Apprehending the elusive and ambiguous: communication, language and literacy

ABSTRACT

This paper surveys some of the peculiar challenges facing those who would study communication. It draws heavily upon the recent work of David R. Olson to show how ‘meaning’ and ‘context’ have elusive and ambiguous dimensions. It explores how literacy is related to reasoning about reasoning and forms of literate humor, and it documents how literacy makes the phenomena of meaning and context more complex yet equally provides resources for apprehending them. The paper concludes by offering some takeaway implications for more mindfully managing heated and/or charged discourse within contemporary life.

Acknowledgments

I need to thank Allison Peiritsch, and the New York State Communication Association (NYSCA), for inviting me to deliver a keynote address at their 80th annual conference in 2022. This paper was the outcome. I also want to recognize both the Institute of General Semantics and the Media Ecology Association for their continued support and inspiration. I should add that I presented a later version of this paper at the 2023 Media Ecology Association annual convention. I want to thank Michael Plugh and Sara van den Berg for useful comments and suggestions, and I want to thank David R. Olson for his encouragement and inspiration. I also need to thank Valerie V. Peterson for assistance during the final stages of writing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Likely others, but perhaps the early Greeks? They used the word ‘Barbarian’ to describe those who did not speak Greek because they heard foreign tongues as a succession of sounds amounting to: ‘Bar-Bar-Bar’

² In Foucault’s The Order of Things, he writes, ‘From an extreme point of view, one might say that language in the Classical era does not exist. But that it functions; its whole existence is located in its representative role, is limited precisely to that role and finally exhausts it’ (1973, pp. 78–79).

³ Certainly, many scholars have pointed to literacy as crucial to modern sensibilities and some have perhaps overstated the fundamental shift in consciousness, a transformation of consciousness (e.g. Jaynes, McLuhan, Ong, Havelock, Goody). The orality/literacy debates were fairly hot in the 60s and 70s, with some scholars suggesting that there are no fundamental cognitive differences between the oral and literate mind. Others argued for subtle differences such as proclivities toward abstraction and de-poeticiation of language. Because writing stores ideas and helps to lessen the fear of forgetting as well as lessen the reliance upon rhyme, alliteration, and other mnemonic devices, literate minds suffer less fear of novelty. Literacy arguably enables for the decontextualization of information (e.g. Denny). It helps literates develop of notion of ‘verbatim’ in contrast to ‘paraphrase’ (e.g. Lord, Parry), and print literacy is related to nationalism, the rise of bureaucracies, methods of independent learning and silent reading (e.g. McLuhan).

⁴ ‘Think’ and ‘believe’ are perhaps of equal importance but well beyond the scope of the present essay.

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Corey Anton

Corey Anton (PhD, Purdue University, 1998) is Professor of Communication Studies at Grand Valley State University and a Fellow of the International Communicology Institute. He is author of Selfhood and Authenticity (2001, SUNY Press), Sources of Significance: Worldly Rejuvenation and Neo-Stoic Heroism (2010, Purdue University Press), Communication Uncovered: General Semantics and Media Ecology (2010, IGS Press), and How Non-being Haunts Being: On Possibilities, Morality, and Death Acceptance (2020, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press). He is the editor of Valuation and Media Ecology: Ethics, Morals, and Laws (2010, Hampton Press), and the co-editor, along with Lance Strate, of the collection Korzybski And… (2012, IGS Press), and co-editor, along with Robert K. Logan and Lance Strate, of the collection, Taking Up McLuhan’s Cause (2017, Intellect Publishing). Past Editor of the journal Explorations in Media Ecology and Past President of the Media Ecology Association, Anton currently serves as Vice-President of the Institute of General Semantics, and on the editorial boards of The Atlantic Journal of Communication, ETC, New Explorations, and Explorations in Media Ecology.