Page 48 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

COMMUNICATION

. Meanwhile, American comparative linguistics, under the influence of
Benjamin Lee Whorf and Edmund Sapir, proposed the notion of
‘linguistic relativity’, suggesting that language organised perception,
and different languages organised it differently. Thus, reality was a
product of howcommunicative systems ordered the world. Different
cultures – Hopi Indians compared with ‘standard average
Europeans’, for instance – therefore experienced different realities.
. The French structural anthropologist Claude Le ´vi-Strauss connected
communication with two other fundamental aspects of culture –
marriage and money – suggesting that the circulation of signs (in
language and art), women (in kinship systems) and money (in the
economy) revealed fundamentally similar structures, which Le ´vi-
Strauss believed revealed universals of the human mind.
. American social-science empirical research into the micro-processes
of modern life brought communication into the purviewof formal
study for the first time. It concentrated on the practical details of
how mass society communicated with itself, starting with the
unresolvable problem that such a society comprises masses who are
anonymous to each other and to commercial and political elites, but
who are constitutionally and commercially sovereign as citizens and
consumers. In such a paradoxical situation, mass communication
became of strategic importance, especially the role of advertising
(Vance Packard), journalism, public relations or PR, and political
propaganda (Michael Schudson). The effects of ‘mass’ entertain-
ment on unknowable but sovereign individuals was also seen as an
important issue.
. It followed that business needed communication, the more scientific
(i.e. using easily replicated methods to produce findings that were
generalisable across large populations), the better. Consumer
optimism and behaviour, maximised by the most scientific means
possible, were key to the rise and continuing success of the post-
World War II economic boom in the US, Japan and Europe. In the
US Schools of Communication, founded on the need to train
citizens in the public arts of rhetorical persuasion so as to
democratise the public life of the Republic, prospered as they
added media, PR, journalism and advertising to their repertoire.
. The Canadian literary historian Marshall McLuhan (1962, 1964),
combining his own discipline with cognitive psychology and the
communication philosophy of Harold Innes, was also influential in
the exorbitation of communication. His aphoristic style appealed
not only to many academics, but to people in the business
community also, including those in the industries McLuhan seemed

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