Ryan Kelly
Prof. Jessie Miller
Communications 110
7 September 2023
Journal #5
The first passage that really stood out to me was on page 24, paragraph 5, it talks about the emergence of areas of study and how the discipline of communications stemmed from the study of public speaking. It goes on to talk about how we are experiencing a “change from an emphasis on striking individuals or unusual events to a deeper understanding of everyday behavior” and how this is occurring in all kinds of disciplines; and that growing needs are a huge focus on our everyday life.
The second passage that caught my attention was on page 39, paragraphs 1-4, it talks about media and mass communication. More specifically, it talks about the study of the impact of technology on the construction of knowledge, social systems, and perceptions. This stood out to me because the internet has affected the amount of knowledge we need to learn as humans. For example, why take the time to learn and memorize information when I could look it up on my phone in less than ten seconds. I think technology and humans have a sort of symbiotic relationship, without technology we would lose the ability to gain and spread knowledge.
One question that I thought of while reading chapter 2 stemmed from paragraph 2 on page 28 in which it states “If we assume that the development of the discipline has not finished yet, then we must assume it is continuing” The question being do you think that the discipline of communication should end or keep going on and why? There was also a question similar to mine at the end of that same paragraph, “If the discipline of communications studies has not evolved to a final state of perfection as a result of previous historical and intellectual forces, then where is it to go next?” I think this is a very important question that should be covered and get different opinions on.
PG 25 PARA 2
This passage I found to be quite confusing or hard for me to understand. The study of rhetoric is a well known practice and can be related to many different parts of communication. Public speaking is very important to the study of rhetoric, and although good written work and good speaking share similar skills they are different practices. Rhetoric allows students to identify hidden messages of words and phrases used in both written and spoken literature.
PG39 PARA 5
This passage is very interesting to me, I have found that the interactions between doctors and patients is very important, more so now than ever. The ability of the scientific community to clearly convey information to the public has vast implications for social and political communities in our society. Most recently the covid-19 pandemic that limited human interaction both commercially and socially had major implications on the 2020 election year. If doctors were better able to communicate with their patients there would have been less widespread panic regarding the pandemic.
Q: PG39 PARA 5
C: Doctor patient relationships have always been incredibly complicated as many of us are aware of. The doctor is generally not a person that we feel comfortable communicating with on a daily basis. When we communicate with our doctors we are often in times of pain or despair. The doctor’s job is not to make you feel better about your situation, you are simply another one of his or her patients. They’re job is to make you well again if you are unwell. However many doctors are very personable people who want to help their patients live their best lives under whatever the circumstances might be. Modern medicine is looked at under a microscope, however, and many people have come to even distrust their doctors. There have been countless cases of botched operations, overprescription, and poor judgment in the medical field so many people feel justified in their distrust of their doctors. This is why communication between patients and doctors is so incredibly important in the modern world.
Q: How can we better ensure that information from the medical field has been well tested and is safe for human practice?
Comment (at least 75 words): I wouldn’t have considered a nonverbal way of communication to fall under a researcher’s notes. I would understand tone of voice or hesitancy, but I’m stumped because I feel like that would leave a lot of outliers and complicate the process if one were to consider notes of a subject being nonverbal in every experiment. I feel that I for one am often nonverbal, and while there are aspects to nonverbal communication that are normal, there are also several ways that it is not. Though I guess that everyone has their ways of communicating, even if they fall under the nonverbal category.
Question: What are some ways that nonverbal communication further an experiment?
Quote: page 36 paragraph 3
Comment (at least 75 words): I would think that amongst the disadvantages for critical approach, that a limited perspective would be rampant and that because of this, a critical approach would be used less than a social-scientific or interpretivist one. I’d think that, with my understanding of the reading to guide me on this, that this approach focuses way too heavily on power, and inequality, and I’d go as far to say that other important factors would be overlooked because of a power imbalance between the communicating parties.
Question: What would be an inappropriate example of a critical approach being used today?
What I found interesting was the passage regarding the emergence in areas of study of communications. I think it’s interesting that people didn’t study communications outright until fairly recently. Prior to that people studying things like public speaking or general speech makes sense. In reference to the study of communications history, the disregard to everyday behavior is also fascinating, I think before you get to the big picture you also have to know all the nuances of what’s going on as well.
Page 14, paragraph 3
I like how this passage takes a clinical approach in an explanation as to why studying communication is to happen naturally. The passage also states that a laboratory experiment can tell researchers what happens but not what happens naturally. If anything, we know that communication wether we know it or not is a naturally occurring thing. I also find it an interesting point that the passage brings up that “you can never be truly objective, because everyone has their own interpretations.”
Question Page 14, Paragraph 3
Q: If you can never be truly objective when studying communication how do we find common ground in what we believe to be is right and wrong?
