Representatives and main assertions of the four major schools of communication

The four major figures of the study abroad school of communication, their diagnosis may be the contribution of the treatment of various fields.

1. The empirical school (traditional school).

It mainly refers to the school of social science that examines social phenomena with empirical and quantitative research methods, and focuses on the study of communication effects. Empirical research methods refer to methods that empirically investigate social phenomena or social behaviors using observable, measurable, and quantifiable empirical materials.

1. Two important features:

1) the purpose of pragmatism;

2) A pluralistic view of society.

2. The main principles of empirical research methods:

1) The study procedure should be objective and reproducible;

2) the primary objective is to collect and make available indisputable scientific data and materials;

and 3) construct general theoretical models or "theorems" about social phenomena through open academic discussions.

3. Defects: 1) Quantifiable and observable empirical materials are limited, while social phenomena and human behaviors are unlimited, and human spiritual and rational activities cannot be explained solely by empirical materials;

2) the procedures and techniques such as questionnaire surveys and control experiments relied on by current empirical studies lack precision and rigor;

2. The Critical School.

The Critical School was formed and developed under the influence of the Frankfurt School, mainly by European scholars.

1) Rooted in the long history and cultural tradition of Europe, and deeply influenced by the European traditional humanistic criticism.

2) It is based on Europe's unique communication practices, which emphasize the public interest, and the public media dominate the communication system in most European countries, and have a natural wariness of the commercial communication system.

3) The crisis of Western civilization, such as the environmental crisis, the spiritual crisis, etc., has caused people to reflect on the capitalist system.

c) School of Cultural Studies (Birmingham School).

Originated in the 20th century at the Institute of Contemporary Culture at the University of Birmingham, UK. Representative figures: Hall, Hoggart, etc. Key takeaways:

1. Mass communication is an important part of the capitalist social system, which plays an important ideological function in regulating social relations and exercising political domination, and has relative independence.

2. Mass communication can be divided into two parts: one is the production process of cultural products, and the other is the consumption process of cultural products. The former is the process of "symbolizing" and "giving meaning" to social things through the selection and processing of symbolic things, and the latter is the process of the audience contacting the media information and interpreting and interpreting the meaning of symbols.

3. Symbols are combined with a certain value system and meaning system, and the symbolic activities of the mass media are essentially "giving meaning" to things according to the value system of the dominant class.

Internationally, communication studies can be broadly divided into two schools. 1. The traditional school centered on the United States, including Canada, Japan, Australia and other Pacific Rim countries. They call themselves empiricists, believing that their research is empirical and empirical and reliable.

Western European scholars refer to them as administrative schools, arguing that their research proceeds from the interests of the administration. 2. The Western European-centered critical school, which is opposed to the traditional American school, is not actually a simple whole, but contains many scholars' different views and research methods. The most powerful of them originated in the Frankfurt School in Germany.

The Frankfurt School, born in the 20s of the 20th century, is an academic school of Western Marxism, which mainly studies the role and disadvantages of mass media in capitalist society, focusing on the critique of the relationship between communication and society, politics, economy, culture and so on.

As I have learned earlier, theory is a solid set of systematic intuitions about the way things work. Communication is the relational process of establishing and interpreting information that elicits a response.

as a communication of interpersonal interaction and influence. Scholars of this school of thought have relied on rigorous, systematic observation of ethnic groups to discover and spread the truth. What can I do to make the other person change?

The Yale Center for Attitude Research examines the three sources of influence variables in the framework of "Who, What Says, To Whom, and What Effects":

Propagation as an information processing system. The genre sees communication as the connection between different parts of any system, such as a computer system, a family system, an organizational system, or a system. The cybernetic school is committed to answering the question: How can you troubleshoot a system?

Communication as a technical public oratory. Until the 20th century, the debate techniques of ancient Greece and Rome were the wisdom of communication. Rhetoric is the art of persuading others through a variety of effective means, such as the expression of arguments, the organization of ideas, the use of language, and the calculation of public speeches.

In the rhetorical school, there has been controversy over whether public speaking skills should be more theoretical or practical. Ongoing debate means that two factors play an equally important role in the training of skillful public speaking, communication as the process of sharing meaning through symbols. Semiotics studies signs.

A symbol can be anything or refer to anything. Semiotics is the study of referential and non-linguistic signs, and how their interpretation affects society, communication as creators and formulators of social reality. The theory is based on the following assumptions:

The dialogue between people is the production and reproduction of culture. Sapir Wolf hypothesis of linguistic relativity: it is the structure of language that shapes people's thoughts and behaviors; Realistic social construction.

People work together to build their own world in communication.

Communication as a reflection and challenge to unjust discourse. The term critical theory originated from the work of a group of German scholars who were affiliated with the Institute of Sociology at the University of Frankfurt and were therefore known as the "Frankfurt School". The theory challenges three major features of modern society from beginning to end:

One is that the practice of controlling language will perpetuate the imbalance of power. Second, the role of the mass media is to suppress the cognition of the masses. The third is the blind reliance on the scientific method and the uncritical acceptance of empirical findings.

Talk to each other to feel the spread of self and other. Phenomenology's imagery analysis of everyday life from the individual's own standpoint; Explore the possibilities of understanding the experiences of self and others. Phenomena place special emphasis on individual cognition and interpretation based on one's own subjective experience.

For phenomenology, the story of an individual's life is more important and authoritative than any hypothesis and propagation of proverbs.