Remarks to the Pennsylvania Communication Association

 

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(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