Q: “you can never be truly objective, because everyone has their own interpretations.”
C: I find this very interesting and I wonder how this effects the general study of communications.
This passage piques my interest because it explains and shows the significance of the interactions between healthcare workers and their patients. How much our healthcare and scientific communities can effectively communicate medical information to the public, greatly affects our public communities. It affects them in both social and political ways. One example that the book uses is the covid pandemic and how it had so many effects on human life, it affected social life and economics, which also greatly affected the election year. The healthcare to society communication was the leading cause of news spread and how news travelled.
Page 24 / Paragraph 3-5
This passage is very interesting and intriguing to me because it focuses entirely on communications and how it plays a huge role in public areas. It explains the study of communications is developed and derived from the study of public speaking. It also talks about how academic fields are beginning to look more at people’s everyday behaviors instead of just focusing on extraordinary events that occur. This shift of focus in various studies and is starting to become a very important part of our lives.
QCQ
What types of ways can we make sure that healthcare professionals are telling the general public accurate and important information?
Page 26 paragraphs 1,2,3,4
The reason I chose to use this one was because it talked about how there was a whole different shift in the way we learn at a time, more specifically, speech and rhetoric. I found this part pretty interesting because it talked about how a new generation had to adapt to a whole different learning style and this all happened after World War ll. After the war, a lot of people enrolled in school, and the students and the schools did not like this because of the cosmic shift in learning and teaching. So overall no one was happy but it was pretty interesting to see that a whole learning style was changed because of a new generation.
Question: Do you foresee another learning/teaching style to come to schools and Universities or do you think the one we have will stick for good?
Page 40 Paragraphs 3,4
This article talked about the study of persuasion and how it can affect someone during communication. It talked about how the art of persuasion is tracked back all the way to the ancient Greeks and ancient Romans which is really interesting. It said how this was the start-up to the beginning of learning and studying speech. The ones who were very interested were given rhetic lessons. The study itself involves people’s thinking and their behaviors. Because it was pretty broad people were free to do what they wanted with it and there was a lot of lee-way.
Question: Do you find yourself changing when trying to persuade? If so how and what changes about yourself?
The first passage that stuck out to me was on page 27 paragraph 5. I’m not a communications major, however I have taken a social media “theory and practice” course while at UNE and I’m curious as to why it wasn’t offered by the communications department. What I mean is that it wasn’t a “CMM” course. If my memory is correct, I believe it was offered by the business department. It’s interesting to me that social media in today’s society plays such a huge role in communication. Spreading news, connecting with people you went to middle school with, and a wide variety of other duties. One might think that the communications department would be better off teaching such a topic.
The second passage that I found to be interesting was on page 35 paragraph 6. It is funny to think that historians know so much about how life and people interacted long before these things could be recorded for everyone to see. For example, at first we only knew Christopher Columbus’ side of when he landed on the Native Americans’ grounds. Then, we started finding more and more journals and writings that described the side of the Native Americans and perhaps the truthful perspective. I think it’s great to get a gist of the time Julius Caesar ruled based on his journals, however we couldn’t fully understand without the nonexistent journals of common folk in that era.
DISCUSSION QUESTION: If social media is such a huge portion of communication, why don’t communications departments teach social media courses, rather than business departments?
This paragraph is talking about multiple variables in the way someone thinks or acts. Their example was having a person play a violent video game and then measure their behavior after. This is interesting to me because I have and still do play violent video games (gore, guns, etc) and have shown no signs of violence. This compares to the person in the paragraph because they too had no signs, due to all things having many different reasons for why they happen.
Page 38 para 4
This paragraph is interesting because it talks about how, in a later chapter, that group communication always takes the relational side of it all. It also talks about how premade relationships will shine and over time create an influence in decision making as a group and interactions. It goes on to say that if people have tiny connections or no connections at all, you can anticipate future connections or the generation of relational allies and adversaries in the groups.
What I found really interesting was that wealthy people would send their sons to Aristotle and Socrates to learn from them and learn how to write. I found this really interesting because only wealthy people would send their sons and not their daughters to learn. This passage really stuck out to me because of how only the wealthy were able to learn from these two. I know that’s how times were back then because the wealthy only got education and the less wealthy families were not able to get educated because of their financial status.
QCQ:
Quote: “Wealthy citizens sent their sons to learn from such wise people as Aristotle and Socrates” (Page 25 para 3).
Comment: This passage stuck out to me because who was able to be educated by these two and how more people were able to become successful in the English writing world.
Question: Why were only the wealthy allowed to learn from them?
What confused me about this passage was the different ways to study the approach of communication. This was confusing to me because of the different ways the text explained how to study the different ways to study communication. This passage stuck out to me because I didn’t understand it at first and I had to read it multiple times to be able to somewhat understand it. The different ways just confused me the most because of how the text mentioned ways to compare the differences.
