I enrolled in a MOOC this past week offered by the University of Amsterdam and taught by
Dr. Rutger de Graaf. The course title is Introduction to Communication Science. The lessons are delivered in short videos of about 6 minutes in which Dr. de Graaf explains theories of communication, transmission models and other interesting things. After you watch the video, you take a short quiz.
The key to communication I can gather thus far is that the sender of a message must construct the message so that the receiver of the message understands the intent of the sender. This is tricky because how the message is created and how it is delivered impacts how the receiver interprets the message. In addition, the message can be misinterpreted by diverse audiences who each hear the message within a different context.
Let’s take the example of US Secretary of State John Kerry speaking in a news conference about Syria recently. He gave what was intended to be a somewhat flippant response to a reporter’s question about whether there was anything the Syrians could do to avoid being bombed. Secretary Kerry suggested Syria could give up their chemical weapons in the following week to avoid being bombed.
It is not clear whether Sec. Kerry ran this idea up the flag pole with anyone before he delivered it; but if he did, I suspect it was with the boys at the country club. They probably all pulled their cigars from their mouths and jiggled their jolly jowls in a round of guffaws and snorts at such an outlandish proposition. Mr. Kerry may have taken from this test audience that all audiences would interpret the message the same way. In the MOOC we learned about the work of Jacobson in 1960 who proposed the theory of polysemic communication, that different people may interpret the same message differently.
Sec. Kerry’s message was not tailored to a diverse mass media audience. Not everyone listening to the press conference was a rich middle-aged American guy in a Polo shirt so far removed from the realities of war. Syrians heard this message from the perspective of people who were soon to be on the receiving end of untold mayhem. The Syrian government and the Russians saw this message as an opportunity to propose diplomacy; and to our government’s surprise (Embarrassment? Relief? Calculation?), they did so.
If this was a gaffe, Mr. Kerry should sign up for the MOOC I’m taking. He will learn enough in week one to avoid delivering a poetic (message) using a code (defined meaning) that gave a conative (call to action) which was either unwanted or at the very least unexpected.