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| Saturday, June 9, 2007 |
| Em Grifin chapter 6 |
Expectancy Violations
Theory
of Judee Burgoon
Early in my teaching career, I was walking back to my office, puzzling over classroom conversations with four students. All four had made requests. Why, I wondered, had I readily agreed to two requests but just as quickly turned down two others? Each of the four students had spoken to me individually during the class break. Andre wanted my endorsement for a graduate scholarship, and Dawn invited me to eat lunch with her the next day. I said yes to both of them. Belinda asked me to help her on a term paper for a class with another professor, and Charlie encouraged nu• to play water polo With guys fron, hi, h„u.,• that night. I said no to those requests.
Sitting down at my desk, I idly flipped through the pages of Httrrton Corrurutnicntion Research (HCR), a relatively new behavioral science journal that had arrived in the morning mail. I was still mulling over m), uneven response to the students when my eyes zeroed in on an article entitled "A Communication Model of Personal Space Violations."' "That's it," I blurted out to our surprised department secretary. I suddenly realized that in each case my response to the student may have been influenced by the conversational distance between us.
I mentally pictured the four students making their requests-each from a distance that struck me as inappropriate in one way or another. Andre was literally in my face, less than a foot away. Belinda's 2-foot interval invaded my personal space, but not as much. Charlie stood about 7 feet away-just outside the range I would have expected for a let's-get-together-and-have-some-fun-thathas-nothing-to-do-with-school type of conversation. Dawn offered her luncheon invitation from across the room. At the time, each of these interactions had seemed somewhat strange. Now I realized that all four students had violated my expectation of an appropriate interpersonal distance.
FIGURE 6-1 Expectancy Violations in a Classroom Setting
Consistent with my practice throughout this book, I've changed the names of these former students to protect their privacy. In this case, I've made up names that start with the letters A, B, C, and D to represent the increasing distance between us when we spoke. (Andre was the closest; Dawn, the farthest away.) Figure 6-1 plots the intervals relative to my expectations.
Judee Burgoon, a communication scholar at the University of Arizona, wrote the journal article that stimulated my thinking. The article was a follow-up piece on the nonverbal expectancy violations model that she had introduced in HCR two years earlier. Since my own dissertation research focused on interpersonal distance, I knew firsthand how little social science theory existed to guide researchers studying nonverbal communication. I was therefore excited to see Burgoon offering a sophisticated theory of personal space. The fact that she was teaching in a communication department and had published her work in a communication journal was value added. I eagerly read Burgoon's description of her nonverbal expectancy violations model to see whether it could account for my mixed response ht the various atm rrsatiunal distances chosen by the four students.
PERSONAL SPACE EXPECTATIONS: CONFORM OR DEVIATE?
Burgoon defined personal space as the "invisible, variable volume of space surrounding an individual that defines that individual's preferred distance from others."2 She claimed that the size and shape of our personal space depend on our cultural norms and individual preferences, but it's always a compromise between the conflicting approach-avoidance needs that we as humans have for affiliation and privacy.
The idea of personal space wasn't original with Burgoon. In the 1960s, Illinois Institute of Technology anthropologist Edward Hall coined the term proxemics to refer to the study of people's use of space as a special elaboration of culture.} He entitled his book The Hidden Dimension because he was convinced that most spatial interpretation is outside our awareness. He claimed that Americans have four proxemic zones, which nicely correspond with the four interpersonal distances selected by my students:
IF TOU CAN READ THIS YOU’RE TOO CLOSE
1. Intimate diaanre: 0 to IS inches (Andre)
2. Personal distance 18 inchies to 4 feet (Belinda)
3. Social distance: 4 to Ill feet (Charlie)
4. Public distance: 10 feet to infinity (Dawn)
Hall's book is filled with examples of "ugly Americans," who were insensitive to the spatial customs of other cultures. He strongly recommended that in order to be effective, ice learn to adjust our nonverbal behavior to conform to the communication rules of our partner. We shouldn't cross a distance boundary uninvited.
In his poem "Prologue: The Birth of Architecture," poet W. H. Auden echoes Hall's analysis and puts us on notice that we violate his personal space at our peril:
Some thirty inches from my nose The frontier of my Person goes, And all the unfilled air between IS'private pagus or demesne. Stranger, unless with bedroom eyes I beckon you to fraternize, Beware of rudely crossing it: I have no gun, but I can spit.'
Burgoon's nonverbal expectancy violations model offered a counterpoint to Hall and Auden's advice. She didn't argue with the idea that people have definite expectations about how close others should come. In fact, she would explain Auden's 30-inch rule as based on well-established American norms plus the poet's own idiosyncracies. But contrary to popular go-along-to-get-along wisdom, Burgoon suggested that there are times when it's best to break the rules. She believed that under some circumstances, violating social norms and personal expectations is "a superior strategy to conformity."5
AN APPLIED TEST OF THE ORIGINAL MODEL
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Whether knowingly or not, each of the four students making a request deviated from my proxemic expectation. How well did Burgoon's initial model predict my responses to these four different violations? Not very well. So that you can capture the flavor of Burgoon's early speculation and recognize how far her current theory has come, I'll outline what the model predicted my responses would be and in each case compare that forecast to what I actually did.
Andre. According to Burgoon's early model, Andre made a mistake when he crossed my invisible "threat threshold" and spoke with me at an intimate eyeballto-eyeball distance. The physical and psychological discomfort I'd feel would hurt his cause. But the model missed on that prediction, since I wrote the recommendation later that day.
Belinda. In the follow-up article I read that day, Burgoon suggested that noticeable deviations from what we expect cause us to experience a heightened state of arousal. She wasn't necessarily referring to the heart-pounding, sweaty palms reaction that drives us to fight or flight. Instead, she pictured violations stimulating us to review the nature of our relationship with the person who acted in a curious way. that would be good news for Belinda if I thought of her as a highly rewarding person. But every comment she made in class seemed to me a direct challenge, dripping with sarcasm. Just as Burgoon predicted, the narrow, 2-foot gap Belinda chose focused my attention on our rocky relationship, and I declined her request for help in another course. Score one for the nonverbal expectancy.violations model.