QCQ:
Quote: “If you want to study pairs of people interacting, then you bring them into the lab, interview them in their homes, or analyze transcripts of their chatter” (Page 28 para 7)
Comment: This confused me with the amount of different ways to study interactions.
Question: Do these different ways to study communication actually work?
Page 53 para 2, “Why are college students the participants in most research?”
I thought it was funny to see this brought up, as it is very true. People seem to think college students are representative of all young adults but that’s far from it. I learned a lot about survey taking and how to get a good representation of the population. It’s so easy to communicate misrepresented and inaccurate information that hundreds of people will take it as fact.
How far do our social biases and assumptions go, subconsciously or not, for how we perceive others?
Page 65 para 1, “Further, health information is frequently gained through social networks, and health information gained online or through media is accessed through the context of relationships.”
Being on social media and having family members in the medical field has given me an interesting perspective on health communications. I see endless videos on TikTok from those who claim to be doctors (some real, probably some not) “approving” a health product like skin care or even food. Anybody can say anything on the internet, my sister swears by products she’s seen recommended on social media. My mother will believe anything she sees on the internet, and she’s a registered nurse.
Despite practically everyone having an online presence, wouldn’t more education on misinformation go as far as to help general health? People assume that since we’ve grown up with the internet, we don’t have anything to learn about it.
In this paragraph, the author talks about how there are different reasons to why someone does what they do. The author uses the example of the person who plays the violent video game and then they would test their anger afterwards to see if it has changed them. The results showed that the person they tested did not show any telling signs that they were now violent. This really made me think about myself because I have played games like Call of Duty and GTA but have not been violent in any way besides when I play sports.
Is it really that common for someone to be violent after playing video games like this? Most if not all of my friends have played violent video games and have showed no signs of violence outside of sports.
Page 39 Paragraph 4
In this paragraph and the paragraph or two after, the author talks about how health care workers interact with their patients. This was really interesting to me because my grandmother was a nurse for a long time so it gave me some insight to how she would be around her patients. One example the author stated was surrounding the covid pandemic and all the effects it had on the way we function as humans, including with healthcare professionals. Healthcare was very important during this time because they were the ones in the front line getting all the information.
Could there be healthcare professionals that were biased and tried to make things seem like less of a problem or more of a problem?
The first section that stuck out to me was on page 26 para 7. This paragraph talks about the development or journalism and communication as majors in graduate education. It talks about how these types of majors were accepted into many graduate programs, and how they didn’t fit in within any type of subunit in a graduate atmosphere. What I liked the most about this passage was that the people who were really passionate about journalism or communication didn’t care that this major wasn’t accepted in graduate schools but mass communication scholars found a way for the students to be a able to spend time together working on the things they wanted to know and expanding there education. The question that I have for this section is, what was it about the journalism or communication majors that weren’t apart of a graduate education? The second section that stuck out to me was on page 37 para 4. This whole chunk of the page, communication education and instructional communication, really stuck out to me. This section is about the devotion that people have toward making the major of communication more disciplined and how those who loved this atmosphere worked as hard as possible to make the structure and rigor of the course fit to everyone. They are so dedicated to improving instruction of their materials, and making things easier and be better understood by the students. My question from this section is what about the communication major makes it so that there needs to be constant change and flexibility in the major?
The first passage in this chapter that stood out to me starts on page 22 and is labeled “The Challenges in Writing History”. This passage to me is one of the most important to this whole chapter as it prepares us for the fact that it is a difficult task to truly describe the history of such a storied and diverse field as communication. The passage makes a point of correcting itself as it states that the “history” of communications should be the “histories” of communication due to the diversity between different cultures and their approaches to communications. It also goes over the idea of bias between people and societies as a whole. The passage gives the example of the British and Americans announcing the end of the Revolutionary War. The British would be likely to dismiss the loss in some way and maybe even spin it around as something positive, however the Americans would mostly hyperbolize and make it positive.
The second passage that I found important to the chapter as a whole is found on page 28. The passage “Methods of Studying Communications” describes the three most common and effective approaches to studying communications as best as can be done. The three most effective methods are the social scientific approach, the interpretivist approach and the critical approach. The social scientific approach views the world the most black and white. It entails the world view that everything is objective, casual and predictable. A downside of this is that the world and humans are often unpredictable. The interpretivist approach is one which seeks to understand and detail communication. This approach looks at natural communication instead of communication which may occur in a laboratory setting, unlike the social scientific approach. A disadvantage of this method is that the methodology is not as consistent or concise and therefore some studies may not have accurate results. Lastly is the critical approach. The critical approach to studying communications takes a deep look into symbols and language we use, in order to better understand how communications affect our society. This approach uses similar methods of study to the interpretive approach as they look at natural communication primarily. The main disadvantage of the critical approach is that if you are to use this approach it can easily be turned back onto itself causing a distraction from the original goal of the approach.
