'How are messages created?': Changes in thinking about communication theory leading to a new synthesis

In trying to answer the question ‘How are messages created?’ (Cobley 1994, p. 1) we can see that, within the discipline of communication and media studies, researchers have developed a number of ideas, models, concepts and theories to explain the phenomenon of communication itself: what it is, how it works and what are the implications of seeing things in those ways. These developments have covered objectivist, subjectivist, materialist, idealist, quantitative and qualitative frameworks. One can discern within that wealth of information certain schools of thought that have developed which have moved from thesis to antithesis and then to synthesis, as commonly attributed to Hegelian philosophy (Kaufmann 1978). For example, the process school can be seen as a well lodged thesis. It sees the transmission of information from one point to the next as the best way to describe communication (Fiske 1990). Its antithesis can be described as the cultural context school. This school insists the generation of meaning is not to be found in a linear act of communication, but is instead processed within particular cultural contexts and ‘markers of communication...will be read and evaluated differently by different people, depending on the cultural contexts they bring to any communication practice, and on the specific contexts in which that practice takes place’ (Schirato & Yell 2000, p. 8). These changes in thinking from school to school have led to some consideration that a synthesis of these two divergent ways of seeing communication may be proposed. Starting at the point of ontology and epistemology and then drawing predominantly on the work of Bourdieu, Csikszentmihalyi, and Rogers and Kincaid, it is suggested here that this synthesis may be found in seeing acts of communication in a similar manner to the way creativity and cultural production has been theorised in recent research, that is, acts of communication come into being as emergent properties of what may be best described as a system of communication at work.