Charlie. Charlie was a nice guy who cared more about having a good time than he did about studies. He knew I'd played water polo in college, but he may not have realized that his casual attitude toward the class was a constant reminder that I wasn't as good a teacher as I wanted to be. In her 1978 HRC article, Burgoon wrote that a person with "punishing power" (like Charlie) would do best to observe proxemic conventions or, better yet, stand slightly farther away than expected. Without ever hearing Burgoon's advice, Charlie did it right. He backed off to a distance of 7 feet-just outside the range of interaction I anticipated. Even so, I declined his offer to swim with the guys.
Dawn. According to this nonverbal expectancy violations model, Dawn blew it. Because she was an attractive communicator, a warm, close approach
would have been a pleasant surprise. But her decision to issue an invitation from across the room would seem to guarantee a poor response. The tarther she backed off, the worse the effect would be. There's only one problem with this analysis: Dawn and I had lunch together in the student union the following day.
Obviously, my attempt to apply Burgoon's original model to conversational distance between me and my students didn't meet with much success. The theoretical scoreboard read:
Nonverbal expectancy violations model: 1 Unpredicted random behavior: 3
Burgoon's first controlled experiments didn't fare much better. But where I was ready to dismiss the whole model as flawed, she was unwilling to abandon expectancy violation as a key concept in human interaction. At the end of her journal article she hinted that some of her basic assumptions might need to be tested and reevaluated.
Of course that was then; this is now. Over the last three decades Judee Burgoon and her students have crafted a series of sophisticated laboratory experiments and field studies to discover and explain the effects of expectancy violations. One of the reasons I chose to write about her theory is that the current version is an excellent example of ideas continually revised as a result of empirical disconfirmation. As she has demonstrated, in science failure can lead to success.
,CONVOLUTED MODEL BECOMES AN ELEGANT THEORY
When applied to theories, the term elegant suggests "gracefully concise and simple; admirably succinct."6 That's what expectancy violations theory has become. Burgoon has dropped concepts that were central in earlier versions that never panned out. Early on, for examplr..hwaharnioaned the idea of a "threat tliresli(ii(i." Even though that hypothetical boundan made intuitive sense, repeated experimentation failed to confirm its existence.
Burgoon's retreat from "arousal" as an explanatory mechanism has been more gradual. She originally stated that people felt physiologically aroused when their proxemic expectations were violated. Later she softened the concept to "an orienting response" or a mental "alertness" that focuses attention on the violator. She now views arousal as a side effect of a partner's deviation and no longer considers it a necessary link between expectancy violation and communication outcomes such as attraction, credibility, persuasion, and involvement.
By removing extraneous features, Burgoon has streamlined her model. By extending its scope, she has produced a complete theory. Her original nonverbal expectancy violations model was concerned only with spatial violations-a rather narrow f$cus. But by the mid-1980s, Burgoon had realized that proxemic behavior is part of an interconnected system of nonlinguistic cues. It no longer made sense to study interpersonal distance in isolation. She began to apply the model to a host of other nonverbal variables-facial expression, eye contact, touch, and body lean, for example. Burgoon continues to expand the range of expectancy violations. While not losing interest in nonverbal communication, she now applies
the theorv to em(,,ional, marital. and intercultural communication as tvell. Consistent with this broad sweep, she has dropped the nonverbal qualifier and refers to her theory as "expectancy violations theory" and abbreviates it EVT. From this point on, so will I.
What does EVT predict? Burgoon sums up her empirically driven conclusions in a single paragraph. It is my hope that my long narrative account of the theory's development will he:p you appreciate the almost 30 years of work that lie behind these simple lines.
Expectancies exert significant influence on people's interaction patterns, on their impressions of one another, and on the outcomes of their interactions. Violations of expectations in turn may arouse and distract their recipients, shifting greater attention to the violator and the meaning of the violation itself. People who can assume that they are well regarded by their audience are safer engaging in violations and more likely to profit from doing so than are those who are poorly regarded. When the violation act is one that is likely to be ambiguous in its meaning or to carry multiple interpretations that are not uniformly positive or negative, then the reward valence of the communicator can be especially significant in moderating interpretations, evaluations, and subsequent outcomes.... In other cases, violations have relatively consensual meanings and valences associated with them, so that engaging in them produces similar effects for positive- and negative-valenced communicators.7
CORE CONCEPTS OF EVT
A close reading of Burgoon's summary suggests that EVT offers a "soft determinism" rather than hard-core universal laws (see Chapter 1). The qualifying terms may, rnore likely, can be, and relatively reflect her belief that too many factors affect Communication to allow us ever to discover simple cause-and-effect relationships. She does, however, hope to show a link among surprising interpersonal behavior and attraction, credibility, influence, and involvement. These are the potential outcomes of expectancy violation that Burgoon and her students explore. In order for us to appreciate the connection, we need to understand three core concepts of EVT: expectancy, violation valence, and connnunicntor reward valence. I'll illustrate these three variables by referring back to my students' proxemic behavior and to another form of nonverbal communication-touch.
Expectancy
When I was a kid, my mother frequently gave notice that she expected me to be on my best behavior. I considered her words to be a wish or a warning rather than a forecast of my future actions. That is not how Burgoon uses the word. She and her colleagues "prefer to reserve the term 'expectancy' for what is predicted to occur rather than what is desired."8 Figure 6-1 shows that I anticipated conversations with students to take place at a distance of 2t4 to 6 feet. How did this expectation arise? Burgoon suggests that I processed the context, type of relationship, and
characteristics of the others automatically in my mind so that I could gauge what they might do.
Context begins with cultural norms. Three feet is too close in England or Germany yet too far removed in Saudi Arabia, where you can't trust people who won't let you smell their breath. Context also includes the setting of the conversation. A classroom environment dictates a greater speaking distance than would be appropriate for a private chat in my office.
Relationship factors include similarity, familiarity, liking, and relative status In one study, Burgoon discovered that people of all ages and stations in life anticipate that lower-status people will keep their distance. Because of our age difference and teacher-student relationship, I was more surprised by Andre and Belinda's invasion of my personal space than I was by Charlie and Dawn's remote location.