A question I had after reading this chapter was which study of communication do people follow in their everyday lives? Does this change person to person? Or does it change on a larger scale such as their are only differences culture to culture?
First passage that caught my attention was talking about media and mass communication because it revealed the truth of the impact of technology ruining human knowledge( Page 39, para 1). Kids nowadays know the easy way out so they’re not gonna sit in class and actually learn when they can just look up the answers. This grabbed my attention because it’s something that isn’t talked about alot and I feel it’s important for us as humans to actually learn instead of just using technology. Some humans can’t even process without technology and it’s really sad nobody is stepping in saying something. The second passage that caught my attention was the doctor and patient communication because my mom is actually a nurse and the stories she tells me are always resulting in patients being rude. (not from the passage, my own opinion) Being rude to someone who’s taking care never made sense to me because they have your life in their hands. Doctors staying in contact with their patients would make their patients feel like they are in good care. Nobody wants a doctor who isn’t checking up on their well being. This was another rarity of a passage I loved because nobody talks about these things enough.
Q- “
C- Our healthcare workers should be treated with the utmost respect and they should also keep their responsibility by checking up on their patients.
Q- Why isn’t technology limited in schools like they used to be?
The section that introduced social scientific approach was very interesting to me because it describes a perspective based on the assumption that there is objective truth. Objective truth is a very tricky thing to deal with, because even when there are things that we consider to be “objectively true”, every person who is involved in an interaction experiences and thinks about it completely differently, sometimes leading them to respond in different ways. It would seem to make it difficult to study something with an objective view when the situation is dependent on subjective viewpoints.
I was also interested in the description of the critical approach, which involves examining underlying structures that favor certain groups over others and uphold the status quo. It is a very similar approach to the one taken by my art history class when discussing how art history as a field is studied and taught, what art means, and what things it can teach us.
The reason I like this area in the book is because I find it interesting that science can be used in communications. Studying the ways that people communicate with each other to see how we impact children in a more positive manner. What I also enjoyed was how we use manipulation tricks on patients or people to find out how people will react and how we can help change that if it’s in a negative way and how to make that continuously occur if it was in a positive manner. I will say I read this more than once to understand.
Page 31 Par. 2-3
The reason I chose Advantages and Disadvantages is because I like how it talks about the positives of social science experiments and how it makes it easier to understand communication patterns for them, but I also like how it talks about the difficult parts of using the social science experiments. It talks about how you never know what the result of human behavior will react to these experiments and that it’s harder to make a first assumption because of this.
Journal #5
Chapter 2 QCQs.
Q: “The study of interpersonal communication continued to grow in popularity at the
undergraduate and graduate levels. A departure from earlier research in this area, the
study of interpersonal communication tends to focus on close personal relationships
rather than simply two people talking with one another. The study of social and
personal relationships is now a dominant presence in the discipline of communication.”
C: I think that personally, the idea of interpersonal communication is the hardest for me to grasp. In my educational experience, we were taught about rhetoric communication through speech and debate classes, and we were taught about mass communication through the news and articles used in class, etc. However, there was never really a “lesson” on how interpersonal communication works, we are just expected to know how to communicate on a deep level with others based on the experiences we have growing up.
Q: Is it important to teach early on in education how to form and interpret interpersonal relationships and communication?
Q: “The critical approach to communication seeks to identify the hidden but formidable
symbolic structures and practices that create or uphold disadvantage, inequity, or
oppression of some groups in favor of others. Scholars taking this approach try to
uncover hidden or explicit power within a societal group (i.e., who does not have
power, how power is maintained, and how existing power differences are challenged).”
C: Out of the methods or approaches that were listed in this chapter, the one that stood out the most to me was the critical approach. I found it interesting how this approach takes into consideration the different traits and social structures that can affect the way that people communicate with each other. I think that simply doing experiments or observations without this kind of critical approach doesn’t fully encapsulate how people communicate with each other and why. I would be interested to learn more about taking a critical approach towards the study of communication.
Q: Why does there need to be certain power structures between two people that affect the way they communicate with each other? Why doesn’t everyone communicate the same way regardless of how important one person is, or how well you know one another?
17 thoughts on “JOURNAL # 5”
Ryan Kelly
Prof. Jessie Miller
Communications 110
7 September 2023
Journal #5
The first passage that really stood out to me was on page 24, paragraph 5, it talks about the emergence of areas of study and how the discipline of communications stemmed from the study of public speaking. It goes on to talk about how we are experiencing a “change from an emphasis on striking individuals or unusual events to a deeper understanding of everyday behavior” and how this is occurring in all kinds of disciplines; and that growing needs are a huge focus on our everyday life.
