First and foremost, I have to share this quote from chapter one that stuck out to me right off the bat: “Communication is one of those everyday activities intertwined with all of human life so completely that we sometimes overlook its pervasiveness, importance, and complexity” (Littlejohn, Foss, and Oetzel, 2017).
How freaking true is that! We take communication for granted sometimes, and don’t understand or appreciate the importance of it. For example, I have my best friend and I (pictured at Crowder’s Mtn. when she came to visit me) in this entry to show that we never take communication for granted because no matter the 650 mile distance, we never lose contact and I’ll always be thankful for that! But I know that for others that’s not always the same case, and even for me sometimes in certain situations!
In chapter one, Stephen Littlejohn, Karen A. Foss and John G. Oetzel (2017) explain that we need to treat communication as central to human life — I couldn’t agree more. He explains that there’s so many ways to define communication, which makes sense to me. Communication theory helps us see things we’ve never seen before and helps us understand things about our communication that we couldn’t explain before…which led me into chapter two.
In this chapter, I explored the four typologies used for organizing theories into larger frameworks to make sense of the discipline of communication as an area of inquiry (Littlejohn, Foss, and Oetzel, 2017). I resonated most with Robert Craig’s approach to organizing theories, specifically one of the seven traditions he describes when dividing the world of communication theory, the cybernetic tradition. This tradition is the tradition of complex systems in which interacting elements influence one another (Littlejohn et al., 2017). Isn’t this true of communication, especially in today’s society? This tradition made me think about how we are so influenced by what others are putting out into the world that we sometimes let that information influence us. But it is OUR individual decision to decide whether or not to let it!
Littlejohn, Stephen W., et al. Theories of Human Communication. Waveland Press, Inc., 2017.
Janae's Journey 