Communicator characteristics include all of the age/sex/place-of-birth demographic facts asked for on application forms, but they also include personal features that may affect expectation even more-physical appearance, personality, and communication style. Dawn's warm smile was a counterpoint to Belinda's caustic comments. Given this difference, I would have assumed that Dawn would be the one to draw close and Belinda the one to keep her distance. That's why I was especially curious when each woman's spatial "transgression" was the opposite of what I would have predicted.
We can do a similar analysis of my expectation for touch in that classroom situation. Edward Hall claimed that the United States is a"noncontact culture," so I wouldn't anticipate touch during the course of normal conversation.' Does this mean that Latin American or southern European "contact cultures" wouldn't have tight expectations for nonverbal interaction? By no means; Burgoon is convinced that all cultures have a similar structure of expected communication behavior but that the content of those expectations can differ markedly from culture to culture. Touch is fraught with mranin~; in rvrrv society, but the who, when, where, and how of touching area rn.rtt- r~~t , ulturr-spocifii standard and ru~tom:.
As a male in a rulr rcl.ittcm~fuh, it never Occurred to me that student.,; might make physical contact while voicing their requests. If it had, Dawn would have been the likely candidate. But at her chosen distance of 25 feet, she'd need to be a bionic woman to reach me. As it %vas, I would have been shocked if she'd violated my expectation and walked over to give me a hug. (As a lead-in to the next two sections, note that I didn't say 1would have been disturbed, distressed, or disgusted.)
Violation Valence
The term violation valence refers to the positive or negative value we place on a specific unexpected behavior, regardless of who does it. Do we find the act itself pleasing or distressing, and to what extent? With her commitment to the scientific method, Burgoon may have borrowed the concept of valence from chemistry, where the valence of a substance is indicated by a number and its sign (+3 or -2,
~ for example). The term net worth from the field of accounting seems to capture the same idea.
We usually give others a bit of wiggle room to deviate from what we regard as sta;;dard operatir,g procedure. But once we deal with someone who acts outside the range of expected behavior, we switch into an evaluation mode. According to Burgoon, we first try to interpret the meaning of the violation, and then figure out whether we like it.
The meaning of some violations is easy to spot. As a case in point, no one would agonize over how to interpret a purposeful poke in the eye with a sharp stick. It's a hostile act, and if it happened to us, we'd be livid. Many nonverbal behaviors are that straightforward. For example, moderate to prolonged eye contact in Western cultures usually communicates awareness, interest, affection, and trust. A level gaze is welcome; shifty eyes are not. With the exception of a riveting stare, we value eye contact. Even Emerson, a man of letters, wrote, "The eyes of men converse as much as their tongues, with the advantage that the ocular dialect needs no dictionary.... "10
When a behavior has a socially recognized meaning, communicators can easily figure out whether to go beyond what others expect. If the valence is negative, do less than expected. If the valence is positive, go further. Burgoon validated this advice when she studied the effect of expectancy on marital satisfaction." She questioned people about how much intimate communication they expected from their partner compared to how much focused conversation they actually got. Not surprisingly, intimacy was ranked as positive. Partners who received about as much intimacy as they expected were moderately satisfied with their marriages. But people were highly satisfied with their marriages when they had more good talks with their husbands or wives than they originally thought they would.
On the other hand, some expectancy violations are ambiguous and open to multiple interpretations. For example, the meaning of unexpected touch can be puzzling. Is it a mark of total involvement in the conversation, a sign of warmth and affection, a display of dominance, or a sexual move? Distance violations can also he confusing- Andre isn't from the Middle East, so why was he standing so close? I don't bark or bite, so why did Dawn issue her invitation from across the room? According to EVT, it's at times like these that we consider the reward valence of the communicator as well as the valence of the violation.
Before we look at the way communicator reward valence fits into the theory, you should know that Burgoon has found few nonverbal behaviors that are ambiguous when seen in a larger context. A touch on the arm might be enigmatic in isolation, but when experienced along with close proximity, forward body lean, a direct gaze, facial animation, and verbal fluency, almost everyone interprets the physical contact as a sign of high involvement in the conversation.1z Or consider actor Eric Idle's words and nonverbal manner in a Monty Python sketch. He punctuates his question about Terry Gilliam's wife with a burlesque wink, a leering tone of voice, and gestures to accompany his words: "Nudge nudge. Know what I mean? Say no more ... know what I mean?"13 Taken alone, an exaggerated wink or a dig with the elbow might have many possible meanings, but as part of a coordinated routine, both gestures clearly transform a questionable remark into a lewd comment.
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There are times, hovever, when nonverbal expectancy violations are truly equivocal. The personal space deviations of my students are cases in point. Perhaps I just wasn't sensitive enough to pick up the cues that would help me make sense of their proxemic violations. But when the meaning of an action is unclear, EVT says that we interpret the violation in light of how the violator can affect our lives.
Communicator Reward Valence
EVT is not the only theory that describes the human tendency to size up other people in terms of the potential rewards they have to offer. Social penetration theory suggests that we live in an interpersonal economy in which we all "take stock" of the relational value of others we meet (see Chapter 8). The questions What can you do for me? and What can you do to me? often cross our minds. Burgoon is not a cynic, but she thinks the issue of reward potential moves from the background to the foreground of our minds when someone violates our expectation and there's no social consensus as to the meaning of the act. She uses the term communicator reward valence to label the results of our mental audit of likely gains and losses.
The reward valence of a communicator is the sum of the positive and negative attributes that the person brings to the encounter plus the potential he or she has to reward or punish in the future. The resulting perception is usually a mix of good and bad and falls somewhere on a scale between those two poles. I'll illustrate communicator characteristics that Burgoon frequently mentions by reviewing one feature of each student that I thought about immediately after their perplexing spatial violations.
Andre was a brilliant student. Although writing recommendations is low on my list of fun things to do, I would bask in reflected glory if he were accepted into a top graduate program.