The second passage that caught my attention was on page 39, paragraphs 1-4, it talks about media and mass communication. More specifically, it talks about the study of the impact of technology on the construction of knowledge, social systems, and perceptions. This stood out to me because the internet has affected the amount of knowledge we need to learn as humans. For example, why take the time to learn and memorize information when I could look it up on my phone in less than ten seconds. I think technology and humans have a sort of symbiotic relationship, without technology we would lose the ability to gain and spread knowledge.
One question that I thought of while reading chapter 2 stemmed from paragraph 2 on page 28 in which it states “If we assume that the development of the discipline has not finished yet, then we must assume it is continuing” The question being do you think that the discipline of communication should end or keep going on and why? There was also a question similar to mine at the end of that same paragraph, “If the discipline of communications studies has not evolved to a final state of perfection as a result of previous historical and intellectual forces, then where is it to go next?” I think this is a very important question that should be covered and get different opinions on.
Sawyer Ohman
CMM110-A
9/7/23
Journal #5
PG 25 PARA 2
This passage I found to be quite confusing or hard for me to understand. The study of rhetoric is a well known practice and can be related to many different parts of communication. Public speaking is very important to the study of rhetoric, and although good written work and good speaking share similar skills they are different practices. Rhetoric allows students to identify hidden messages of words and phrases used in both written and spoken literature.
PG39 PARA 5
This passage is very interesting to me, I have found that the interactions between doctors and patients is very important, more so now than ever. The ability of the scientific community to clearly convey information to the public has vast implications for social and political communities in our society. Most recently the covid-19 pandemic that limited human interaction both commercially and socially had major implications on the 2020 election year. If doctors were better able to communicate with their patients there would have been less widespread panic regarding the pandemic.
Q: PG39 PARA 5
C: Doctor patient relationships have always been incredibly complicated as many of us are aware of. The doctor is generally not a person that we feel comfortable communicating with on a daily basis. When we communicate with our doctors we are often in times of pain or despair. The doctor’s job is not to make you feel better about your situation, you are simply another one of his or her patients. They’re job is to make you well again if you are unwell. However many doctors are very personable people who want to help their patients live their best lives under whatever the circumstances might be. Modern medicine is looked at under a microscope, however, and many people have come to even distrust their doctors. There have been countless cases of botched operations, overprescription, and poor judgment in the medical field so many people feel justified in their distrust of their doctors. This is why communication between patients and doctors is so incredibly important in the modern world.
Q: How can we better ensure that information from the medical field has been well tested and is safe for human practice?
Colette Murphy
Professor Miller
CMM 110
9/7/2023
Journal #5
Quote: page 29 para 1
Comment (at least 75 words): I wouldn’t have considered a nonverbal way of communication to fall under a researcher’s notes. I would understand tone of voice or hesitancy, but I’m stumped because I feel like that would leave a lot of outliers and complicate the process if one were to consider notes of a subject being nonverbal in every experiment. I feel that I for one am often nonverbal, and while there are aspects to nonverbal communication that are normal, there are also several ways that it is not. Though I guess that everyone has their ways of communicating, even if they fall under the nonverbal category.
Question: What are some ways that nonverbal communication further an experiment?
Quote: page 36 paragraph 3
Comment (at least 75 words): I would think that amongst the disadvantages for critical approach, that a limited perspective would be rampant and that because of this, a critical approach would be used less than a social-scientific or interpretivist one. I’d think that, with my understanding of the reading to guide me on this, that this approach focuses way too heavily on power, and inequality, and I’d go as far to say that other important factors would be overlooked because of a power imbalance between the communicating parties.
Question: What would be an inappropriate example of a critical approach being used today?
Journal 5
Tony D’Arcangelo
Page 4-5 starting in 3rd paragraph on page 4
What I found interesting was the passage regarding the emergence in areas of study of communications. I think it’s interesting that people didn’t study communications outright until fairly recently. Prior to that people studying things like public speaking or general speech makes sense. In reference to the study of communications history, the disregard to everyday behavior is also fascinating, I think before you get to the big picture you also have to know all the nuances of what’s going on as well.
Page 14, paragraph 3
I like how this passage takes a clinical approach in an explanation as to why studying communication is to happen naturally. The passage also states that a laboratory experiment can tell researchers what happens but not what happens naturally. If anything, we know that communication wether we know it or not is a naturally occurring thing. I also find it an interesting point that the passage brings up that “you can never be truly objective, because everyone has their own interpretations.”
Question Page 14, Paragraph 3
Q: If you can never be truly objective when studying communication how do we find common ground in what we believe to be is right and wrong?
Q: “you can never be truly objective, because everyone has their own interpretations.”
