Communication Chain Research Articles

The Reference of a Proper Name and the Chain of Communication

The Reference of a Proper Name and the Chain of Communication

How Are Stereotypes Maintained Through Communication? The Influence of Stereotype Sharedness.

Recent research has suggested that interpersonal communication may be an important source of stereotype maintenance. When communicated through a chain of people, stereotype-relevant information tends to become more stereotypical, thus confirming the stereotypes held by recipients of communication. However, the underlying mechanisms of this phenomenon have yet to be fully determined. This article examines how the socially shared nature of stereotypes interacts with communication processes to maintain stereotypes in communication chains. In 3 experiments, participants communicated a stereotype-relevant story through 4-person chains using the method of serial reproduction. Manipulations included the extent to which communicators believed their audience and other community members shared and endorsed their stereotypes, and also the extent to which they actually shared the stereotypes. The shared nature of stereotypes was found to be a strong contributor to rendering the story more stereotypical in communication. This is discussed in relation to the maintenance of stereotypes through communication.

"1 + 1 = 3" and Other Dilemmas: Reading Vertigo in "Invisible Man", "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts", and "Song of Solomon"

... the metaphor of the chain of communication picks up the sense of contingency as contiguity, while the question of the link immediately raises the issue of contingency as the indeterminate. (Homi K. Bhabha 188) I won't even talk about the cultural heritage from Africa. (Ralph Ellison, Going to the Territory 66) By representing aporia, dislocation, and caesura through vernacular space, Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977) asserts that Amos Tutuola's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954) and Ralph Ellison's In visible Man (2952) constitute linked gestures toward the diasporic sensibility within which Morrison situates her own work. This strategy of foregrounding aporetic impasse and lapsed rhetorical connections addresses a significant tension in Ellison's work, recuperating an apparent blindness toward African retentions operating at the level of deep structure in his own text. Morrison's revision explores these moments of blindness in Ellison's text and exposes their contours. Relying on black vernacular motifs inspired by Ellison, Morrison's narrative strategy also reveals that, taken together, the three texts chart both individualized and collective evolutions of diaspora consciousness across national and geographic boundaries. These generational shifts reveal sites of neocolonial cultural arrest, rupture, and vi olence, thematized through a network of allusions to ascent, suspension, and rotation. In contemplating these representations as spatiotemporal features of diaspora culture, Song of Solomon constructs African diaspora subjectivity through what I will call an aesthetics of vertigo that reconfigures the of Black space. This usage of the term psychogeography posits, after Lefebvre, that, in the production of social space, foreclosed zones of resistance can be made habitable. (2) Such transgressive spaces are frequently represented through narratives of cultural chaos inscribed as incoherence and vertiginous anxiety, as in both Ellison and Tutuola. Morrison participates in these representations, but claims a route to equilibrium by rewriting vertigo as a liminal site of creative tension that can be better understood in the context of African diaspora cosmologies. These hybrid cosmologies which support her protagonist's acclimation to a vertiginous, diasporic subjectivity are derived primarily from Yoruba and related traditions, including Ifa, Vodoun, and hoodoo, and from archetypal figures within these traditions, particularly Obatala and Eshu. For the purposes of this essay, vertigo is an element in Ellison's and Tutuola's work that for Morrison becomes a vernacular event that reveals a habitable space organized by diasporic cosmologies, in which autopoesis, self-creation, can be realized. All three texts encode vertigo as more than inexplicable instances of perceptual disturbance. Vertigo captures the relationship of the internal experience of the colonized to the colonized environment. As the authors explore the uncharted spaces of diaspora subjectivity, they confront the unarticulated implications of vertigo as a cultural phenomenon. In environments organized by neo-colonialist constructions of race, the protagonists face unavoidable assaults on their humanity, sanity, and cultural coherence. In the aftermath of slavery, Tutuola's nameless protagonist occupies the emblematic position of having no right to describe myself (170). Milkman lack[s] coherence, a coming together of the features into a total self (Song 69). They experience the effects of colonialism and racism as psychological trauma, generally represented as fragmentation or splitting, framed by Du Boisian double-consciousness, as is evident when Tutuola's protagonist later comments, that we left ourselves on the road to beco ming slave and master (171). Because they inhabit places dominated by colonialist hegemonies that confront them with abnormally hostile negations, the protagonists lack spaces in which to redefine and voice themselves. …

The importance of communication in meeting consumer demands

Government, supermarkets, consumers, farming leaders and opinion formers all have a clear view of what primary producers and landowners should deliver in terms of the economic and environmental goods needed to maintain a sustainable, accessible and visually attractive countryside. The trouble is that while each may have a clear vision, it is not always the same vision.The key communication chains in the industry are between farmer-market-farmer; between farmer-taxpayer/consumer-farmer; between farmer-scientist-farmer and between farmer-government-farmer.

