pedersen's own ontology of communication, which flows from the idea, introduced in chapter 1, that we can only know the world from our own individual perspective. Here he writes:

The main argument of my book is that human communication is an individual activity and even further that the construction and understanding of communication is and can only be individual. (p. 92)

This thesis poses something of a paradox because, having argued that any ontology is only one perspective among others, Pedersen presents his own ontology as "the human condition" or what communication "can only be" and suggests in a couple of places that this is something we can all agree on. Well, I'm not so sure of that. A survey of the traditions of communication theory turns up quite a few theories that question the status of individual perspectives, seeing individuals as existing only in relation to others or as constituted by social practices and discourses, or seeing the mind as something other than private individual consciousness. When it comes to ontologies, Pedersen's radically individualistic perspectivism (he admits somewhere that it could be described as solipsism) is one useful perspective among others. Of course, we are all inclined to privilege our own perspective, but Pedersen's commitment to theoretical pluralism entails what I have described elsewhere as the paradox of pluralism: To embrace pluralism is to take a standpoint that can take no standpoint.  

After introducing Pedersen's ontology of communication, chapter 6 goes on to relate that ontology in some detail to each of the seven traditions of communication theory as defined in the metamodel, highlighting how human individuals are theorized as communicators in each tradition. Then (it's a long chapter!) Pedersen stages a discussion between Harris's and Pablé's theory of integrational semiology and Dervin's sense-making theory as two theories that are both fully consistent with his own ontology yet offer different insights. In discussing integrational semiology, he also brings in criticisms of semiotics from the metamodel's seven traditions. So, a lot goes on in this chapter, but, taken as a whole, we can see it as further illustration of Pedersen's idea that discussions across theoretical traditions can be centered on one theory, which in this case is Pedersen's ontology of communication. I have some problems (which I won't go into here) with the way Pedersen uses the metamodel's seven traditions in this discussion, but reading chapter 6 to learn about some interesting theoretical concepts and issues is worth the long trek nonetheless. 

Taking an applied turn, chapter 7 considers how each of the seven traditions can be used in communication analysis and planning while noting advantages and limitations of each tradition and making a case that it's often best to combine different traditions rather than use them one at a time. Written from the perspective of Pedersen's ontology of the individual communicator as a fixed standpoint, the chapter underplays the fact that each tradition has its own ideas about the individual. Aside from that, however, this chapter gives the reader a good sense of each tradition's approach to practical problems and makes useful suggestions. 

Chapter 8 develops the metatheoretical claim that communication theories, as constructed ways of understanding communication, are not true or false but only helpful or not for some purpose. But Pedersen exempts his own ontology of communication from this claim, arguing that the individual, "inside-out" nature of human understanding is a true description of the human condition, not just a constructed perspective useful for some purposes. The ontology, he says, has nothing specifically to do with communication or communication theory but describes a fact about the human mind that impacts communication and all other human activities. This tricky line of argument takes us to some interesting places, such as the claim that there are no misunderstandings in communication, only different understandings, and, ultimately, that "reception is not part of the communication process in the somewhat startling sense that anything can be understood as anything and that the sender of the message never (as in never ever) controls the individual understanding of any message" (p. 173). Solipsism, indeed. 

Chapters 9 and 10 conclude the book with further reflections on the constitutive metamodel and metamodels in general. Chapter 9 takes a detailed look at the framework used for defining traditions in the constitutive metamodel, with an emphasis on how the traditions criticize each other (and themselves) within the metamodel, which points toward issues for discussion across traditions. 

Chapter 10 is titled, "Is the Inside-Out View the New Metamodel, but without the Hassle?" It opens with the observation that Pedersen never intended to present a new theory or metamodel of communication in this book, but now he wonders if that is what his ontology of communication has turned out to be: a theory and/or a metamodel. Rumination on this question leads finally to the conclusion that the ontology is neither a theory nor a metamodel, although it does some of the work of a metamodel in provoking theoretical discussion across traditions. Returning to the constitutive metamodel, Pedersen revisits some criticisms mentioned earlier and offers a suggestion about how to use the metamodel that I, for one, can wholeheartedly endorse:

So, if we want to find out how e.g. the sociopsychological and semiotic traditions compare, we can use Craig’s metamodel with that purpose in mind, but if we want to know what semiotics is all about, we will have to find sources that go deeper to make sure that we do not deal with semiotics from [a] general communication theoretical point of view, but from a specialised semiotic point of view.

Thereby, a metamodel can be seen as a navigation tool with which we can steer in the general direction of a tradition (in the case of Craig’s metamodel). But when we get there, we need a more detailed map true to the tradition. (p. 184).

In sum, there's a lot of lively thinking displayed in this book, and I enjoyed reading it, even though I had to read it in the form of an online e-book accessed through my university library, because I was unwilling to pay the $120 that the publisher (named "Ethics") charges for this slim volume. Or, you can purchase the e-book through Google for $118.95, thereby saving a cool $1.05. Or, hopefully, your library has it or will order it. 

Back in Business

This blog has been offline for the last week or so because of a technical glitch, now solved thanks to a suggestion from the blogger.com help community. Thanks!

Review of "Communication Theory as Liberal Education" by Austin S. Babrow (Cognella Academic Publishing, 2025)

 

Image source: https://titles.cognella.com/communication-theory-as-liberal-education-9798823343947

A new college textbook by Austin S. Babrow uses the traditions of communication theory in a unique way to introduce the subject of communication theory as a vital part of liberal education. In contrast to narrow technical or professional training, liberal education fosters personal growth by liberating our minds from dogmatic, unreflective, habitual ideas, cultivating both a broadminded openness to different perspectives and a capacity for critical thinking. This potential for mind expansion has long been at the heart of arguments for the value of a traditional liberal arts education, and this book offers communication theory as a key component of that education for our present era. 