C: I find this very interesting and I wonder how this effects the general study of communications.
Tyler Richards
Journal #5
Communications 110
9/11/23
Page 39 / Paragraph 4-5
This passage piques my interest because it explains and shows the significance of the interactions between healthcare workers and their patients. How much our healthcare and scientific communities can effectively communicate medical information to the public, greatly affects our public communities. It affects them in both social and political ways. One example that the book uses is the covid pandemic and how it had so many effects on human life, it affected social life and economics, which also greatly affected the election year. The healthcare to society communication was the leading cause of news spread and how news travelled.
Page 24 / Paragraph 3-5
This passage is very interesting and intriguing to me because it focuses entirely on communications and how it plays a huge role in public areas. It explains the study of communications is developed and derived from the study of public speaking. It also talks about how academic fields are beginning to look more at people’s everyday behaviors instead of just focusing on extraordinary events that occur. This shift of focus in various studies and is starting to become a very important part of our lives.
QCQ
What types of ways can we make sure that healthcare professionals are telling the general public accurate and important information?
Page 26 paragraphs 1,2,3,4
The reason I chose to use this one was because it talked about how there was a whole different shift in the way we learn at a time, more specifically, speech and rhetoric. I found this part pretty interesting because it talked about how a new generation had to adapt to a whole different learning style and this all happened after World War ll. After the war, a lot of people enrolled in school, and the students and the schools did not like this because of the cosmic shift in learning and teaching. So overall no one was happy but it was pretty interesting to see that a whole learning style was changed because of a new generation.
Question: Do you foresee another learning/teaching style to come to schools and Universities or do you think the one we have will stick for good?
Page 40 Paragraphs 3,4
This article talked about the study of persuasion and how it can affect someone during communication. It talked about how the art of persuasion is tracked back all the way to the ancient Greeks and ancient Romans which is really interesting. It said how this was the start-up to the beginning of learning and studying speech. The ones who were very interested were given rhetic lessons. The study itself involves people’s thinking and their behaviors. Because it was pretty broad people were free to do what they wanted with it and there was a lot of lee-way.
Question: Do you find yourself changing when trying to persuade? If so how and what changes about yourself?
The first passage that stuck out to me was on page 27 paragraph 5. I’m not a communications major, however I have taken a social media “theory and practice” course while at UNE and I’m curious as to why it wasn’t offered by the communications department. What I mean is that it wasn’t a “CMM” course. If my memory is correct, I believe it was offered by the business department. It’s interesting to me that social media in today’s society plays such a huge role in communication. Spreading news, connecting with people you went to middle school with, and a wide variety of other duties. One might think that the communications department would be better off teaching such a topic.
The second passage that I found to be interesting was on page 35 paragraph 6. It is funny to think that historians know so much about how life and people interacted long before these things could be recorded for everyone to see. For example, at first we only knew Christopher Columbus’ side of when he landed on the Native Americans’ grounds. Then, we started finding more and more journals and writings that described the side of the Native Americans and perhaps the truthful perspective. I think it’s great to get a gist of the time Julius Caesar ruled based on his journals, however we couldn’t fully understand without the nonexistent journals of common folk in that era.
DISCUSSION QUESTION: If social media is such a huge portion of communication, why don’t communications departments teach social media courses, rather than business departments?
Daraun White
Journal #5
Page 31 para 8
This paragraph is talking about multiple variables in the way someone thinks or acts. Their example was having a person play a violent video game and then measure their behavior after. This is interesting to me because I have and still do play violent video games (gore, guns, etc) and have shown no signs of violence. This compares to the person in the paragraph because they too had no signs, due to all things having many different reasons for why they happen.
Page 38 para 4
This paragraph is interesting because it talks about how, in a later chapter, that group communication always takes the relational side of it all. It also talks about how premade relationships will shine and over time create an influence in decision making as a group and interactions. It goes on to say that if people have tiny connections or no connections at all, you can anticipate future connections or the generation of relational allies and adversaries in the groups.
What I found really interesting was that wealthy people would send their sons to Aristotle and Socrates to learn from them and learn how to write. I found this really interesting because only wealthy people would send their sons and not their daughters to learn. This passage really stuck out to me because of how only the wealthy were able to learn from these two. I know that’s how times were back then because the wealthy only got education and the less wealthy families were not able to get educated because of their financial status.
QCQ:
Quote: “Wealthy citizens sent their sons to learn from such wise people as Aristotle and Socrates” (Page 25 para 3).
Comment: This passage stuck out to me because who was able to be educated by these two and how more people were able to become successful in the English writing world.
Question: Why were only the wealthy allowed to learn from them?
