Senders and Their Cognitive Abilities |
In the standard model of communication, the sender of the message is its encoding source. Encoding requires cognition.
ABSTRACT Encoding requires cognitive abilities. In machine communication, which is not often included in communication texts, encoding is a computational system modeling cognition. Accounts of group communication often focus on decision making, collaboration, problem solving, and conflict management, all cognitive processes. In mass communication, senders are teams of persons who design, plan, anticipate, and select. In every conceivable instance of a sender, there is a person whose cognitive abilities are operative or mimicked. |
Encoding requires cognitive abilities.
Even in the most rudimentary models of communication and, in particular, in models of interpersonal communication, encoding is the function attributed to a "sender." Encoding entails "cognitive activities that accompany the perception of a to be remembered item or event, thereby influencing the properties of the resulting memory trace" (Eysenck, 134). In "Encoding and Retrieval of Information," Scott C. Brown and Fergus I. M. Craik discuss in detail the role of the memory in encoding processes (Tulving & Craik, 93ff.).
In machine communication, which is not often included in communication texts, encoding is a computational system modeling cognition.
In her Machines Who Think, Pamela McCorduck identifies Norbert Wiener as the "patron saint of cybernetics" (39). Weiner was fascinated by "the kinds of analogies that could be made between electronic devices and biological devices" (44). Weiner's theories of cybernetics drew upon the information-theory ideas of Claude Shannon and others. Warren McCulloch (a neurophysiologist) and Walter Pitts (a mathematician) published "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity" in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics in 1943. The paper asserted that "Because of the 'all-or-none' character of nervous activity, neural events and the relations among them can be treated by means of a pro positional logic." This presupposition lies behind work in cybernetics. McCorduck notes that, although cybernetic theory based on this presupposition Weiner's feedback principle proved "sterile,"
Digital computers would indeed come to simulate human cognitive processes, but the approach would be quite different from that of biology or cybernetics. It would be called the information-processing level of modeling ... and its central idea would be the manipulation of symbols .... [whose] singular and most powerful feature was to view the computer as a species of information processor, symbol manipulator, a view which could also be applied to human beings. And, sure enough, the information processing model would come to dominate cognitive psychology ... (46-47.)
The field of Artificial Intelligence grow out of the early efforts to understand the human brain as a computational machine. The "manipulation of symbols" is, of course, a species of encoding. Thus, even in the case of machine communication, computers can be regarded as having "artificial" cognitive abilities.
Accounts of group communication often focus on decision making, collaboration, problem solving, and conflict management, all cognitive processes.
As the fields of communication study were extended into group and organizational communication, communication theory shifted its focus to accommodate them.
Group communication textbooks often focus on the cognitive process of "decision making"—e.g., Donald G Ellis and B. Aubrey Fisher's Small Group Decision Making and Joann Keyton's Communicating in Groups: Building Relationships for Effective Decision Making.
Keyton applies a basic model of communication to groups, noting in particular that opportunities for distortion of the message are exponentially increased and that groups communicate through several channels, specifically verbal and non-verbal ones. In her chapter on "Managing Conflict in Groups," Keyton remarks "a cognitive conflict exists when group members disagree" (237, italics mine). Like Ellis and Fisher, Keyton includes innumerable cognitive abilities in her discussions: brainstorming, collaborating, listening, comparing, problem solving, ranking, delegating, assessing, planning, empathizing, and so on.
In mass communication, senders are often teams of persons who design, plan, anticipate, and select.
Mass communication theory is sometimes articulated without references to persons, which does not make it the case that persons and their cognitive abilities have nothing to do with mass or mediated communication. Some person or more likely persons are doing the mediating.
Mediated communication, Internet communication being a good example, places the communicators behind a screen and they invariably present themselves as "avatars," just as in everyday exchanges they present themselves in suitable personae. Without doubt, this complicates the communication, but it does not eliminate cognition. It does introduce forms of cognition—e.g., blogging—not discussed in communication texts devoted to interpersonal communication prior to the 1990s.. Virtuality, however, does not remove cognitive abilities from the picture. It channels the cognitive abilities that shape cyberspace. A blog may be a new genre of discourse but it requires bloggers and the host of cognitive abilities they bring to this form of communication.
In every conceivable instance of a "sender," there is a person whose cognitive abilities are operative or mimicked.
In the context of human communication, a "sender"—at a minimum—sends "messages." As often as not these messages are discourses. Thus a sender—at a minimum—encodes.
jjs
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September 4, 2007
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