Communication theory is especially valuable now, says Babrow, because communication has become so central to our lives and prospects in a world that is ever more hyperconnected, diverse, contentious, and uncertain. As liberal education, the study of communication theory can free our minds from unreflective, habitual assumptions about communication and cultivate our ability to think critically from various points of view about the communication we experience and practice in our everyday lives.

The opening and closing chapters of Communication Theory as Liberal Education develop the idea of communication theory as liberal education. To introduce multiple perspectives on communication, Babrow structures the remaining chapters according to seven traditions of communication theory as defined in the Constitutive Metamodel: rhetorical, social psychological, phenomenological, cybernetic, semiotic, sociocultural, and critical, with an additional chapter that broadens the subject to include non-Western traditions. The theoretical traditions are useful for Babrow's purposes because they are based on different core conceptions of communication that "offer distinctive ideas about the self, relationships with other people, social institutions of every sort, and our relationship with nature" (p. 14). Learning to approach the world from these different perspectives on communication can expand our possibilities for living and, thus, our freedom. Because theories in each tradition are systematically elaborated and defend points of view that differ from other theories, the study of multiple traditions also fosters critical thinking.

Unlike other theory textbooks that can overwhelm students with numerous concepts and theories, this relatively short text of about 200 pages illustrates each theoretical tradition by presenting one or two representative theories in detail. Interspersed through the text are brief "reflections" that pose questions for application, critical thinking, and discussion, and each chapter concludes with a set of questions for further thought and discussion, making this an ideal text for use in small, discussion-based classes and seminars. The text is engagingly written with many relevant examples, personal anecdotes, and references to recent events and issues.  

This book provides an accessible introduction to the traditions of communication theory while largely avoiding the technical complexities of the Constitutive Metamodel, the metatheoretical scheme in which the traditions were originally defined. Readers learn about the seven traditions and about the general idea of traditions based on different core concepts of communication, but without grappling with notions of communication as a practical discipline, theoretical and practical metadiscourse, matrices of topoi for argumentation across traditions, and so on. This non-technical approach to the traditions is a limitation but also a strength, in that it keeps the focus on the idea of communication in its multiple conceptions and what it all means for how we understand the world and live our lives. 

And, whereas I have often complained that textbook presentations of the metamodel are a little misleading, I find that Babrow gets it right in essence and gives a vivid sense of each tradition's distinct point of view on the world. I am pleased to recommend this book for classes on communication theory as a liberal art. 

Traditions of Communication Theory: An Introduction to the Constitutive Metamodel

 

Above is a slide prepared for a lecture about the traditions of communication theory. It tries to encapsulate seven complex traditions of thought in just a few words. I've been using versions of this slide for many years, but it never looks quite right to me, so I tweak it for every new presentation. This is the latest version as of this writing, but I doubt it will be the last. 

The traditions of communication theory represent some basic options for framing communication problems. They first appeared in my 1999 article, "Communication Theory as a Field," as elements of the Constitutive Metamodel of communication theory. As I mentioned in an earlier post, much of my subsequent writing, including this blog, has grown out of ideas in that article. (For my current thinking on and "beyond" the seven traditions, check out this interview.)

Readers wanting to learn in depth about the Constitutive Metamodel and the traditions can use the sources listed below under Further Reading, some of which are available on my website. Descriptions of the metamodel that you'll find in popular communication theory textbooks are helpful but often a little misleading in my opinion, and free materials that people have posted online, almost always based on those second-hand textbook accounts, are usually worse. Except for a decent Wikipedia article that currently needs editing and updating, I haven't found an introduction to the metamodel free on the Web that I can strongly recommend. 

So, this post provides a free-online, accurate, and I hope fairly readable introduction to the Constitutive Metamodel and the traditions of communication theory. Borrowing some material from previous encyclopedia articles (Craig, 2009a, 2016), I'll start off by explaining the metamodel in general, then say more about the seven traditions, and I'll conclude by discussing criticisms of the metamodel and recent work that expands the traditions and suggests different applications. 

The Constitutive Metamodel

A model is a representation of something from some point of view. A metamodel is a model of models. It's a framework for describing and comparing different models of something. Every theory of communication is also a model of communication insofar as it represents the communication process from some point of view. The Constitutive Metamodel is a framework for describing and comparing different models of communication from the point of view of how they are relevant to practical problems. 

The metamodel is useful theoretically because it shows how diverse ideas about communication relate to each other, and it is useful practically because it gives us a wide range of perspectives on communication problems. It's called the "constitutive" metamodel because it is based on a constitutive model of communication--the idea that communication is a social process that constitutes, or produces, shared meaning. The Constitutive Metamodel is a model of communication in the field of communication theory. As such, it represents models of communication as ways of communicating about communication that constitute, or produce, alternative meanings of communication as a concept and a practice. 

We need a metamodel because communication theory is a wonderfully rich field of thought but also a very fragmented one. There has never been a single, generally accepted overall theory or core set of theories of communication. In fact, there are hundreds of  theories, and not only are they about different aspects of communication (such as media technologies or personal relationships), they often come from such different intellectual backgrounds that they can seem entirely unrelated to each other. How does a psychological theory of media effects relate to a critical theory of decolonizing communication, and what difference does it make for communication in practice? The metamodel gives us a way of thinking about questions like that. 

From the early decades of the 20th century, theories of communication sprang up in philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, speech, and many other fields of thought. Philosophers analyzed problems of language and meaning, sociologists looked at problems of urban community, psychologists studied problems of persuasion and group dynamics, and so on. I suspect that the topic of communication attracted such widespread intellectual attention because communication was increasingly felt to be an important problem in society. Each discipline developed theories by extending its own traditional ways of thinking to address some communication problems, but until the late 1940s there was still no awareness of "communication theory" as an overarching topic that included all of those theories. 