What confused me about this passage was the different ways to study the approach of communication. This was confusing to me because of the different ways the text explained how to study the different ways to study communication. This passage stuck out to me because I didn’t understand it at first and I had to read it multiple times to be able to somewhat understand it. The different ways just confused me the most because of how the text mentioned ways to compare the differences.
QCQ:
Quote: “If you want to study pairs of people interacting, then you bring them into the lab, interview them in their homes, or analyze transcripts of their chatter” (Page 28 para 7)
Comment: This confused me with the amount of different ways to study interactions.
Question: Do these different ways to study communication actually work?
Page 53 para 2, “Why are college students the participants in most research?”
I thought it was funny to see this brought up, as it is very true. People seem to think college students are representative of all young adults but that’s far from it. I learned a lot about survey taking and how to get a good representation of the population. It’s so easy to communicate misrepresented and inaccurate information that hundreds of people will take it as fact.
How far do our social biases and assumptions go, subconsciously or not, for how we perceive others?
Page 65 para 1, “Further, health information is frequently gained through social networks, and health information gained online or through media is accessed through the context of relationships.”
Being on social media and having family members in the medical field has given me an interesting perspective on health communications. I see endless videos on TikTok from those who claim to be doctors (some real, probably some not) “approving” a health product like skin care or even food. Anybody can say anything on the internet, my sister swears by products she’s seen recommended on social media. My mother will believe anything she sees on the internet, and she’s a registered nurse.
Despite practically everyone having an online presence, wouldn’t more education on misinformation go as far as to help general health? People assume that since we’ve grown up with the internet, we don’t have anything to learn about it.
Bernie Mulcahy
Page 31 Paragraph 7
In this paragraph, the author talks about how there are different reasons to why someone does what they do. The author uses the example of the person who plays the violent video game and then they would test their anger afterwards to see if it has changed them. The results showed that the person they tested did not show any telling signs that they were now violent. This really made me think about myself because I have played games like Call of Duty and GTA but have not been violent in any way besides when I play sports.
Is it really that common for someone to be violent after playing video games like this? Most if not all of my friends have played violent video games and have showed no signs of violence outside of sports.
Page 39 Paragraph 4
In this paragraph and the paragraph or two after, the author talks about how health care workers interact with their patients. This was really interesting to me because my grandmother was a nurse for a long time so it gave me some insight to how she would be around her patients. One example the author stated was surrounding the covid pandemic and all the effects it had on the way we function as humans, including with healthcare professionals. Healthcare was very important during this time because they were the ones in the front line getting all the information.
Could there be healthcare professionals that were biased and tried to make things seem like less of a problem or more of a problem?
The first section that stuck out to me was on page 26 para 7. This paragraph talks about the development or journalism and communication as majors in graduate education. It talks about how these types of majors were accepted into many graduate programs, and how they didn’t fit in within any type of subunit in a graduate atmosphere. What I liked the most about this passage was that the people who were really passionate about journalism or communication didn’t care that this major wasn’t accepted in graduate schools but mass communication scholars found a way for the students to be a able to spend time together working on the things they wanted to know and expanding there education. The question that I have for this section is, what was it about the journalism or communication majors that weren’t apart of a graduate education? The second section that stuck out to me was on page 37 para 4. This whole chunk of the page, communication education and instructional communication, really stuck out to me. This section is about the devotion that people have toward making the major of communication more disciplined and how those who loved this atmosphere worked as hard as possible to make the structure and rigor of the course fit to everyone. They are so dedicated to improving instruction of their materials, and making things easier and be better understood by the students. My question from this section is what about the communication major makes it so that there needs to be constant change and flexibility in the major?
Journal #5:
The first passage in this chapter that stood out to me starts on page 22 and is labeled “The Challenges in Writing History”. This passage to me is one of the most important to this whole chapter as it prepares us for the fact that it is a difficult task to truly describe the history of such a storied and diverse field as communication. The passage makes a point of correcting itself as it states that the “history” of communications should be the “histories” of communication due to the diversity between different cultures and their approaches to communications. It also goes over the idea of bias between people and societies as a whole. The passage gives the example of the British and Americans announcing the end of the Revolutionary War. The British would be likely to dismiss the loss in some way and maybe even spin it around as something positive, however the Americans would mostly hyperbolize and make it positive.
The second passage that I found important to the chapter as a whole is found on page 28. The passage “Methods of Studying Communications” describes the three most common and effective approaches to studying communications as best as can be done. The three most effective methods are the social scientific approach, the interpretivist approach and the critical approach. The social scientific approach views the world the most black and white. It entails the world view that everything is objective, casual and predictable. A downside of this is that the world and humans are often unpredictable. The interpretivist approach is one which seeks to understand and detail communication. This approach looks at natural communication instead of communication which may occur in a laboratory setting, unlike the social scientific approach. A disadvantage of this method is that the methodology is not as consistent or concise and therefore some studies may not have accurate results. Lastly is the critical approach. The critical approach to studying communications takes a deep look into symbols and language we use, in order to better understand how communications affect our society. This approach uses similar methods of study to the interpretive approach as they look at natural communication primarily. The main disadvantage of the critical approach is that if you are to use this approach it can easily be turned back onto itself causing a distraction from the original goal of the approach.
