Communication – who and where?

We have some answers to our initial question of “what is communication?” Let’s now consider the “who”. Who communicates? Who occupies the position of “sender” and what does it mean to be in this position?

Many students who arrive at the study of communication do so because they’re interested in communication as a profession, or as an aspect of professional practice. Some of these students are already professional communicators working in industry spaces: they are journalists, graphic designers, PR practitioners, filmmakers, or social media content creators. Others have decades of experience to draw on from personal and everyday settings – they create, connect, and express themselves using a variety of media, even if they’ve never worked in a communication role.

We can, therefore, describe “communicator” as a professional role, and also as an everyday practice. And we can define the “sender” of a message as the person who created or distributed it, acknowledging that “senders” can be operating in a whole range of personal or professional contexts.

However, this does not mean it’s always easy for us to identify the “senders” of messages, especially in a networked, digitised, commercialised media landscape.

Who, for example, is the “sender” of a news story? It may be the journalist who researched and wrote the story, who may or may not be given a byline; it may also be an editor or an editorial team, a masthead, or a large media company with its own news agenda. And things get murkier when it comes to online content that is not obviously created by or for a news outlet, but might still be received and interpreted as “news”.

Similarly, who is the “sender” of a drama series on Netflix? It may be a single writer or a team of writers working together in a writers’ room; it may be a showrunner, who has creative control over the series as a whole; it may be the director of a single episode or the entire crew; it may be a production company or even Netflix itself. A TV drama is still an act of communication: but who, in this case, is the communicator?

In his book on media literacy, W. James Potter writes about “the decoupling of messages from their senders” and explains, “It is difficult – sometimes impossible – to tell who the sender is and, therefore, what the sender’s intentions are” (2004: 8). This is true of much of the content we encounter today, particularly that encountered online. So what happens when the source of the message is hard to find? Or when the source of the message can’t be trusted? Maybe we can’t trust the message because we can’t identify the source. This is part of the lived reality of our complex media landscape today.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash. How are the technologies and practices of communication embedded in everyday life?

The spaces and places of communication

The spaces – the “where” – of communication are equally interesting. When we communicate, where are we communicating from?

Much of our communication today is mediated or mediatised – it takes place in media spaces and is facilitated, enlivened, disrupted, or recreated by digital tools. Importantly, the biggest commercial players in today’s media landscape – including Alphabet (the company that owns Google) and Meta (the company that owns Facebook) are deeply invested in our communication practices. These companies do not themselves create content – they create the interfaces that shape our interaction with content, and with each other (Couldry 2012: 22). For such companies, communication can be defined as the business of sharing meaning.

But even when communication takes place in virtual spaces, such acts of communication are grounded in embodied and emplaced experiences. We do not communicate in placeless realms. Likewise, processes of communication do not occur outside the rhythms and gritty details of emplaced life.

Consider how pertinent this question of place became during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2020 and 2021, many of us spent extended periods of time working or studying from home, using digital tools for many if not most of our communication experiences: email, social media, and of course, Zoom, the videoconferencing software that burst into mainstream popularity during a time when workers and students needed to engage in face-to-face communication while isolated at home.

While initially Zoom gave us insight into the bedrooms, kitchens, lounges, pets, laundry habits, and family lives of our colleagues, peers, and friends, the trend quickly became to use virtual backgrounds to obscure one’s sense of place – as though we were communicating from nowhere, or from a fabricated somewhere, rather than from our couches and kitchen tables.

And then there was American scientist Gretchen Goldman. In September 2020, Goldman was interviewed on CNN, giving expert commentary on a political matter (as it happens, the appointment of then-US-President Donald Trump to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). Appearing on the live program, she epitomised working-from-home professionalism, with neat hair and makeup, a smart yellow jacket, and a carefully curated (but real) background showing a white wall with tasteful framed photographs.

The following day, Goldman posted to Twitter an image showing her actual surrounds, all that couldn’t be seen beyond the screen – a makeshift desk consisting of two chairs and a coffee table; a living room strewn with children’s toys; and professional attire that ceased to exist from the waist down. You can read more about her story in this article from Slate magazine. Goldman’s post was captioned “Just so I’m being honest”, and sparked a trend of “being honest” about one’s background and surrounds while using Zoom.

This is just one expression of the way communication in digital spaces can be very fabricated and artificial but it is also grounded in real lives and real places (whether these are obscured or revealed, acknowledged or avoided).