Belinda had a razor-sharp mind and a tongue to match. I'd already felt the sting of her verbal Imrb-~ and thought that thinly veiled criti, ism in the future was a distinct pu>•ihtlfh
Charlie was the classic goof-off-seldom in class and never prepared. I try to be evenhanded with everyone who signs up for my classes, but in Charlie's case I had to struggle not to take his casual attitude toward the course as a personal snub.
Dawn was a beautiful young woman with a warm smile. I felt great pleasure when she openly announced that I was her favorite teacher.
My views of Andre, Belinda, Charlie, and Dawn probably say more about me than they do about the four students. I'm not particularly proud of my stereotyped assessments, but apparently I have plenty of company in the criteria I used. Burgoon notes that the features that impressed me also weigh heavily with others when they compute a reward valence for someone who is violating their expectations. Status, ability, and good looks are standard "goodies" that enhance the other person's reward potential. However, the thrust of the conversation is even more important. Most of us value words that communicate acceptance, liking, appreciation, and trust. We're turned off by talk that conveys disinterest, disapproval, distrust, and rejection.
Why does Burgoon think that the expectancy violator's power to reward or punish is so crucial? Because puzzling violations force victims to search the social context for clues to their meaning." Thus, an ambiguous violation embedded in a host of rationally warm signals takes on a positive cast. An equivocal violation from a punishing communicator stiffens our resistance.
Now that I've outlined EVT's core concepts of expectancy, violation valence, and communicator reward valence, you can better understand the bottom-line advice that Burgoon's theory offers. Should you communicate in a totally unexpected way? If you're certain that the novelty will be a pleasant surprise, the answer is yes. But if you know that your outlandish behavior will offend, don't do it.
When you aren't sure how others will interpret your far-out behavior, let their overall attitude toward you dictate your verbal and nonverbal actions. So if like Belinda and Charlie you have reason to suspect a strained relationship, and the meaning of a violation might be unclear, stifle your deviant tendencies and do your best to conform to expectations. But when you know you've already created a positive personal impression (like Andre or Dawn), a surprise move not only is safe; it probably will enhance the positive effect of your message.
INTERACTION ADAPTATION-BURGOON'S NEXT FRONTIER
As evidence of its predictive power, EVT has been used to explain and predict attitudes and behaviors in a wide variety of communication contexts. These include students' perceptions of their instructors, patients' responses to health care providers, and individuals' actions in romantic relationships. For example, Arizona State University communication professor Paul Mongeau has studied men and women's expectations for first dates and compares those expectations with their actual experiences.'' He discovered that men are pleasantly surprised when a woman initiates a first date and that they usually interpret such a request as a sign that she's interested in sexual activity. But there's a second surprise in store for nuo~,t Of these guys When it turns out that they have less physical intimacy than thrv do on the traditional male-initiated first date. We might expect that men's disappointment would put a damper on future dates together, but surprisingly it doesn't.
For Mongeau, EVT explains how dating partners' expectations are affected by who asks out whom. Yet unlike early tests of EVT, Mongeau's work considers how one person's actions might reshape a dating partner's perceptions after their time together-a morning after the night-before adjustment of expectations. In the same way, Burgoon has reassessed EVT's single-sided view and now favors a dyadic model of adaptation. That's because she regards conversations as more akin to duets than solos. Interpersonal interactions involve synchronized actions rather than unilateral moves. Along with her former students Lesa Stern and Leesa Dillman, Burgoon has crafted interaction adaptation theory as an extension and expansion of EVT.'6
Burgoon states that human beings are predisposed to adapt to each other. That's often necessary, she says, because another person's actions may not square with the thoughts and feelings that we bring to our interaction. She sees this initial interaction lrosirioa as made up of three factors: requirements, expectations, and desires. Reqnire•n:ents are the outcomes that fulfill our basic needs to survive, be safe, belong, and have a sense of self-worth. These are the panhuman motivations that Abraham Maslow outlined in his hierarchy of needs." As opposed to requirements that represent what we need to happen, expectations as defined in EVT are what we think really will happen. Finally, desires are what we personally would like to see happen. These three factors coalesce or meld into our interaction position of what's needed, anticipated, and preferred. I'll continue to use touch behavior to show how Burgoon uses this composite mindset to predict how we adjust to another person's behavior.
I'm a "people person" who places a high value on close relationships-a requirement. When I get together with my friend Bob, we usually greet each other with a simultaneous clasp of each other's elbow or a side-by-side shoulder hug, physical contact more intimate than a formal handshake-an expectation. I'd like our nonverbal behavior to convey the enjoyment I think we both feel when we get together-a personal desire. Suppose Bob were to walk up to me with widespread arms to give me a bear hug for the first time in our relationship. This move would be somewhat discrepant from my interaction position, so I'd need to adapt my response in some way. What would I do?
Because I regard Bob's action as more positive than my interaction position, interaction adaptation theory predicts I would either reciprocate his warm approach or at least adjust my behavior in the direction of more intimacy. That means that I'd make the bear hug mutual, or perhaps give an enthusiastic shoulder hug that's longer and firmer than Usual. Conversely, if I liked my interaction position better than Bob's effusive action, I'd compensate by merely going through the motions in a half-hearted way or back off completely. The same principle of compensation would apply if Bob greeted me without any physical touch. I'd try to reestablish our previous level of nonverbal closeness, or at least move to shake hi~ hand .
:\f,out .i decade ago Bur};oon outlined two shortcomings of expectancy violations theun that she found particularly troubling:
First, EVT does not fully account for the overwhelming prevalence of reciprocity that has been found in interpersonal interactions. Second, it is silent on whether communication valence supersedes behavior valence or vice versa when the two are incongruent (such as when a disliked partner engages in a positive violation.1w
Interaction adaptation theory is Burgoon's attempt to address these problems within the broader framework of ongoing behavioral adjustments. There's obviously more to the theory than I've been able to present, but hopefully this brief sketch lets you see that for Burgoon one theory leads to another.
CRITIQUE: WORK IN PROGRESS
I have a friend who fixes my all-terrain cycle whenever I bend it or break it. "What do you think?" I ask Bill. "Can it be repaired?" His response is always the same: "Man made it! Man can fix it!"
