I hate my communication text, but that's ok because I found out that my Communication 101 teacher hates it as well, but is required by the department to use it. Actually, every Comm 101 class has to use the same book, and almost all the professors hate it, but are required to use it. It's simply a bad book, and I'll tell you why.
First, the required reading level is somewhere around 9th or 10th grade, very boring indeed for college students, and the flow of the book is definition after definition after definition. You can easily just skim the bold words and get a very thorough undertanding of a given chapter.
The definitions are the secind problem: they treat the subject of human communication, human interaction, in a very mechanical way. There is a lot of talk of Transmitting, Receiving, Encoding, Decoding, Noise, Sytax and Grammar. I suppose if you were undertaking a highly scientific study of communication, terms like these would be necessary, but they simply don't do the act of communication justice. This week I was watching some file footage of Dr. King's 'I Have A Dream' speech. This is my favorite piece of oration, and it moves me to tears practically every time I hear it. How can you possibly discuss this in terms of Trasmitting and Receiving and Mass Communication and do justice? You can't. Commincation and human interation is vastly more complex than these word allow for.
It also takes some concepts to unecessary extremes, particulary their ideas on the origin of the self. They contend that we get our Self Image from other through Feedback on the Messages we Encode and Transmit to them. This Feedback is internalized and becomes our Self Concept. This is called Symbolic Interactionism, and, here I quote: "The result is the person you see in the mirror today." Now, I'm not saying that what other people think of you has no effect, but the authors seem to state that it is the only determinate of how you view ourselves. They futher illustrate this idea with a quick sotry about Dominique Mocianeu (sorry for any misspelling). They say that she became a wolrd class gymnast because her father told her from a very young age that it was her destiny, and that she probably had some natural talent. So, the primary factor in her Olympic medals is her father telling her one day she would. A lifetime of training complete personal dedication to her sport had nothing to do with it what so ever. I find that notion simply offensive.
It also discusses this theroy that language shapes our reality, completely and totally. Since all of our ideas are expressed through language, and language is limited, all of our reality is shaped and limited by and through words. This is simple not true. If it were, language would be static, and the world would never change, but the world is changing, new things, ideas, concepts and philosophies are coming out all the time. The definitions of words are changing constantly. Take "ram." You probably just thought of random acess memory, but originally it was type of goat. Remember that ram? LAnguage can't keep up with human thought, so we stretch, twist, and completely reinvent it to suit out current needs, and even so, we all have thoughts, ideas, feelings, dreams, and more that we simply cannot express in words. It also dosen't even mention art and music, certainly forms of communication, that rely on no words at all, but I won't get into that now.
The finaly thing I hate about it, is it's very dated. Every paragraph is studded with the dates of studies, and researchers, and scientists, and the vast majority of the dates are from the 60s and 70s. There is the occasional 1994 or 97, but they are out weighed by the equal number of 1950's citations.
Well the battery is almost dead, so I have to run. I have to work in a half hour any way.
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