COMM2001 What is communication? This is the question that drives this course. The question is deceptively simple since you can probably provide an answer with little difficulty. You may say something like ?Communication is the transmission of ideas from a source to a receiver,? or something very similar. Answers to the question, ?What is communication?? have been dominated by a very particular tradition of Northern American scholarship since the early part of the Twentieth Century. Words like ?source,? ?receiver,? ?effectiveness,? and ?transmission,? have not only formed the basis of our common sense understanding of what communication is. They have also organized communication research in both America and Europe since the 1950?s. The structure of this course reflects the fact that there are two main schools in the study of communication. The first see communication as the transmission of messages. It is concerned with how senders and receivers encode and decode and sees communication as a process by which one person affects the behavior or the state of mind of another. The second school sees communication as the production and exchange of meanings. It is concerned with how people interact with messages or texts in order to produce meaning, and examines the roles of texts in our culture. This course will examine both areas of communication study.