Judee Burgoon shows the same resolve as she seeks to adjust and redesign n expectancy violations model that never quite works as well in practice as its theoretical blueprint says it should. Almost every empirical test she runs seems to yield mixed results. For example, her early work on physical contact suggested that touch violations were often ambiguous. However, a sophisticated experiment she ran in 1992 showed that unexpected touch in a problem-solving situation was almost always welcomed as a positive violation, regardless of the status, gender, or attractiveness of the violator.
Do repeated failures to predict outcomes when a person stands far away, moves in too close, or reaches out to touch someone imply that Burgoon ought to trade in her expectancy violations theory for a new model? Does interaction adaption theory render EVT obsolete? From my perspective, the answer is no.
Taken as a whole, Burgoon's expectancy violations theory continues to meet four of the five criteria of a good scientific theory, as presented in Chapter 3. Her theory advances a reasonable explanation for the effects of expectancy violations during communication. The explanation she offers is relatively simple and has actually become less complex over time. The theory has testable hypotheses that the theorist is willing to adjust when her tests don't support the prediction. Finally, the model offers practical advice on how to better achieve important communication goals of increased credibility, influence, and attraction. Could we ask for anything more? Of course.
We could wish for predicted effects of verbal and nonverbal violations that prove more reliable than the Farmer's Almanac forecast of long-range weather trends. A review of recent research suggests that EVT has reached that point. For example, a comparative empirical study tested how well three leading theories predict interpersonal responses to nonverbal immediacy-close proximity, touch, direct gaze, direct body orientation, and forward lean.jQ None of the theories proved to be right all the time, but expectancy violations theorv did better than tile other two. And for what it's worth, the revised EVT ex post facto scoreboard for niv responses to student proxemic violations now stands at four hits and fit) missc,.
QUESTIONS TO SHARPEN YOUR FOCUS
1. What Irroxernic advice would you give to communicators who believe they are
seen as unrewarding?
2. Except for ritual handshakes, touch is often unexpected in casual relationships. If you don't know someone well, what is the violation valence you ascribe to a light
touch on the arm, a brief touch on the cheek, or a shoulder hug?
3. EVT suggests that cornrnunicafor reward valence comes into play only when the violation valence is ambiguous or neutral. Even when experienced in context, what verbal or nonverbal expectancy violations would be unclear or confusing to you?
4. EVT and coordinated management of meaning (see Chapter 5) hold diverse
assumptions about the nature of knowledge, reality, and communication research. Can
you draw the distinctions?
selengkapnya
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| Monday, April 9, 2007 |
| Communication Technology : The New Media In Society / Everett M. Rogers 1986 |
Chapter 1
The Changing Nature of Human Communication
"Technological change has placed communication in the front lines of a social revolution."
William Paisley, 1985
The word technology comes from the Latin root texere, to weave or to construct. So technology should not be limited just to the use of machines, although this narrower meaning is often implied in everyday speech. Technology is a design for instrumental
action that reduces the uncertainty in the cause-effect relationships involved in achieving a desired outcome (Rogers, 1983, p. 12). A technology usually has both a hardware aspect (consisting of material or physical objects) and a software aspect (consisting of the information base for the hardware). For instance, we distinguish between computer hardware (consisting of semiconductors, electrical connections, and the metal frame to protect these electrical components) and computer software (consisting of the coded instructions that enable us to use this tool). Both the software and hardware are essential for any practical use of the computer, but because the hardware technology is more visible to the casual observer, we often think of technology mainly in hardware terms. It is an oversimplification to think of technology as an autonomous, isolated force that is disconnected from the rest of society (Slack, 1984) In this book, we stress the context of the new technologies of study.
One kind of technology -- communication technology -- is especially important in modern societies such as the United States. Communication technology is the hardware equipment, organizational structures, and social values by which individuals collect, process, and exchange information with other individuals. Certain communication technologies go back to the beginnings of human history, such as the invention of spoken language and such written forms as the pictographs on the walls of caves. Mass media technologies (with at least the potential for reaching a mass audience) date from the clay tablets of such early civilizations as the Sumerians and Egyptians. But technologies such as Gutenberg's movable-type printing press did not actually reach a mass audience until the 1830s, with the advent of the "penny press" in the United States. In the decades that followed, such electronic media technologies as film, radio, and television became important. These mass media technologies are mainly unidirectional, allowing one or a few individuals to convey a message to an audience of many. During the 1980s, a different kind of communication technology became important, and it facilitated the exchange of information on a many-to-many basis through computer-based communication systems. Whether you call it "the new communication technologies," "the new media," or "interactive communication," it is obvious that a very basic change is occurring in human communication.
All communication technology extends the human senses of touching, smelling, tasting, and (especially) hearing and seeing. Such extensions allow an individual to reach out in space and time, and thus obtain information that would not otherwise be available (McLuhan, 1965). Media technologies provide us with "a window to the world," and as a result we know more about distant events than we could ever experience directly.
Nature of the New Communication Technologies
The key technology underlying all the other new communication technologies is electronics. Electronics technology these days allows us to build virtually any kind of communication device that one might wish, at a price (Pool, 1983a, p. 6). One special characteristic of the 1980s is the increased number and variety of new communication technologies that are becoming available. Further, and more important, is the nature of how these new. media function most are for many-to-many information exchanges. Their interactive nature is made possible by a computer element that is contained in these new technologies. In fact, what marks the new communication technologies of the post-1980s era as special is not just the availability of such single new technologies as microcomputers and satellites, but the combining of these elements in entirely new types of communication systems -- for example, the use of satellites to deliver a wide variety of programming to cable television systems. Certain cable TV systems, such as Qube in Columbus, Ohio, are interactive (allowing household users to send, as well as receive, messages) because they utilize a computer at the head-end of the cable system.