The ELectronic Society for Social Scientists: from journals as documents to journals as knowledge exchanges

The ELectronic Society for Social Scientists (ELSSS) envisages a new concept of scholarly and scientific journal: conceived and managed by academics themselves; aimed at providing direct competition to high‐priced commercial publications; based on a business model whereby subscription revenues cover the non‐trivial cost of peer‐review; designed to maximise research productivity; intended as a platform for scientific and scholarly debate. The ELSSS model conceives the peer‐reviewed published article not at the final stage of the scholarly communication chain, but as an intermediate step, to be followed by Web‐based interaction among self‐selected networks of interested researchers. The paper suggests that the very concepts of “lending” and “document” need redefining in the case of the forthcoming generation academic‐led journals.

Writing and interacting in the discourse community of engineering

In this paper, the author looks at text production from a social perspective, drawing on concepts of social interaction and discourse community. The discourse community in question is that of engineering. The texts analyzed here are products of a group of Danish consulting engineers working together to develop an energy concept for a German municipality. The paper mainly aims to show writing as a social action in a discourse community, which is constructed by the interactive work of its members. Important aspects of this work occur in the processes of text production, feedback, and text revision. Three examples of qualitative revision analyses illustrate the interplay of participating in current chains of communication with manifesting membership in a discourse community.

The Reproduction of Culture: Communication Processes Tend to Maintain Cultural Stereotypes

Culture can be regarded as a system of meaning that is produced and maintained through the dynamic production and reproduction of meanings in the social activities of individuals. To illustrate such a process, this paper examined the changes to a story when it is transmitted between several individuals and contains information relevant to cultural stereotypes. It was argued that people favor the reproduction of stereotype-consistent over stereotype-inconsistent information in communication, rendering the story increasingly more stereotypical and therefore maintaining the cultural stereotype. A story about a football player, who exhibited stereotype-relevant behaviors of his occupation, was transmitted through 20 four-person communication chains. Stereotype-consistent information was reproduced more than stereotype-inconsistent information, with the latter progressively screened out of the story over the course of the chain. Moreover, when the story content was compared across the chains, a divergence occurred when the story was initially transmitted but a convergence toward similar story content appeared through collective transmission. These findings are discussed with respect to the maintenance of cultural stereotypes and the reproduction of culture through the activities of individuals in a social network.

Benefits, safety, and risks of immunisation programmes

Immunisation is potentially the most effective and efficient of all preventive medical activities. It is also unique among interventions in that it protects both the individual and the community. The UK's immunisation programme has been highly successful in controlling a number of life threatening infectious diseases, and consequently public concern has shifted from the diseases to vaccine safety. In recent years a series of vaccine myths and vaccine safety scares have affected the UK and other industrialised countries. Although an effective vaccine without any risk is probably unachievable, the vaccines in use in the UK are very safe. Serious adverse outcomes truly attributable to vaccination are extremely rare, always far rarer than adverse outcomes among individuals acquiring the vaccines' target infections. Vaccine safety may be called into question, however, on the basis of spurious coincidental associations between vaccination and adverse events. An inadequate public health response in the 1970s to a scare over whooping cough vaccine allowed substantial losses of professional and public confidence to take place. Vaccine coverage halved and much preventable morbidity and mortality resulted. Plausible vaccine associations must be investigated thoroughly, and the UK has become a world leader in developing techniques for rapid investigations. The public health response to scares over MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine safety has been faster and firmer than for whooping cough and no link has been found between MMR vaccine and inflammatory bowel disease or autism. Consequently the impact on immunisation coverage has been small, though the cumulative threat of measles, mumps, and rubella epidemics is growing. Recently an international investigation excluded a possible association of intussusception with oral polio vaccine before it could become a vaccine scare. A clearer chain of communication in responding to vaccine myths and scares is needed. This must provide rapid information and, if appropriate, reassurance to professionals and the public. Considerably more training is needed for professionals in providing information to the public and supporting parents in making difficult decisions over vaccination. Though there is no place for complacency, and improvements are needed, the UK's ability to monitor vaccine effectiveness, safety, and risks is strong. As a consequence it has a vaccination programme that is very safe and very effective.

Benefits, safety, and risks of immunisation programmes

Immunisation is potentially the most effective and efficient of all preventive medical activities. It is also unique among interventions in that it protects both the individual and the community. The UK's immunisation programme has been highly successful in controlling a number of life threatening infectious diseases, and consequently public concern has shifted from the diseases to vaccine safety. In recent years a series of vaccine myths and vaccine safety scares have affected the UK and other industrialised countries. Although an effective vaccine without any risk is probably unachievable, the vaccines in use in the UK are very safe. Serious adverse outcomes truly attributable to vaccination are extremely rare, always far rarer than adverse outcomes among individuals acquiring the vaccines' target infections. Vaccine safety may be called into question, however, on the basis of spurious coincidental associations between vaccination and adverse events. An inadequate public health response in the 1970s to a scare over whooping cough vaccine allowed substantial losses of professional and public confidence to take place. Vaccine coverage halved and much preventable morbidity and mortality resulted. Plausible vaccine associations must be investigated thoroughly, and the UK has become a world leader in developing techniques for rapid investigations. The public health response to scares over MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine safety has been faster and firmer than for whooping cough and no link has been found between MMR vaccine and inflammatory bowel disease or autism. Consequently the impact on immunisation coverage has been small, though the cumulative threat of measles, mumps, and rubella epidemics is growing. Recently an international investigation excluded a possible association of intussusception with oral polio vaccine before it could become a vaccine scare. A clearer chain of communication in responding to vaccine myths and scares is needed. This must provide rapid information and, if appropriate, reassurance to professionals and the public. Considerably more training is needed for professionals in providing information to the public and supporting parents in making difficult decisions over vaccination. Though there is no place for complacency, and improvements are needed, the UK's ability to monitor vaccine effectiveness, safety, and risks is strong. As a consequence it has a vaccination programme that is very safe and very effective.