A question I had after reading this chapter was which study of communication do people follow in their everyday lives? Does this change person to person? Or does it change on a larger scale such as their are only differences culture to culture?
Altirique McElveen
Professor Miller
Journal 5- Communications
12 Sep 2023
First passage that caught my attention was talking about media and mass communication because it revealed the truth of the impact of technology ruining human knowledge( Page 39, para 1). Kids nowadays know the easy way out so they’re not gonna sit in class and actually learn when they can just look up the answers. This grabbed my attention because it’s something that isn’t talked about alot and I feel it’s important for us as humans to actually learn instead of just using technology. Some humans can’t even process without technology and it’s really sad nobody is stepping in saying something. The second passage that caught my attention was the doctor and patient communication because my mom is actually a nurse and the stories she tells me are always resulting in patients being rude. (not from the passage, my own opinion) Being rude to someone who’s taking care never made sense to me because they have your life in their hands. Doctors staying in contact with their patients would make their patients feel like they are in good care. Nobody wants a doctor who isn’t checking up on their well being. This was another rarity of a passage I loved because nobody talks about these things enough.
Q- “
C- Our healthcare workers should be treated with the utmost respect and they should also keep their responsibility by checking up on their patients.
Q- Why isn’t technology limited in schools like they used to be?
The section that introduced social scientific approach was very interesting to me because it describes a perspective based on the assumption that there is objective truth. Objective truth is a very tricky thing to deal with, because even when there are things that we consider to be “objectively true”, every person who is involved in an interaction experiences and thinks about it completely differently, sometimes leading them to respond in different ways. It would seem to make it difficult to study something with an objective view when the situation is dependent on subjective viewpoints.
I was also interested in the description of the critical approach, which involves examining underlying structures that favor certain groups over others and uphold the status quo. It is a very similar approach to the one taken by my art history class when discussing how art history as a field is studied and taught, what art means, and what things it can teach us.
Intro To Comm
Social Scientific Approach
Page 30 Par. 1-5
The reason I like this area in the book is because I find it interesting that science can be used in communications. Studying the ways that people communicate with each other to see how we impact children in a more positive manner. What I also enjoyed was how we use manipulation tricks on patients or people to find out how people will react and how we can help change that if it’s in a negative way and how to make that continuously occur if it was in a positive manner. I will say I read this more than once to understand.
Page 31 Par. 2-3
The reason I chose Advantages and Disadvantages is because I like how it talks about the positives of social science experiments and how it makes it easier to understand communication patterns for them, but I also like how it talks about the difficult parts of using the social science experiments. It talks about how you never know what the result of human behavior will react to these experiments and that it’s harder to make a first assumption because of this.
Isabelle Trombley
Professor Miller
CMM 110
Journal #5
Chapter 2 QCQs.
Q: “The study of interpersonal communication continued to grow in popularity at the
undergraduate and graduate levels. A departure from earlier research in this area, the
study of interpersonal communication tends to focus on close personal relationships
rather than simply two people talking with one another. The study of social and
personal relationships is now a dominant presence in the discipline of communication.”
C: I think that personally, the idea of interpersonal communication is the hardest for me to grasp. In my educational experience, we were taught about rhetoric communication through speech and debate classes, and we were taught about mass communication through the news and articles used in class, etc. However, there was never really a “lesson” on how interpersonal communication works, we are just expected to know how to communicate on a deep level with others based on the experiences we have growing up.
Q: Is it important to teach early on in education how to form and interpret interpersonal relationships and communication?
Q: “The critical approach to communication seeks to identify the hidden but formidable
symbolic structures and practices that create or uphold disadvantage, inequity, or
oppression of some groups in favor of others. Scholars taking this approach try to
uncover hidden or explicit power within a societal group (i.e., who does not have
power, how power is maintained, and how existing power differences are challenged).”
C: Out of the methods or approaches that were listed in this chapter, the one that stood out the most to me was the critical approach. I found it interesting how this approach takes into consideration the different traits and social structures that can affect the way that people communicate with each other. I think that simply doing experiments or observations without this kind of critical approach doesn’t fully encapsulate how people communicate with each other and why. I would be interested to learn more about taking a critical approach towards the study of communication.
Q: Why does there need to be certain power structures between two people that affect the way they communicate with each other? Why doesn’t everyone communicate the same way regardless of how important one person is, or how well you know one another?