Communication technology has had a very strong impact on the nature of scholarly research on human communication. The issues studied by communication scientists over the past forty years have been affected by the changing nature of communication (as we will show in Chapter 3). In the past, the basic division of the scholarly field of communication has been a dichotomy on the basis of channel: interpersonal channels, which involve a face-to-face exchange between two or more individuals, versus mass media channels, all those means of transmitting messages such as radio, television, newspapers, and so on, which enable a source of one or a few individuals to reach an audience of many. This classification is mainly on the basis of the size of the audience, with interpersonal channels reaching from one individual up to a small group of fifteen to twenty. Now, scholars (Dominick, 1983, p. 14) recognize a third category, "machine-assisted interpersonal communication," that has certain qualities of both mass media and interpersonal channels yet is different in several important ways from either one (Chapter 2). An example of such machine-assisted interpersonal communication is the telephone it does not fit into either category of mass media or interpersonal channels because it is neither face-to-face nor one-to-many. Examples of newer communication technologies are: teleconferencing networks, electronic messaging systems, computer bulletin boards, and interactive cable television.
The new interactive technologies have been available only for several years, and they have not yet become very widely adopted in the United States. Their potential impact, however, is quite high. By 1985, about half of American households had cable television, although only a few cable systems were interactive. Less than 1 percent of American households have videotext or teletext. Over the past decade, 20 percent of households accepted video cassette recorders (VCRs) around 15 percent have at least one microcomputer, and in 1985 about 25 percent of the U.S. work force used computers as their primary work tool. From 1980 to 1985, about 95 percent of American elementary and high schools adopted computers, although less than 10 percent: of the students were enrolled in a class in which microcomputers were used. So the interactive communication technologies are off to a fast start. But just a start.
What is different about human communication as a result of the new technologies?
1. All of the new communication systems have at least a certain degree of interactivity, something like a two-person, face-to-face conversation. Interactivity is the capability of new communication systems (usually containing a computer as one component) to "talk back" to the user, almost like an individual participating in a conversation. The new media are interactive in a way that the older, one-to-many mass media could not be the new media can potentially reach many more individuals than if they were just face-to-face, although their interactivity makes them more like interpersonal interaction. So the new media combine certain features of both mass media and interpersonal channels.
Interactivity is an inherent property of the communication process, not just of the communication technology itself, and is thus a unique communication concept (Rafaeli, 1984 and 1985). The exact degree to which computer-based communication can approach human interaction is an important question. One measurement of the ability of computers to think is the Turing test, in which a computer's intelligence is measured by its performance in responding to conversational questions in comparison to human performance in the same tasks. Obviously, not all computer communication is interactive in fact, not all human face-to-face communication behavior is interactive if interactivity means a two -- way exchange of utterances in which the third remark in a series is influenced by the bearing of the second on the first. Sheizaf Rafaeli (1984) poses this interesting illustration of a three-message exchange: (1) a sign on a candy machine catches an individual's attention (2) the individual inserts 35 cents in the machine: (3) the machine dispenses a candy bar. Are candy machines interactive communication media? No, because they are not "intelligent." The third response is not predicated on the bearing of the second exchange on the first. Here we see that not all two-way exchanges are necessarily interactive automatic, mechanical reaction is not the same as mutual responsiveness. Human response implies listening, attentiveness, and intelligence in responding to a previous message exchange.
Interactivity is a desired quality of communication systems because such communication behavior is expected to be more accurate, more effective, and more satisfying to the participants in a communication process. These advantages usually come at the cost of more communication message exchanges and the greater time and effort required for the communication process (Rafaeli, 1984).
So the most distinctive single quality of the new media is their interactivity, indicating their basic change in the directionality of communication from the one-way, one-to-many flow of the print and electronic mass media of the past century. In interactive communication systems, the individual is active rather than completely passive or reactive.
2. The new media are also de-massified, to the degree that a special message can be exchanged with each individual in a large audience. Such individualization likens the new media to face-to-face interpersonal communication, except that they are not face-to-face. The high degree of de-massification of the new communication technologies means that they are, in this respect at least, the opposite of mass media. De-massification means that the control of mass communication systems usually moves from the message producer to the media consumer.
3. The new communication technologies are also asynchronous, meaning they have the capability for sending or receiving a message at a time convenient for an individual. For example, say that an electronic message is sent to you on a computer teleconferencing network you may receive it on your home or office computer whenever you log-on. Unlike a telephone call, electronic messaging systems avoid the problem of "telephone tag," which occurs when you call someone who is unavailable, then when they return your call you are unavailable, etc. Only about 20 percent of business calls directly reach the individual being telephoned. In new communication systems, the participants do not need to be in communication at the same time. The asynchronicity of computer-based communication means that individuals can work at home on a computer network and thus make their workday more flexible. The new media often have the ability to overcome time as a variable affecting the communication process.
I have a friend who likes to watch the "CBS Evening News with Dan Rather," but he seldom gets home from work in time to see the broadcast. My friend is one of the 20 percent of American households who owned a video cassette recorder by the mid-1980s. So whenever he arrives on his doorstep, Dan Bather and the CBS evening News is waiting for him. This time-shifting ability of many of the new communication technologies is one aspect of asynchronicity. In addition to video cassette recorders, computer-based communication systems and several of the other new media have this time-shifting capacity.
Asynchronicity is part of the shift of control from the source to the receiver in a communication system in this case the control of time is put in the hands of the receiving individual. With increasing frequency, this person can determine the most convenient time to receive a message. Automated teller machines (ATMs) allow one to bank in an asynchronous way instead of being a slave to my banker's hours, I can now do my banking twenty-four hours a day. Such added convenience is an important reason for the widespread adoption of ATMs by the American public. Telephone-answering machines also provide this time-shifting and/or time-expanding ability to many.
There are other differences between the new communication technologies and their older counterparts of radio, television, and film many of the differences stem indirectly from such fundamental distinctions as the interactivity, asynchronicity, and de-massification of the new media. The new media represent an expanded accessibility for individuals in the audience, with a wider range of alternative conduits by which information is transmitted and processed. Further, the format or the manner of display of information is changing (Compaine, 1981). Finally, compared to the one-way media, the contents of new communication technologies are more likely to be informational, rather than just entertainment.
Implications for Communication Research
The new communication technologies have elevated the field of communication research to a high level of importance in human society. Public and private policy issues swirl around the results of research being conducted on the new technologies: international competition and trade conflicts in high-technology the transition from an Industrial Society to an Information Society and growing concern with socioeconomic and gender inequalities, unemployment, and other social problems that result from the impacts of the new communication technologies.
