Communication studies – 2 Benefits not to ignore

What is meant by Communication Studies?

Communication studies is an academic field that deals with the processes of communication, commonly involves the sharing of symbols or signals over distances in space and time. Hence, communication studies encompass a wide range of topics and contexts ranging from face-to-face conversation to speeches to mass media outlets such as television broadcasting. Communication studies as a discipline, is also often interested in how audiences interpret information and the political, cultural, economic, and social dimensions of speech and language in context. The field is institutionalized under many different names at different universities and in various countries, including “communications”, “communication studies”, “speech communication”, “rhetorical studies”, “communications science”, “media studies”, “communication arts”, “mass communication”, “media ecology,” and sometimes even “mediology” although this latter is a different area of study. Communication studies often overlaps with academic programs in journalism, film and cinema, radio and television, advertising and public relations and performance studies. Communication studies is often considered a part of both the social sciences and the humanities, drawing heavily on fields such as sociology, psychology, anthropology, political science, and economics as well as rhetoric, literary studies, linguistics, and semiotics. The field can incorporate and overlap with the work of other disciplines as well, however, including engineering, architecture, mathematics, computer science, gender and sexuality studies.

Domains of Communication Studies

The vast breadth and interdisciplinary nature of communication studies has understandably made it difficult for both students and institutions to place it within the broader educational system. Despite intellectual incoherence, the field attracts and sustains large numbers of students, scholarly journals, professional associations, and lively discussions across the academy for researchers, educators, lawmakers, businesses, and reformers. Broadly understood, the contemporary study of communication per se interfaces and overlaps with areas such as business, organizational development, philosophy, languages, composition, theatre, debate (often called “forensics”), literary criticism, sociology, psychology, history, anthropology, semiotics, international policy, economics and political science, among others. The breadth and the primacy of communication in many areas of life is responsible for the ubiquity of communication studies, as well as for the resulting confusion about what does and does not constitute communication. Ongoing debates rage as to whether communication studies can best be understood as a discipline, a field, or simply a topic.

Components of Communication Studies

Most graduate programs in Communication today trace their history through speech to ancient rhetoric. Programs in Communication, Communication Arts or Communication Sciences often include Organisational Communication, Interpersonal Communication, Speech Communication (or Rhetoric), Mass Communication, and sometimes Journalism, Film criticism, Theatre, Political science (e.g., political campaign strategies, public speaking, effects of media on elections), or Radio, Television or Film production. Graduates of formal communication programs can be found in a wide range of fields working as university professors, marketing researchers, media editors and designers, speech therapists, journalists, human resources managers, corporate trainers, public relations practitioners, and media managers and consultants in a variety of fields including, media production, life coaching, public speaking, organisational, political campaign/issue management and public policy.

Benefits of the field

Communication is often recognised as a cornerstone of modern society—it would be hard to conceive of modern life without it. However, communication as an English-language field of study and a subject of social thought took off only in the first part of the twentieth century, and is thus a relatively recent and thus unsettled discovery.

Strengthening Social ties

In what is sometimes called the “transmission” view, communication is a process by which messages are sent, transmitted, filtered, and received. At core, the transmission view maps closely onto information theory nothing of Communication.” A more recent “ritual” view, proposed by the late James W. Carey, holds that communication partakes in central daily rituals that forge meaningful human relationships and communities.

Stress handling and Information

While transmission proposes a model of communication as transportation (across space, in one time), the ritual model proposes that meaning can be constituted in repeated media events (across times, in one space). The newspaper, for instance, does not only transmit messages to the reader through text, but reminds and reassures the reader through repeated and meaningful events, such as its morning appearance on the doorstep and a familiar page layout.