The term "communication theory" first appeared in the field of electrical engineering, where by the 1930s and '40s it referred to theories of signal coding and transmission--the origins of what I call the cybernetic tradition. As the academic discipline of communication began to be organized in the 1950s and '60s (a long story that can't be told here), the term "communication theory" was borrowed from the electrical engineers and became an umbrella term covering all theories of communication in all fields of thought. Although much has changed through the following decades, communication theorists continue to work in a variety of different intellectual traditions, so the field continues to be rich with ideas but also very fragmented. Yet, all of those disconnected theories have relevant things to say about communication problems in society, so there is common ground among them and a potential for productive dialogue about their practical differences.  

The Constitutive Metamodel tries to bring the field of communication theory together in a unified conversation without diminishing its rich diversity. The trick is to see how all communication theories are relevant to practical problems. In that pragmatic capacity, not only do most theories contribute something useful, they all have something in common to discuss and debate when we treat them as alternative models for framing practical problems.

The main ideas of the Constitutive Metamodel can be summarized in a few bullet points:

• Communication is a culturally shaped concept and social practice, constituted in the ordinary metadiscourse (practical discourse about communication) that circulates in a society. In other words, how we understand and practice communication is shaped by common ways of talking about communication in our culture.
• Communication theory is a technical practice of metadiscourse that interprets, critiques, and reconstructs ordinary metadiscourse to develop useful new ways of talking about (and thereby constituting) the practice of communication. Communication theory contributes to society by creating and disseminating practically relevant forms of metadiscourse that can be used to frame problems and discuss practices of communication in everyday situations.
• Theories that are practically relevant are both plausible (consistent with some commonly held beliefs about communication) and interesting (challenge other common beliefs). For example, cybernetic theories are plausible because they build on certain commonplace ideas (e.g., that communication depends on information transfer) while also challenging other commonplace ideas (e.g., that humans are essentially different from machines). As such, cybernetic theories give us a unique perspective for framing and discussing a range of communication problems. 
• A basis for debate between different theories is that they often disagree about the validity of some commonplace metadiscourse. For example, theories of genuine dialogue (in what I call the phenomenological tradition), contrary to cybernetic theories, generally challenge the idea that communication depends on information transfer while affirming that humans are essentially different from machines. This difference gives us two alternative perspectives on communication problems, one focused on information processing and the other on authentic human relationships. In this way, the diversity of communication theory can be a strength when it enables us to reflect on problems from different viewpoints. 
• Theories of communication are both numerous and intellectually diverse, partly because they have developed independently in several different thought traditions, each with its own vocabulary, core assumptions, and relevance to ordinary metadiscourse. The Constitutive Metamodel argues that many ideas in communication theory are based on a smaller number of fundamentally different conceptions of communication, first presented in my 1999 article as the seven traditions of communication theory. It's important to emphasize that these traditions are not uniform or unchanging. Each tradition includes many contending theories and they all continue to evolve over time through ongoing innovation and debate. It's also important to emphasize that the metamodel is open-ended in principle and not limited to the original seven traditions. In fact several more traditions have already been recognized in the literature since 1999. Finally, theories often blend ideas from different traditions, so we can't expect every theory to fit neatly in one tradition. 

Traditions of Communication Theory

In the original article on the Constitutive Metamodel (Craig, 1999) the seven traditions were represented in the form of two tables, reproduced below. Feel free to skip over the tables. They may be hard to read on your device, and they refer to a lot of complex ideas that I can't explain in this short introduction to the metamodel. Instead, I'll say a few words about the overall structure of the tables and then return to the simplified version at the top of this post to say more about each tradition.

Table 1. Seven Traditions of Communication Theory (from Craig, 1999, p. 133)

The purpose of Table 1 is to display the seven traditions of  communication theory as forms of metadiscourse based on different fundamental conceptions of communication. Each tradition is summarized with regard to:

• Its typical definition of communication,
• Its general way of framing communication problems,
• Some of its core vocabulary, 
• Some commonplace ideas about communication that it affirms, and 
• Some commonplace ideas about communication that it challenges.

Table 2. Topoi for Argumentation Across Traditions (from Craig, 1999, p. 134)

Table 2 illustrates points of disagreement among the traditions as a basis for theoretical debate across the field. In the column under each tradition, the table lists "topoi" or lines of argument from that tradition against each tradition. Because theoretical debate goes on within as well as between traditions, the diagonal cells of the table present lines of argument against each tradition from within the same tradition: rhetoric against rhetoric, semiotics against semiotics, and so on. As I've mentioned, this table alludes to a lot of complex ideas and it may be hard to make much sense of it until you have studied the traditions more deeply. 

With that in mind, let's return to the simplified picture at the top of this post and consider a brief sketch of each tradition (adapted from Craig, 2016).  

Rhetorical Tradition

• Communication is the practical art of discourse.
• Problems of communication involve choices about what to say and how in particular situations, depending on such factors as audience, purpose, and the available means of persuasion (reasons, emotions, stylistic devices).

Rhetorical theory originated in ancient Greek city-states where citizens participated in public juries and deliberative assemblies, and public speaking skills were highly valued. Popular teachers known as sophists wrote handbooks on techniques of effective speaking. Aristotle, in the first systematic philosophical treatise on rhetoric, defined it as the art of discovering the available means of persuasion and codified fundamental rhetorical concepts that continue to be used today. Through the Roman and medieval periods in the West, rhetoric was a standard school subject (part of the trivium), and a complex tradition of theoretical writings on rhetoric can be traced from ancient times down to the present. As the idea of communication gained currency in the 20th century, rhetorical theory also flourished and the scope of rhetoric was broadened from its roots in public speaking and written composition so that any communication could now be thought of as a form of rhetoric. In the rhetorical tradition, communication is a practical art of discourse, concerned with mastering techniques of communication, developing a critical awareness of techniques, and making wise choices about what and how to communicate in practical situations. 