Each of the three main characteristics of the new communication technologies has implications for the conduct of communication research (as we detail in Chapter 7):
1. The interactivity of the new media is made possible by computers, which provide new data and allow use of different data-gathering and analysis methodologies than in the past. The computer element in the new communications systems can retain a complete, word-for-word record of all communication messages in its memory. This record is available for analysis by communication scholars, who in the past have seldom had access to such a gold mine of data about human interaction.
2. The individualized, de-massified nature of the new media makes it almost impossible to investigate a new communication system's effects using the linear-effects paradigm followed in much past research on mass media communication, where a relatively standardized content of the media could be assumed (at least to the extent that the same messages were available to everyone in the audience). With the new media, message content becomes a variable each individual may receive quite different information from an interactive communication system.
Consider the some 3,000 scholarly research publications on the effects of television violence on children. This inquiry has followed generally a linear, one-way model of communication, exploring whether a consequence of the violent content of children's television programming is aggressive behavior by youthful viewers. Most American children are exposed to the same dose of violent television content. Could this research approach be used to study the effects of the highly individualized content of a computer bulletin board? No. Conventional research methodologies and the traditional models of human communication are inadequate. That's why the new communication technologies represent a new ball game for communication research.
3. The asynchronous nature of the new communication systems also implies major changes in communication research and theory. This lack of time-boundedness makes such machine-assisted interpersonal communication more similar to certain mass communication (you can read today's newspaper today or tomorrow) than is face-to-face interpersonal communication, although its two-person nature is similar to interpersonal exchange. Such asynchronous communication forces researchers to give more attention to time as a variable than they have in the past when the over-time, process nature of communication was almost entirely ignored, perhaps because past communication research methods are suited best to gathering one-shot data and analyzing it with cross-sectional statistical methods.
A technological determinist (someone who feels that technology is the main cause of social changes in society) might attribute the fundamental changes beginning to take place in human communication as being entirely due to the new information technologies, particularly computers. Many changes can indeed be traced to the new technologies, but the way in which individuals use the technologies is driving the Information Revolution now occurring in the United States (and in most other Western nations as well as Japan). Thus, this book takes a human behavioral approach to understanding the nature of communication technologies, focusing especially on two overriding issues:
1. Adoption. Here, the main research questions include: Who adopts (purchases) a new communication technology (as compared to who does not)? Why do they adopt? What is the rate of adoption of a new technology? What will it likely be in the future? How could the rate of adoption be speeded up or slowed down? Are individuals (or households or organizations) who adopt one new communication technology also likely to adopt other new communication technologies? Is there a key communication technology (for example, the home computer) that triggers the adoption of other communication technologies?
2. Social Impacts. Here the main research questions include: What are the direct, intended, and recognized effects or consequences of a new communication technology? What are the indirect, unintended, and unrecognized effects or consequences? How do the new communication technologies affect the older technologies of communication (for example, how will the telephone be changed by its increasing use for transmitting computer data)? Do the new communication technologies widen the gaps between the information-rich (who are usually the first to adopt) and the information-poor (who adopt later, if at all)?
These two broad research issues are discussed in Chapters 4 and 5, respectively.
The new communication technologies occur in a sociocultural context other factors (such as governmental policies) accompany the technology. So, is it the new communication technologies, or the variables accompanying them, that cause the social impacts? It is difficult to separate the social impacts of the new technologies from those of their context. Therefore, we consider both communication technologies and their context as explanations of social change. In this book, we are soft technological determinists, viewing technology along with other factors as the causes of change.
After reviewing the history of communication research, my former Stanford University colleague William Paisley concluded: "Technological change has placed communication on the front lines of a social revolution" (Paisley, 1985, p. 34). I agree. How adequately are communication scholars prepared for this new leadership role? Not very, I think. The new technologies demand an epistemological change in communication research, a paradigm shift (as we argue in Chapter 6).
Linear models of communication, based on source-message-channel-receiver components (Shannon and Weaver, 1949), may have been fairly appropriate for investigating the effects of one-way mass media communication (Chapter 3). And, in fact, such effects-oriented research has been the main preoccupation of mass communication scholars for the past forty years or so. But the interactivity of the new communication technologies forces us to follow a model of communication as convergence, the mutual process of information exchange between two or more participants in a communication system (Rogers and Kincaid, 1981). Such convergence communication behavior implies that it it impossible to think of a "source" and "receiver" in a communication system with a high degree of interactivity. Instead, each individual is a "participant."
The distinctive aspects of the new information technologies are forcing basic changes in communication models and in research methodologies (Rice and Associates, 1984). More broadly, the new communication technologies, through their impacts in helping to create Information Societies, are leading to a new set of communication research issues that are beginning to be addressed by scholars. Thus, the Information Revolution is causing a scientific revolution in communication research.
Welcome to the Information Society
In recent years, the United States and several other highly advanced nations have passed through an important transition in the makeup of their work force, the basis of their economy, and in the very nature of their society. Information has become the vital element in the new society that has emerged, and so these nations are called Information Societies.
An Information Society is a nation in which a majority of the labor force is composed of information workers, and in which information is the most important element. Thus, the Information Society represents a sharp change from the Industrial Society in which the majority of the work force was employed in manufacturing occupations, such as auto assembly and steel production, and the key element was energy. In contrast, information workers are individuals whose main activity is producing, processing, or distributing information, and producing information technology. Typical information worker occupations are teachers, scientists, newspaper reporters, computer programmers, consultants, secretaries, and managers. These individuals write, teach, sell advice, give orders, and otherwise deal in information. Their main activity is not to raise food, to put together nuts and bolts, or to deal with physical objects.
Information is patterned matter-energy that affects the probabilities available to an individual making a decision. Information lacks a physical existence of its own it can only be expressed in a material form (such as ink on paper) or in an energy form (such as electrical impulses). Information can often be substituted for other resources, such as money and/or energy -- for example, "smart" household appliances that contain a microprocessor save expensive electrical power. Information behaves somewhat oddly as an economic resource in the sense that one can sell it (or give it away) and still have it. Because information is such an abstract phenomena, it is often difficult to perceive its crucial importance in modern society.
