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Communication Models and Struggle |
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Written by Tomaselli, Keyan
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Author: Tomaselli, Keyan
Date: 1997
Other Authors: Eric Louw
Publichsed: In Zhuwarara, R., Gecau, K. and Drag, M. (eds) Media, Democratization and Identity. Harare: department of English, University of Zimbabwe, 34-50. Also published in Journal of African Communications, 1(1), 1996, 18-41.
Copyright: Tomaselli and Louw and the two publications. | | |  | | |
In spite of numerous critiques of the basic positivist communication models which inappropriately tried to extend the Shannon and Weaver (1949) telecommunications model to account for human communication (see, eg,. Sless, 1986), such models remain dominant in journalism and communication course curriculae, and in mass media and propaganda practices. The originating context of these models is an authoritarian and anti-democratic one. They underpin top-down social communication by foregrounding the perspective of the `communicator' and the construction of the message. Such models limit how far class and other interests can be accommodated, and spuriously assume that all messages are benevolent - communication is naively defined as `sharing', `exchange of information', `interactive', and so on. But they cannot, for example, account for lies, lying or deception, which are everyday aspects of commercial, corporate, state and inter-personal communication. In this article, we criticize the positivist assumption on which communication modelling is based. By way of contrast, we offer a theory of communication which arose out of social, class, community, gender, and race-struggles against apartheid during the 1980s. Download the entire article | | |
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