Semiotic Tradition

• Communication is the sharing of meaning through signs and symbols.
• Problems of communication involve the use of signs and symbols (words, gestures, images, etc.) to express meaning, achieve understanding, and bridge gaps between different subjective viewpoints. Problems can arise from unfamiliarity, language differences, too much abstraction, or  unintended meanings that might be confusing or offensive. 

Semiotics, the theory of signs, sprang in its modern form from the 17th-century empiricist philosopher John Locke, who theorized that words stand for ideas in each person’s mind and that communication fails when people use words with different or unclear meanings. Under the influence of seminal thinkers such as Charles S. Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure, sophisticated theories were developed in the 20th century to explain types and systems of signs and how signs function in the mind and in society. For example, natural signs (e.g., smoke is a sign of fire) can be distinguished from symbolic signs (e.g., the word “fire” used in a speech about fire prevention) in that symbolic signs have shared meaning only as a matter of social convention. In the semiotic tradition, communication depends entirely on the production and interpretation of signs to share meaning or convey information. The practical concerns of rhetoric and semiotics overlap, but rhetoric has traditionally focused on persuasion while semiotics has focused on intersubjective understanding as the fundamental problem of communication. 

Phenomenological Tradition

• Communication is the experience of self and other in dialogue. 
• Problems of communication involve inauthentic ways of being and relating to others, such as one-way monologue, rejection of different views, or focus on an instrumental goal like persuading the other or projecting a certain image of oneself.

Phenomenological theory is concerned with communication as a subjective experience. In contrast to cybernetics, human consciousness and intentionality are essential to communication as theorized in this tradition. Phenomenological theory describes the forms of conscious experience through which we interpret and make sense of the world around us, including other people. Several contending schools of phenomenology developed in the 20th century from the work of major Continental philosophers such as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. An important concept first theorized by the philosopher Martin Buber is that of genuine dialogue—an event of communion between people who experience each other as full persons with their own subjectivity (I–you) rather than as instrumental objects (I–it). The phenomenological tradition thus offers an ethical view of communication that values openness and authenticity and is critical of strategic (rhetorical) as well as mechanistic (cybernetic or sociopsychological) views. Phenomenology’s focus on our direct experience of others can be contrasted to the semiotic assumption that meaning can only be shared through signs, but current philosophers of communication often blend the two traditions, weaving signs and discourse into the fabric of conscious experience. 

Cybernetic Tradition

• Communication is information processing in systems at all levels of complexity (machines, organisms, groups, organizations, societies). 
• Problems of communication involve malfunctions in the flow of information such as too little or too much information, lack of feedback, runaway processes such as escalating conflict, or system breakdown. 

In the late 1940s, formal theories of communication developed by mathematicians and electrical engineers, especially Claude Shannon’s theory of information and Norbert Wiener’s theory of cybernetic feedback-control systems, attracted widespread attention in disciplines ranging from biology to psychology and the social sciences. At the dawn of the Information Age, these theories seemed to point the way to a rigorous science of communication that would explain how information functions in all complex systems including machines, biological organisms, and human society. Although the formal mathematics of these theories were not easily applied to human interaction, Shannon’s diagram of the linear model of communication (showing the flow of information from a source through a channel to a destination) became a staple of communication theory courses, and key terms such as information, redundancy, noise, and feedback were absorbed into ordinary language as a somewhat technical-sounding vocabulary for discussing communication. In the cybernetic tradition, communication is information processing in systems at all levels from machines to human societies, and problems of communication have to do with system malfunctions (such as information blockage in organizations or escalating conflict in interpersonal relations) rather than persuasion (contrary to the rhetorical tradition) or shared meaning (contrary to the semiotic tradition). In a cybernetic view, contrary to the phenomenological tradition, communication is a functional process that does not rely on conscious intentionality. Human consciousness itself is a form of information processing that is not different in its essential functioning from that of computing machines or other nonconscious systems.

Sociopsychological Tradition

• Communication is a process of social behavior, interaction and influence, the causes and effects of which are determined by psychological variables such as personality, cognition, and emotion.
• Problems of communication involve the use of psychological variables to affect behavior and interaction and to achieve desired outcomes, such as sales from advertising, public health, team motivation, or interpersonal closeness.

Scientific social psychology developed in the 20th century, roughly in parallel with phenomenology and in response to some related practical concerns about human relations, but it theorized communication, quite differently, as a process of behavioral interaction with psychological causes and effects. Leading social psychologists such as Kurt Lewin, Carl Hovland, and Gordon Allport developed theories of group dynamics, persuasion and social influence, rumor transmission, cognitive information processing, interpersonal attraction, and other communication-related phenomena that have been extensively applied and further developed in communication research to explain media effects and interpersonal interaction. This is the dominant theoretical tradition in current conceptions of communication research as a science. As a tradition focused on explaining the causes and effects of communication, sociopsychologcal theory appeals to a practical interest in diagnosing the causes of communication problems and finding effective solutions to control outcomes. Although both rhetoric and social psychology are concerned with communication techniques, rhetoric theorizes communication as an art adapted to each situation while social psychology pursues scientific generalizations. Although cybernetics and social psychology share a scientific orientation, sociopsychological theory does not equate machine and human communication but rather emphasizes the importance of distinctly human factors such as personality, emotion, and motivated cognition. 

Sociocultural Tradition

• Communication is participation in society and culture. 
• Problems of communication involve barriers to community and social cooperation, and can arise from factors such as cultural differences, social and cultural change, and community conflict. 

