Name: 1.3 Concepts
Uploaded: 2016-04-09T04:58:03.000Z
Duration: 3 min 35 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

We’ve just seen that different scientific  disciplines all study communication.

Of course they focus on different aspects of  communication.

Some scholars want to understand the workings  of the media infrastructure for instance,

others focus on the social importance of  communication, or

political communication effects or one of many  alternative perspectives.

It’s not surprising that communication is studied  by so many from so many angles.

It fills our lives & society, we spend tremendous  amounts of time communicating ideas,

sharing thoughts, absorbing new information,  being entertained or persuaded somehow.

Communication, simply put, enables us to  function as social, cultural and political animals.

It makes sense that these different perspectives  have led to a wide spectrum

of scientific thought on the topic of  communication.

In this course we’ll go out and explore some of  them and try to find our way

in this wild jumble of theories, models and  concepts.

Perhaps a good starting point therefore is to  begin with a brief definition

of ‘theory’, ‘model’, and ‘concept’.

A concept is a word or set of words that  represents an idea.

It’s of course important to clearly define the  concepts we use.

Let’s take the concept of ‘identity’ for instance.

It’s easy to imagine two or more different  interpretations

Is it how one views oneself, or perhaps we  should also take into consideration

how ones identity is perceived by others.

Or is that particular concept better described  perhaps with the word ‘image’?

Often scientists squabble over definitions, and  rightly so,

because it should be clear what we talk about.

These discussions sometimes never stop, and  why would they?

Different people give different meanings to a  word,

and who can say which are the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’  definitions?

At most we can speak about preferred or  dominant definitions of concepts,

but even these usually change over time and  from context to context.

In this course I will often stop to define certain  key concepts.

I would like to stipulate that these definitions are  unfortunately

If you are following this MOOC and you had  some previous classes in communication

or perhaps you have worked in communication  or read books or articles about the topic

don’t be surprised when I will define things  slightly different than you have learned.

For instance, when I said that media are every  channel that we use to communicate,

so this would include the voice, it’s very possible  that you have learned previously

that only technical channels are considered  media, which would exclude the voice.

Because both definitions, and many more, exist  in the scientific field.

To make things more difficult, scientists, like  many professionals,

sometimes give every day words a different  meaning.

If I would ask a random person in the street the  definition of the word ‘text’,

most will agree that a ‘text’ is a message made  up out of some type of letters.

Communication scientists however regard each  carrier of communication as a text.

So a movie, a song, a painting, they‘re all ‘texts’  in our eyes, ready to be ‘read’ by an audience.