When I stepped into my very first class in Communication in January 2002, I wondered what it was all about. The professor waved a book in the air and said: "You all must get this textbook. It is the required reading." The book was called An Introduction to Mass Communication. I looked at it carefully. In that book was the secret to understanding what I had signed up for. Later that day, when classes were over, I bought the book. I took it home and eagerly began to read it. I was reading my first book in the world of communication. A few of the things I learned from reading that book were: An old approach to communication studies saw communication as a linear activity. Based on the old broadcast model, communication was simply the case where a sender packaged a message and sent it through a channel to a receiver, who accepted the message in toto. There was no opportunity for feedback. Some of the theories of media effects that thrived in this paradigm were: the almighty effects model, which gave media messages overwhelming power over their audiences; the hypodermic needle theory, which gave media messages direct and powerful impact over their audiences, and the social control theory, which gave the media the ability to control society. The variables that supported the old school of media effects were: a belief that mass communication was a stimulus-response activity; a belief that audiences were more in tune with the media than with one another; a belief that audiences were not intelligent or sophisticated enough to make their own choices and depended on the media to make such choices for them, and a belief in the instantaneous, conversionary power of mass communication. These variables supported propaganda machines in closed societies as well. They were also applied to socio-political situations such as voting behavior.
Intervening variables in any case put paid to the old school paradigm of media effects. Mass communication became no longer a stimulus-response activity where the media chose for the audience and controlled their tastes, but a network paradigm where audience members were seen to be more in touch with one another than the media, through their membership of peer groups, organizations in church or in the workplace, and extended family members and opinion leaders. Self-perception theories and the selective processes of exposure, perception, retention and recall, as well as increasing socio-political awareness on the part of audience members, all led to a new, limited-effects paradigm of communication. This new paradigm gave communication only a limited set of function-specific effects over audiences and included the element of feedback, effectively turning communication into a circular process involving not a sender and a receiver, but sender-receivers who interchanged roles. And so, when a person was in the actual process of sending a message to a listener or reader, the listener or reader was a potential sender who could retort, or report, or write back. The sender would then become the receiver, and the receiver the sender. Even traditional broadcast programs these days have phone-in components to ensure that the element of feedback remains a significant feature in contemporary understanding of communication.
In my first semester of college, I also took a required class called African Traditional Communication. It was fascinating. A few of the cool things I learned in that class were: African traditional communication began like most pre-historic communication systems by relying heavily on the spoken word and the indefatigable memory of "walking libraries" that were charged with remembering with astonishing fidelity the history of African societies. The names of regents; the stories of battles with other tribes; the economic agenda and oral constitutions of towns and cities were memorized in accurate detail and communicated from one person to another. This was formal communication, more like what newspapers would be today. Informal communication, which would include interpersonal conversations at gatherings such as childbirths, weddings, public dances and so on would not need to be remembered with such fidelity. Women would also gossip in the market place or on their way back from the stream, and so forth. Men would discuss affairs in the public square or on their way back from the farm - these were all informal communications.
African traditional communications also served as the basis for sociopolitical organization, from the level of the nuclear family, to the umunna (or kinship), to the clan, and to the village or autonomous community. The heads of families in such situations served as arbiters of disputes; brokers of peace among feuding factions, and overseers of events and decision-making. They served as pillars of authority, and relied heavily on the words of the "walking libraries" earlier mentioned. Indeed, the death of any of these "walking libraries" would be akin to the burning of a community library in our time. African traditional communications also relied on devices such as the ikoro, which was a huge, hollowed-out drum, placed at the center of the village square and used to broadcast messages to the entire village. If there was say, a bad harvest; or war, or any catastrophe, the ikoro would be beaten a certain way, and the villagers would know a calamity had hit, because of the sort of sound the ikoro was emitting. If there was good news on the contrary, the ikoro would be beaten somehow else: to celebrate victory, or to crown a king, and so forth. The ikoro could also be used to summon the entire village, where a town crier with gong and voice may be used to summon parts of the village or a few households. The ikoro could be compared to the modern day radio. There were other communication events in African traditional communication systems, such as public dances, wedding ceremonies and so forth. At these events, certain prescribed bodily movements were veritable nonverbal communications. Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart also records some prescribed communication behaviors useful for visiting with others and participating fully in the life of a traditional African community. There are other such works.
Mass Communication has been defined as "messages communicated to a large number of people through a mass medium." And to understand mass communication involves understanding the medium, especially as Marshall McLuhan would say that "the medium is the message," in mass communication. And so as an undergrad, I had to take classes in newspaper production (I remember how hard this class in particular was, what with the laying out of type in the exam hall and sweating my brains out); radio broadcast production, and television production and management. I also had to take classes in magazine production, film-making, and printing (actually the class was called Introduction to Typing). We were also taught to say cool things like "writing for the eye" (print communication) and "writing for the ear" (broadcast communication). We also took a couple classes in media law, where we learnt about things like libel, slander and so forth. Plus we took classes in English, French, Psychology, Reasoning, and Sociology. My undergraduate study was illuminating and rich. I am grateful for those four years at Imo State University. Tomorrow, I will give an informal, summary overview of what I learned in Human Communication at the master's level, where the emphasis shifted from media communication to: communication theory and research; public speaking; organizational communication, and crises management.
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