The sociocultural tradition of communication theory emerged under the influence of 19th and early 20th-century social theorists such as Emile Durkheim, Charles H. Cooley, John Dewey, and George H. Mead. In this tradition, communication is viewed as an essential process of human society. On the macro level of society as a whole, communication functions to integrate and coordinate the various institutions of a society. On the micro level of social interaction, our successful communication with one another depends on a shared context of social institutions and cultural patterns, which we both reproduce and flexibly adapt as we interact, thus contributing both to the maintenance of society and to the possibility of social change on the macro level. A problem for sociocultural theories is to explain how local interactions, in the aggregate, produce social and cultural patterns even while they depend on and reproduce existing patterns. The sociocultural tradition is concerned with practical communication problems such as collaboration and organization, social conflict and change, communication across cultural differences, and the quest for community in diverse, multicultural societies. Sociocultural theory criticizes the overemphasis on individual agency and the lack of attention to the macro level of society and culture in traditions such as rhetoric, phenomenology, and social psychology. It criticizes the tendency in traditions such as semiotics and cybernetics to abstract communication codes or functions from the rich context of social life in which they necessarily occur. 

Critical Tradition

• Communication is discursive reflection, meaning that genuine communication requires free and open questioning of the social forces that condition and often distort communication.
• Problems of communication involve hegemonic ideologies and unjust power relations that go unquestioned (with respect to social class, ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, disability, age, etc.) and that systematically distort the communication process to privilege certain views while excluding or marginalizing other views. 

The modern critical tradition of communication theory began in the mid-19th century with the Marxist critique of capitalist ideology and has evolved through the Frankfurt School critical theorists of the mid-20th century, and later Frankfurt School theorists such as Jurgen Habermas, to contemporary poststructuralism and identity-based critical movements that challenge oppressive ideologies of race, gender, sexuality, ability, and other dimensions of difference marked by unjust privilege and domination. For theorists in the critical tradition, most communication is distorted by ingrained ideological assumptions and power structures that perpetuate social injustice, and a practical purpose of communication theory is to cultivate forms of discursive reflection or communication that exposes oppressive ideology, freely questions the status quo, and promotes progressive social change. Turning this critique on the field of communication theory itself, critical-cultural theorists have centered the theoretical contributions of women and LGBTQ+ theorists, theorists of color, and non-Western indigenous thought traditions. If some other communication theorists criticize the critical tradition for politicizing science and scholarship, critical theorists criticize other traditions for upholding a sham political neutrality that implicitly serves dominant interests. 

Criticisms, Applications, and Extensions

The Constitutive Metamodel has been mentioned thousands of times in the academic literature, most often simply as a way of nodding toward communication theory in general or toward the traditions or some other idea in the metamodel. Substantial criticisms, applications, and extensions of the metamodel have also been published, and several traditions of communication theory have been introduced in addition to the original seven. Listed below under Further Reading are good sources for learning more about these developments: Craig (2009b), Craig (2015), Craig & Xiong (2022), and Rich & Robles (2021). I'll just quickly mention some criticisms and applications of the metamodel, and will conclude with brief summaries of four newly-proposed traditions.  

First, here in gist are some of the main criticisms of the metamodel and responses to those criticisms:  

• Epistemological bias: The metamodel represents the field of communication theory from a social constructionist stance as opposed to a naturalistic, scientific stance. In other words, the metamodel sees communication as a social practice that we can constitute in different forms depending on how we talk about it (metadiscourse) as opposed to a natural phenomenon that can be described and explained scientifically. One response to this criticism is to point out that the metamodel does include scientific theories (in the social psychological, cybernetic, and other traditions), but even though some aspects of communication may be naturally determined by biological or other factors that can be discovered scientifically, the practice of communication is still culturally shaped in many ways. Scientific theories can become part of the culture that shapes our understanding and practice of communication. 
• Western bias:  The metamodel is entirely based on Western (chiefly European and North American) thought traditions, and therefore it may have limited relevance for communication theory and practice in Asian, African, and other non-Western cultures. In an article co-authored with Bingjuan Xiong (Craig & Xiong, 2022), we proposed to correct this bias by expanding the metamodel to include non-Western traditions of communication theory, starting with Confucian and Buddhist traditions. 
• Misalignment with current research areas:  Communication scholars often complain that they can't really place themselves or their theories in any of the seven traditions as defined in the metamodel, even if they nominally work in one of them. For researchers at the forefront of fields like rhetoric, semiotics, or phenomenology, the definitions of those traditions may seem too simplistic and/or old-fashioned to capture current thinking. Other scholars often feel that the metamodel excludes, or at least underemphasizes, theories in their own field of expertise, whether it be media ecology, public relations, or communication biology. One way of responding to these criticisms has been to add new traditions to the metamodel to fill gaps, so far including a Pragmatist tradition and a Spiritual tradition, in addition to the Confucian and Buddhist traditions already mentioned. (See below for more on these four traditions.)  Another way of responding to the criticisms is to point out that the traditions are intended to identify different fundamental conceptions of communication, which don't necessarily correspond to current sub-fields of communication. For example, there is no public relations tradition in the metamodel because that field does not have a fundamentally distinct conception of communication, but public relations theories use ideas from several of the traditions including rhetoric, semiotics, social psychology, and others. 

Second, although the metamodel has been criticized for certain biases and limitations, it has nevertheless proven to be a useful way of representing the field of communication theory. Here in gist are two main ways of applying the metamodel: 

• Teaching communication theory:  The metamodel is a useful tool for helping students to make sense of communication theory as a field and to apply communication theories to problems in everyday life, by showing how theories in the field are based on a smaller number of fundamentally different conceptions of communication (the traditions) that all have different practical implications. Most communication theory textbooks include the metamodel in some fashion, and many teachers have developed creative ways of presenting and using it in their courses. You'll find great examples of this in Practicing communication theory: Exploring, applying, and teaching the constitutive metamodel, a book edited by Marc H. Rich and Jessica S. Robles (see below under Further Reading).
• Critically reflecting on theories and subfields: Scholars have used the metamodel to finds points of comparison for analyzing particular theories or entire subfields of communication in terms of how they relate to other theories or to practical problems. Some of these analyses have looked at which traditions are being applied to a problem or topic area and have pointed out gaps that could be filled by applying different traditions. For examples of this type of application in social thought, phenomenology, interpersonal communication, and even robot communication, see Craig (2015, pp. 359-360).

