Studying Communication Studies

A couple of weeks ago I was in a company of my friend's acquaintances when they were having a nice intelligent conversation about journalism. By some chance somebody switched TV to the FOXnews channel and the conversation among those highly liberal people became not only much bitter than it was before but also quite emberrassing for me.

"I'm wondering what did they study?" my friend asked pointing to the talking head on the screen  with disgust. "They must have got a degree in something but they don't quite understand anything!"

"I bet they have a degree in Communication," answered somebody.

"No doubt, indeed," everybody else agreed.

Luckily for me, my friend didn't revealed my embarrasment by telling everybody that they had just qualified me to apply for job at FOX.

Unfortunately for me and for everybody else who studies Communication, this opinion is rather a rule than an exception. 

If you search Google for Communication Degree the most popular results you would get would pose or answer the question "What can I do with a degree in Communication?" 

And as I understand it, this question is just another way to express uncertainty about what actually the field is.

Last week the Communication degree was relatively oftern mentioned in the news. A student of communication appeared on Obama's Forth Myers Town Hall Meeting to ask a question. Here is a video you might find amusing:

"I want to be a broadcaster or a disc jokey," he says honestly. And here it is, public understanding and attitude to what communication is and is meant to be.

Although this video makes me laugh every time I watch it, I find it less then funny to feel embarrassed every time I introduce myself as a graduate student in Communication.

According to Wikipedia, Communication Studies is

academic field that deals with processes of communication, commonly defined as the sharing of symbols over distances in space and time. Hence, communication studies encompasses a wide range of topics; for instance, the transmission of messages from one point to another through some medium of dissemination--such as face-to-face or conversation, television broadcasting, or the reading of records--but also with how institutions like libraries maintain information over time, how audiences interpret information, and the political, cultural, economic, and social dimensions of related topics.

I think the main difficulty for people to understand what the field actually is, lies in the concept that was of such a big concern for one of the discipline's pillar - Marshal McLuhan. He expressed that concept in the widely known phrase "Media is the message". The essens of this concept is mentioned in the Wikipedia article by the word "processes".

Communication studies processes of human communication but not its products or objects. It studies how different types and technologies of communication change with time and influence our culture.

I remember one of my professors at Fordham University Lance Strate said that communication studies the medium of human life, its culture similar to how biologists study medium and culture of life of microorganisms. This metaphor could give you a good illustration of how the field if actually important. Unless you think that studying bacterial life is more important than studying the life of humans.