INTRODUCTION . SELF . SOCIETY . SUBGROUPS . SOCIETY AND SELF .

SOCIETY

Imagine all of the people in the world:

One of the things that these people have in common is that they spend quite a bit of time communicating with one another. But on closer look, it turns out that all people don't communicate equally well with all others.

In fact, scholars are able to distinguish specific groups of people who tend to communicate among themselves much more often than with members of other groups. Furthermore, each of the groups tends to develop its own unique set of languages, values, and beliefs. Such groups are termed "societies".

Clearly, the study of human communication must occur within the context of human societies, and by taking this point of view, scholars have discovered that communication helps to establish the way of life of the people in each society, and in particular:

• each society is distinguished by its own unique characteristics; that is, each society has a way of life that is different from all other societies,

• a society involves cooperation on the part of its members,

• societies remain in existence over a long periods of time. 9501 9502 9503

We observe that societies are distinguishable from one another in various ways. For example, Japanese society is usually seen (by Americans) as highly communal while American society is usually seen (by Americans) as highly individualistic. Americans see both French and Japanese societies as materialistic, while Chinese society is usually seen as much less so. The French are seen as characteristically focused on food, fashion, and art - the British on commerce and industry - the Hindu on spirituality - and so on.

This implies that certain ideas, values, traditions and the like are shared by the members of one society but not others, or that some are more important in some societies than they are in others. We call these shared elements the culture of a society.

Of course these cultural characteristics do not necessarily apply to individuals within the society. Certainly there are communal Americans, materialistic Chinese and industrious French. It is important to see that when we take the societal point of view, we are not speaking of individuals but of the collective way of life of the group. Within a society communication acts to strengthen certain characteristics and lessen others. This is an interesting idea, and we will devote a later chapter of this book entirely to the subject of culture.

Communication among societies is difficult because the very differences that make the societies distinct -- languages, customs, meanings -- make the connection between sender and receiver difficult to establish. This, too, will be discussed at length in chapters to come.

We definitely believe that past societies such as the Roman, or Mayan, or Assyrian existed for long periods of time. Similarly, some current societies, such as the Chinese, or the Hindu, are believed to have existed for many centuries. This implies that the culture of a society is maintained through the participation of its members, and in some way preserved over the centuries. For a society to survive, its members must cooperate in this participation. A society whose members are in conflict will eventually change into a different society or disappear entirely. In later chapters we will also investigate the role of cooperation in the human communication process as well as the role of communication in maintaining the cooperative existence of societies.

SUBGROUPS

Societies often contain many smaller groups, some of which may contain even smaller groups, and so on. Communication takes on different aspects within these different groups. Here are some examples of such "sub-groups": 9517

• A family may be loosely defined as a group whose members live together, or have lived together, and who are closely connected through personal communication. Notice that, as with most definitions of groups, this one is problematical. Family, in this case, might include a single father and his children, a group of college roommates, a gay couple, or a professional baseball team. It also would imply that single individuals living alone are not families in and of themselves.

• An socioeconomic class is a group whose members are connected by their common occupational or economic status. For example, "blue-collar workers" identifies the group of people who work for an hourly wage, as opposed to "white-collar workers," who work for a yearly salary. Similarly, "the poor" identifies a group whose members have a very low level of wealth, while "the rich" identifies a group whose members have a very high level of wealth, and "the middle-class" identifies a group whose members are neither rich nor poor. 9506 9507

• An organization is a group whose members gather together periodically in the pursuit of some particular goal or task. A business is a form of organization, as is a club, a political party or a volleyball team. Smaller groups within organizations include such as divisions, departments, offices, and work-groups. A jargon is an example of a kind of specialized language that often develops within organizations to promote communication. 9510 9511 9512

• An ethnic group is a group of individuals connected by a common cultural heritage. Thus we might study communication within the Afro-American, the Italian, the Asian, or the Hispanic community. 9509

• A community is a group of people connected by virtue of their living in the same geographic area or, increasingly in our age of electronic communication, by means of a loose association with a common interest. Thus, the author of this book is a member of the community of Westminster, Maryland (because he lives there), is a member of the academic community of Western Maryland College (which is also an organization where he works), and is a member of the community of communication professors (which is world-wide in scope and is composed of those who study and teach about communication).

If we study a particular subgroup, we will find that it, too, contains subgroups. For example, a family may contain such as parents, children, grandparents, and distant relatives. Each of these subgroups will possess certain cultural characteristics and patterns of communication. A bit of thought will show that if scholars continued to break groups into subgroups, they eventually would find themselves studying communication among individuals -- and thus would have come full circle. 9513 9514

SOCIETY AND SELF

The result of these observations is that we find ourselves unable to say that the individual is more important to the study of communication than the group, or vice-versa - the two are inseparable. 9508 9515 9516

• SELF
  Communication occurs among individual human beings.
• SOCIETY
  Human communication occurs within the context of social groups.