Third, the metamodel has been extended to include traditions beyond the original seven. (Adding traditions to the metamodel faces some challenges as discussed by Craig, 2015, and Craig & Xiong, 2022.) Here in gist are four traditions that have been proposed so far: 

Pragmatist Tradition (Craig, 2007)

• Communication is pluralistic community, the coordination of practical activities among diverse people and groups through discourse and reflective inquiry.
• Problems of communication involve a "paradox of pluralism" because to fully embrace diversity in a community means taking a standpoint that takes no particular standpoint. 

Building on previous work by Chris Russill, Craig (2007) explicated a pragmatist tradition of communication theory that began in the late 19th century in the work of American Pragmatist philosophers such as William James, C.S Pierce, and John Dewey. For theorists in this tradition, communication problems arise from the difficulty of achieving consensus on matters of common concern among the diverse interests and incommensurable worldviews in complex modern societies. Pragmatist communication theory is concerned with forms of discourse that enable the creation and maintenance of cooperative, pluralistic communities in response to such problems. This tradition not only exists in the field and offers a distinct conception of communication, it makes clear that the Constitutive Metamodel itself is a pragmatist theory of communication: a model in the field as well as of the field. 

Spiritual Tradition (Rich, 2014) 

• Communication is mimetic of the atemporal (non-material) plane of reality. 
• Problems of communication involve the ineffable nature of spiritual truth. "These problems include denial of the atemporal, discerning the mimetic of the atemporal, and failing to overcome the material nature of communication to grasp the inner atemporal purity of the message better" (Rich, 2014, p. 140).

"Rich ... has proposed a spiritual tradition of communication theory in which communication is conceived as mimetic of the atemporal. This tradition is based on a dualistic distinction between the temporal, material world in which we practice human communication and an atemporal, spiritual plane of truth that can influence our temporal beliefs and practices when we manage to connect with it, but that is not in any way influenced, much less socially constructed, through human interaction. Normative human communication can represent atemporal truth, but only imperfectly. Among many writings on communication in the spiritual tradition Rich cites classical works of Plato and Augustine, certain strains of American pragmatism, and contemporary works including those of several communication scholars. Having defined the spiritual tradition, Rich puts it in conversation with the eight previously defined traditions in the field, noting, for example, that genuine dialogue in the phenomenological tradition is an experience of meeting between individuals while in the spiritual tradition it emerges from a shared atemporal moment" (Craig, 2015, p. 361). 

Buddhist Tradition (Craig & Xiong, 2022)

• Communication is the individual's attunement to enlightenment. 
• Problems of communication involve barriers to enlightenment such as self-centeredness and ego-attachment. 

Buddhism, a long-standing religious and philosophical tradition that significantly influences Asian communication concepts and practices, developed from teachings of the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, who lived in ancient India during the 6th or 5th century BCE. While diverse Buddhist traditions exist (Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana), they share core beliefs like the Four Noble Truths, enlightenment, and the interconnectedness of all living things. The Buddhist tradition conceptualizes communication as an individual's attunement to enlightenment, which encompasses both the communication process of becoming enlightened and an ultimate ideal state of communication.  Individuals in this tradition are "conditioned" rather than self-contained agents, yet retain the capacity for "becoming" through Buddhist practices. Causality is a process of "interdependent co-arising" rather than linear cause and effect. "Attunement" highlights mindfulness, harmony, and interconnectedness, emphasizing both inner mind development and the outer world. Consciousness is central, with mind development crucial for enlightenment, achieved through practices like meditation. Enlightenment, similar to nirvana, is a practice-based experience, attainable gradually or suddenly, through the Eightfold Path. This path involves ethical thinking, living, and relating, beginning with understanding the Four Noble Truths. Buddhism challenges social hierarchies, emphasizing moral equality, and stresses individual experience over reliance on language or authority. Buddhism shares (Western) phenomenology's focus on individual consciousness but in a metaphysical context that shapes communication differently. And although it has much in common with the spiritual tradition, Buddhism embraces not a dualistic (temporal-atemporal) but rather a "tri-world" (human-natural-supernatural) conception of reality and regards the material world as an illusion to be overcome in enlightenment. 

Confucian Tradition (Craig & Xiong, 2022)

• Communication is harmonious social interaction.
• Problems of communication involve conditions that threaten social harmony, such as lack of personal cultivation or failure to perform traditional rituals and rites.

Confucianism, a prominent philosophical tradition derived from teachings of the Chinese scholar Confucius (c. 551- c. 479 BCE), has significantly influenced East Asian societies, shaping everything from governance to interpersonal relationships, particularly for Chinese and Koreans. Confucianism offers a coherent system of thinking about communication, emphasizing moral speech that reflects self-cultivation and fosters harmonious relationships. Key concepts like guanxi (social relations), mientzu (face), he (harmony), and uye-ri (reciprocity) are used to understand Asian communication. Chen's harmony theory highlights ren (humanism), yi (righteousness), and li (propriety) as guiding principles. Confucian communication is viewed as harmonious social interaction, prioritizing social harmony over individual enlightenment. This harmony stems from individual virtue and ethical communication, requiring constant attunement to ethical principles and the interplay of yin and yang. The five ethical principles (ren, yi, li, zhi, xin) are interdependent and crucial for moral self-cultivation. Confucianism emphasizes the individual's role in creating harmonious relationships, extending from family to the cosmos. While valuing harmony, it acknowledges conflict, advocating for its resolution towards greater harmony. It promotes individual moral cultivation as the basis of social order, but also acknowledges hierarchical social positions based on virtue. This creates a tension between dynamic adaptation and static rites, leading to both criticism and creative adaptations of the tradition.   

