Why this book? The usefulness of communication concepts

Just as communication as a practice is embedded in real places and contexts, communication theory is not separate from everyday life. Likewise, communication concepts are useful and applicable in both everyday and professional contexts.

This book is called Communication Concepts because it equips you with a set of thinking tools relating to communication, meaning-making, identity, and storytelling. It acknowledges the usefulness of theory – for theory provides us with a framework for understanding communication; a vocabulary for explaining and analysing communication processes and products; and a set of conceptual tools to help us in our work as both scholars and practitioners. Communication concepts are tools for sharing meaning in a complex world – they are also tools for understanding how, why, and what happens when meaning is shared.

In other words, the questions we should be asking about communication are not limited to “how can we do it better”? So this book invites you to adopt a researcher’s mindset, and to keep your critical thinking switched on.

Switch on your critical thinking

Someone once asked me, isn’t “critical thinking” really just the same as, well, thinking? This is a good question – the person was certainly applying their critical thinking, even if they didn’t realise it – so let’s be clear: critical thinking refers to a mindset where we take nothing for granted. When we’re thinking critically about communication, nothing is off the table: nothing is too small, too ordinary, too obvious or too obscure to be analysed. Everything is open to interpretation.

Critical thinking is a higher order of thinking where we inquire, interpret, and seek evidence to support our conclusions. As communication scholars applying our critical thinking, we can take messages apart and discover what makes them work, but through this process we can also discover the consequences of the message – how people, places, and events are represented; how ideas move, how power is enacted, how common sense is formed and how it can be un-formed. This is what it means to apply an academic mindset to the study of communication.

A researcher’s mindset

This book is the product of extensive research. It had to be: communication is a large and multifaceted topic. In order to write this book, I dug deeply into the many traditions of communication research. I engaged with recent scholarly work on communication in an age of digital networks, datafication, artificial intelligence, as well as social, political, and environmental crises. I also read countless works written in and for non-academic contexts about communication as a practice, a skill and an artform. I read, watched, and listened to experts – and non-experts – talk about what good communication looks like. It has been a fascinating journey that, for me, has unearthed many new ways of thinking as well as dusting off old theories to find the parts that still shine. I’ll share these insights in the chapters ahead.

But in the chapters ahead, you won’t just be hearing from me. My co-authors of this resource are communication students taking the Master of Communication course at Deakin University. Each of them has applied their unique perspective, cultural background, industry experience, and scholarly thinking to develop a case study showing communication concepts in action. So, in the chapters ahead, you’ll learn about collaboration, audiences, storytelling, identity, and meaning-making, but you’ll also read about women in sport, Doctor Who fandom, anthropomorphised animals in the Philippines, and news representations of Meghan Markle – and more.

You can read this book by moving from chapter to chapter, or you can use the contents page to guide you to the sections you’re most interested in. Either way, as a reader of this book, you have joined a community of scholarship: you are now part of a group of people who think deeply about communication, who are interested in the communication challenges that shape our world and who have risen to meet their own communication challenges as thinkers and practitioners.