Changes in the Labor Force
Applications of the steam engine to manufacturing and transportation, beginning around 1750 in England, set off the Industrial Revolution that began the transition from an Agricultural Society to an Industrial Society. The Agricultural Society had been the dominant form for about 10,000 years up until this point (and most Third World nations are still Agricultural Societies today). The Industrial Revolution spread throughout most of Europe, to North America, and later to Japan. Figure 1-1 shows that the United States began to industrialize in the mid-1800s from 1900 to 1955, the largest part of the American work force was employed in industrial jobs. Then, in 1955, a historical discontinuity happened when industrial employment began to decrease and information workers became more numerous. Today they are in the majority. What occurred was a Communication Revolution, the social changes in society resulting from the impacts of communication technologies, especially the computer. While the United States led other nations in becoming an Information Society, Canada, England, Sweden, France, and other European nations are not far behind.
The best estimates (Strassmann, 1985, p. 56) available in the mid-1980s indicated that:
* 54 percent of the American work force are information workers.
* 63 percent of all equivalent working days in the U.S. are devoted to information work (the difference of 9 percent over the 54 percent of information workers is because about one-quarter of the time of all noninformation workers is devoted to information work, while almost nolle of information workers' time is involved in handling goods or materials).
* 67 percent of all labor costs in the U.S. are for information work, as information workers receive wages and benefits that are 35 percent higher than noninformation workers.
* 70 percent of work hours in the U.S. are devoted to information work, as information workers put in an average of 10 to 20 percent more work hours per week than do other occupations.
By any of these measures, the United States is definitely an Information Society. Will the recent trends toward information work level off by, say, the year 2000? Probably not. A basic factor in the Communication Revolution is the increasing availability of new information technologies, and many of these communication tools are only in partial use today, so their full impacts have not yet been felt. It is also certainly true that even newer communication technologies are yet to come.
From Massification to Individualization
Industrial Society was a mass society: mass production, mass media, mass culture. Standardization of products, assembly-line production, and returns-to-scale were aspects of this massification. An Information Society is a more individualized society, de-massified in nature. The new communication technologies make this so. "Such devices as teletext, viewdata, cassettes, cables, and videodiscs all fit the same emerging pattern: They provide opportunities for individuals to step out of the mass homogenized audiences of newspapers, radio, and television and take a more active role in the process by which knowledge and entertainment are transmitted through society" (Smith, 1980, p. 22). Such de-massification of mass media communication represents a shift in control, from the producer to the consumer.
This basic change is a fundamental aspect of the Communication Revolution, leading from the Industrial Society to the Information Society. Certain of the other important characteristics of these two types of societies, and of the Agricultural Society, are compared in Table 1-1.
Why Information? Why Now?
The transition of the United States to an Information Society has been the focus of considerable scholarly research. Such research questions have been pursued as (1) how best to index the progress of a nation toward becoming an Information Society (the percentage of the work force that are information workers is most frequently utilized), and (2) what social problems (for example, unemployment, inequality, and information overload) typically accompany the change to an Information Society. Unfortunately, little scholarly attention has been devoted to such fundamental issues concerning the Information Society as "Why information?" and "Why now?"
One theory to explain such "why" questions is proposed by James Beniger (in press), whose analysis suggests that the Information Society emerging in the United States since the mid-1950s results from social changes begun a century ago. In the 1850s, steam energy technology was applied to manufacturing and transportation, leading to the Industrial Revolution. The processing of material was greatly speeded up for example, the newly constructed railroads made it possible to move people and products around the nation relatively rapidly and at low cost. But the Industrial Revolution also led to a "crisis of control" around 1900 as the ability to control the new energy technologies lagged behind their widespread use. For instance, Beniger documents the problem of "lost" railroad cars during this period effective technologies for keeping track of the rolling stock did not keep up with the ability of the railway lines to physically move their cars around the country. The crisis of control created a need in America to exploit information activities. The technological means for doing so arrived in the post-World War II era with the computer and other communication technologies. So in recent years, according to Professor Beniger's theory, we have both the need for information-handling activities (stemming from the Industrial Revolution) and the technological tools to meet this need. The result is the Communication Revolution, and today's Information Society.
Certainly the technical advances in microelectronics that occurred in the 1970s and 1980s have spurred the Communication Revolution. But government policies favorable to the new communication technologies have also aided their rapid diffusion and adoption in recent years. For example, during the 1980s, the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) reversed its previous policies of protecting such existing mass media as broadcast television, usually at the expense of new technologies. The trend toward deregulatory policies on the part of the FCC has opened many parts of the communication industry to free competition. These hands-off policies generally aid the diffusion of the new communication technologies. Sometimes, however, deregulation can have the opposite effect, as in the case of videotext and teletext, whose development has been slowed by the FCC's refusal to select a standard (Singleton, 1983, p. 4). In any event, one cannot leave the role of government policies out of a thorough understanding of the Communication Revolution.
One might wonder if the U.S. will someday become a post-Information Society, whose prerequisites are now being created by the Communication Revolution. What will be the possible nature of this post-Information Society?
The Research University in the Information Society
Fundamental to the growth of the Information Society is the rise of knowledge industries that produce and distribute information, rather than goods and services (Machlup, 1962). The university produces information as the result of the research it conducts, especially basic research, and produces information-producers (individuals with graduate degrees who are trained to conduct research). This information-producing role is particularly characteristic of the fifty or so research universities in the United States. A research university is an institution of higher learning whose main function is to perform research and to provide graduate training.
The research university fulfills a role in the Information Society analogous to that of the factory in the Industrial Society. It is the key institution around which growth occurs, and it determines the direction of that growth. Each of the several major high-technology regions in the United States is centered around a research university: Silicon Valley and Stanford University in California Route 128 and MIT near Boston Research Triangle and the three main North Carolina universities (Duke, North Carolina State, and the Univ
Library of Congress subject headings for this publication: Telecommunication, Interactive computer systems, Interactive video, Teleconferencing, Videotex systems
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