*****

Questions? Comments? Please post a comment on this blog or email me (Robert.Craig@Colorado.edu).

Further Reading

Craig, R. T. (1999). Communication theory as a field. Communication Theory, 9(2), 119-161. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.1999.tb00355.x 

Craig, R. T. (2007). Pragmatism in the field of communication theory. Communication Theory, 17(2), 125-145. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2007.00292.x 

Craig, R. T. (2009a). Traditions of communication theory. In S. W. Littlejohn & K. A. Foss (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Communication Theory (Vol. 2, pp. 958-963). Sage. 

Craig, R. T. (2009b). Reflection on "Communication Theory as a Field". Revue internationale de communication sociale et publique, 2009(2), 7-11. https://doi.org/10.4000/communiquer.346 

Craig, R. T. (2015). The constitutive metamodel: A 16-year review. Communication Theory, 25(4), 356-374. https://doi.org/10.1111/comt.12076 

Craig, R. T. (2016). Traditions of communication theory. In K. B. Jensen & R. T. Craig (Eds.), The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy (Vol. 4, pp. 2068-2077). Wiley Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118766804.wbiect11 

Craig, R. T., & Muller, H. L. (Eds.). (2007). Theorizing communication: Readings across traditions. Sage. 

Craig, R. T., & Xiong, B. (2022). Traditions of communication theory and the potential for multicultural dialogue. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 17(1), 1-25. https://doi.org/10.1080/17447143.2021.2009487 

Rich, M. H. (2015). Spiritual debate in communication theory: Craig's metamodel applied. Journal of Communication and Religion, 38(2), 134-153. https://doi.org/10.5840/jcr201538213 

Rich, M. H., & Robles, J. S. (Eds.). (2021). Practicing communication theory: Exploring, applying, and teaching the constitutive metamodel. Cognella. 

Remarks to the Pennsylvania Communication Association

 

Image source: https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=122109968042533321&set=pb.61565999637307.-2207520000

(Following are my revised notes for a speech presented to the 84th Annual Convention of the Pennsylvania Communication Association, held at Penn State University-Schuylkill Campus, Schuylkill Haven, Pennsylvania, September 27, 2024.)

Thank you, it's great to be here, and it's great to see all of you here and that the PCA is thriving as a professional home for communication scholars in this region. It's especially great to see so many students in attendance. Since you represent the future of communication studies, while I mostly represent the past, we're a good group to engage the conference theme of "Pondering Our Past, Forging Our Future."

I was invited here this year to accept the Julia T. Wood Teacher-Scholar Award, and of course I'm very honored and grateful for that recognition.

REMARKS

When Prof. Schrader wrote to me about the Julia T. Wood award, she asked if I would be willing to share some remarks at the conference. I said yes, of course.

But then, of course, I immediately started worrying about what I was going to say and soon realized that I wasn't really sure what constitutes sharing remarks.

In an email exchange, Valerie and I agreed that it would be something like a short after-dinner speech. But I got interested in the question anyway. What kind of communication is sharing remarks? To begin with, what are remarks?

I vaguely remembered a famous quote, something about "remarks are not ___" but I couldn't remember who said it or what the "not" was.  So I googled "remarks are not" and at the top of the results was a helpful AI snippet reminded me that the quote came from Gertrude Stein, an early 20th century modernist writer, who once remarked that "remarks are not literature" -- which I take to be a bit of a putdown of remarks. 

Also in the top Google results was a snarky tweet pointing out that Gertrude Stein is well known for her quirky remarks but nobody reads her literary writings anymore, which I think is basically true.

Then it occurred to me that Twitter or X is a medium that consists almost entirely of remarks. It's a platform for remarks, and a lot of them are negative.

However, another helpful AI snippet informed me that remarks are not always negative. They express opinions that can be positive or negative, so that was a relief. 

Then I thought, when you make a remark about something, whether positive or negative, you are saying that the thing is somehow remarkable. And that thought became the inspiration for my talk tonight on what to me are some especially remarkable things about our discipline of communication studies.  

THREE REMARKS

A lot of my scholarly work has been about the communication discipline, its fundamental purpose and how our work as scholars and teachers can contribute to that purpose.

So the theme of this conference, "Pondering Our Past, Forging Our Future," is something I have thought about quite a bit over the years, and I'd like to share three remarks about that -- that is, I'd like to point out three remarkable things about the communication discipline that I've learned over time.

1. We're both very practical and very theoretical. I got this insight from my communication theory students in an exercise where I asked them how their communication courses differed from courses in other subjects, and they often said that communication courses tend to be both more practical but also more theoretical as compared to courses like biology or psychology where you learn a lot of "facts". In communication courses you tend to practice communication and learn theories. Theories can help us think critically about practical problems, so maybe sometimes theories are more practical than facts. But how does that actually work, being both very practical and very theoretical? That brings me to my second remark.

2. We're very meta. Not Facebook or Instagram! Not that kind of Meta! I'm referring to metacommunication or meta-discourse - in short, much of our work as communication scholars is talking or writing about communication, often developing new and carefully thought out ways of talking about communication, which is what I think of as communication theory. Communication theory consists of metadiscourse, that is, well-thought-out ways of talking about how we talk.

My little detour into the concept of "remarks" illustrates this way of going meta, taking a practical concept and reflecting on it, asking what it means. This is how our minds work as communication scholars: We go meta. 

In a way, talking about communication is not remarkable in itself, because in modern societies everybody talks about communication. As the sociolinguist Deborah Cameron has pointed out, we live in a communication culture that produces a lot of metadiscourse, people talking about communication problems like loneliness, bullying, polarization, misinformation.

As I see it, our discipline's main role in society is to participate in that metadiscourse and to cultivate it.  

We often contribute to the metadiscourse by saying, in effect, "here's another way of talking about that problem" and referring to some communication theory.

For example, at this afternoon's panel on communication challenges, we heard that students often say that talking about controversial issues is useless, that it's painful, hearing my deep beliefs contradicted hurts me, and so on, and our job as communication teachers is to suggest other, theory-based, potentially more productive ways of talking about dialogue and deliberation on controversial issues. And, in doing so, we can draw from a rich body of relevant theories, which leads to my third remark. 

3. Our theory is amazingly diverse. There's no one theory of communication. There are hundreds of theories. Communication theory provides us with a great diversity of perspectives for thinking about communication problems. Many of those theories originated in other disciplines ranging from philosophy to linguistics, psychology, and so on, but we've made them our own by systematically developing these different intellectual traditions as ways of talking about communication.

I became aware of this theoretical diversity decades ago as an undergraduate student, as I was struck by how communication was a topic in so many courses that I took in other disciplines around the university. Many of those same ideas were brought together in my first communication theory course, where I studied them as different perspectives on communication (psychological, sociological, and so on). It made for a fascinating but not a very coherent subject. 

Many years later I came back to this problem. The field continues to be rich with ideas but the ideas are scattered and come from such different intellectual traditions -- literature, humanities, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, etc. -- that it's hard to see them as part of the same field.

Probably my most widely cited and influential work stems from an article I wrote in 1999, "Communication Theory as a Field," where I presented a metamodel of communication theory that included seven theoretical traditions--rhetorical, semiotic, cybernetic, phenomenological, sociopsychological, sociocultural, and critical.

Most communication theory textbooks include a chapter or section about the metamodel. For those of you who are undergrads and have studied one of those textbooks in a communication theory course, that's where you may have seen my name before. (Craig, Craig, heard that name somewhere...) So, yeah, I'm the "Seven Traditions" guy, and I'd like to apologize for giving you yet another list of seven things to memorize!

But honestly, I didn't write the article as an instrument for torturing students, I wrote it to develop a way of understanding how communication theory can be coherent and useful by contributing to the metadiscourse in society. Most of those hundreds of communication theories are based on a small number of fundamentally different conceptions of communication, each of which is practically relevant because it intersects with concepts and issues in everyday talk about communication.

Without going into details, the gist of the metamodel is that we can think of communication theory as a kind of  conversation about models of communication and how they address practical problems. Rather than one unified theory of communication, we have several traditions of theory that give us different perspectives for thinking about problems. The idea wasn't to have a list of traditions but more like a dialogue or debate among the traditions that all of us can join in on.

*****

So, as we ponder our past and forge our future, let's keep in mind these three remarkable things about our discipline:  we're both very practical and very theoretical, we're very meta, and our theory is amazingly diverse. Those are my remarks, and thank you for listening!

Framing Mass Incarceration as a Social-Systems Communication Problem: Brief Review

Working toward a larger project on how we frame communication problems in theory and practice, I'd like to reflect briefly on a recent academic article about the problem of mass incarceration to illustrate how a certain practical way of talking about problems implies a certain concept of communication and vice versa.

"Mass incarceration" refers to the fact that the United States, since the 1970s, has imprisoned more people relative to population than any other country, and that people of color, especially Black men, are vastly overrepresented among those prisoners. (As the graph above shows, the numbers have gone down a bit in recent years.)  Lane and Ramirez (2024) have studied this problem from a communication perspective. They introduce the term, "carceral communication, to explain the interconnection between communication, digital traces, and surveillance to link individuals, neighborhoods, and prison for poor, Black Americans overrepresented in the criminal justice system" (p. 675).

To document this phenomenon of carceral communication, Lane and Ramirez analyzed the sources of evidence for specific acts that were cited by prosecutors in a sample of publicly available criminal indictments against youth gang members in New York City between 2010 and 2014. They found that a large majority of specific acts cited in the criminal indictments consisted of social media messages or posts, and recorded phone calls with prisoners. Here are the main findings of the study as summarized in the article's abstract:

First, computer-mediated communication (CMC) has become the most sought-after type of criminal evidence because of its visibility and permanence. Second, law enforcement uses the interpersonal communication and neighborhood networks of incarcerated Black men for crime control and surveillance purposes. Third, carceral communication operates as a communication feedback process, in which marginalized, young, Black men under surveillance know they are being watched and respond to that surveillance with resistance that is also subject to criminalization. (p. 674)

The authors describe their study as an exercise in reframing: "By reframing the racial–spatial problem of mass incarceration ... through the concept of carceral communication, we present it as a communication and technology issue" (p. 687). That's a good description as far as it goes, because the study reveals how social media platforms and the routine practice of recording prison phone calls  provide law enforcement with technological means of accessing interpersonal communication networks for purposes of surveillance and investigation. 

What I want to emphasize in addition is how this way of describing the process of mass incarceration implies a social-systems model of communication. In this model, there is a complex set of elements––gang activity, related flows of interpersonal communication, police surveillance of those interpersonal flows targeting poor black communities through technological means such as accessing social media platforms, and feedback processes in which police monitoring leads to resistance (e.g. deleting social media messages) which itself can be criminalized (e.g. as destroying evidence), all leading to criminal prosecution and incarceration––and these elements all operate together to form a self-perpetuating system. This is a communication problem that has little to do with "miscommunication" or other common ways of talking about failures and difficulties in communicating. Rather, the problem is a system of communication that contributes to bad outcomes (criminal activity, racialized mass incarceration), and this way of framing the problem invites reflection on forms of action not for "improving" communication but for intervening to disrupt and change a dysfunctional system. 

References

Lane, J., & Ramirez, F. A. (2024). Carceral communication: Mass incarceration as communicative phenomenon. New Media & Society, 26(2), 674-691. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211060841