Maintaining Cultural Stereotypes in the Serial Reproduction of Narratives

Recent social cognition research showed that the individual often recalls stereotype-inconsistent (SI) information better than stereotype-consistent (SC) information. By contrast, classical studies in social psychology suggest that SC information is retained well in the collective remembering where a number of individuals are involved in the reproduction of stories. In the present experiment, individual and collective remembering were examined. A story about a man and a woman who exhibited gender-stereotype-relevant behaviors was transmitted through five-person communication chains. Although participants in earlier positions of the chains reproduced SI information more than SC information under some circumstances, SC information was retained better than SI information toward the end of the chains regardless. The stability of cultural stereotypes was discussed in terms of the tendency for collective information processing to favor the retention of information shared among individuals.

To mediate or not: it depends on the medium

The role of the medical librarian in the scientific information and communication chain is changing rapidly because of the Internet and other technologies. It is useful to think of these changes in terms of the needs of different user groups and how these needs depend on mediating library services. For the biomedical researcher library services seem to have disappeared, yet direct access to full text journals must still be arranged through the library. For the student the library is a comfortable place to study and meet people; compulsory reading material is within reach either in print or electronic format. For the practising physician there is the need for easy and fast access to highquality information. The role of librarians will become either less visible as organizers of Web-based and other electronic sources (metadata, hypertext links and hierarchical structures), or more prominent, e.g. as members of educational teams or partners in task forces for producing clinical guidelines and finding the best evidence. The multimedia library of the future must be staffed according to the use of the medium.

The Benefits of Flood Warnings: Real But Elusive, and Politically Significant

AbstractFlood‐warning systems need to be seen as providing (a) forecasts of floods, (b) warnings to those at risk, and (c) in‐between arrangements for disseminating warning messages to those who need the information as a basis for their response. This ‘whole‐system’approach reveals that warning dissemination and public response are weak links in the communication chain, and that the public remains dissatisfied with the service which should be seamless and reflect an integrated approach. Research on several aspects of this system reveals significant and continuing problems of low performance, leading to the question as to whether the present institutional arrangements in the UK for flood warning are satisfactory.

Hybrid compression of video with graphics in DTV communication systems

Advanced broadcast manipulation of TV sequences and enhanced user interfaces for TV systems have resulted in an increased amount of pre- and post-editing of video sequences, where graphical information is inserted. However, in the current broadcasting chain, there are no provisions for enabling an efficient transmission/storage of these mixed video and graphics signals and, at this emerging stage of DTV systems, introducing new standards is not desired. Nevertheless, in the professional video communication chain between content provider and broadcaster and locally, in the DTV receiver, proprietary video-graphics compression schemes can be used to enable more efficient transmission/storage of mixed video and graphics signals. For example, in the DTV receiver case this will lead to a significant memory-cost reduction. To preserve a high overall image quality, the video and graphics data require independent coding systems, matched with their specific visual and statistical properties. We introduce various efficient algorithms that support both the lossless (contour, runlength and arithmetic coding) and the lossy (block predictive coding) compression of graphics data. If the graphics data are a-priori mixed with video and the graphics position is unknown at compression time, an accurate detection mechanism is applied to distinguish the two signals, such that independent coding algorithms can be employed for each data-type. In the DTV memory-reduction scenario, an overall bit-rate control completes the system, ensuring a fixed compression factor of 2-3 per frame without sacrificing the quality of the graphics.

The Code Book: The Evolution of Secrecy from Mary, Queen of Scots to Quantum Cryptography

From the Publisher: Codes have decided the fates of empires, countries, and monarchies throughout recorded history. Mary, Queen of Scots was put to death by her cousin, Queen Elizabeth, for the high crime of treason after spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham cracked the secret code she used to communicate with her conspirators. And thus the course of British history was altered by a few sheets of cryptic prose. This is just one link in humankind's evolutionary chain of secret communication, and just one of the fascinating incidents recounted in The Code Book, written by bestselling author Simon Singh. Combining a superb storyteller's sense of drama and a scientist's appreciation for technical perfection, Singh traces the evolution of secret writing from ancient Greek military espionage to the frontiers of computer science. The result is an epic tale of human ingenuity, with examples that range from the poignant to the peculiar to the world-historical. There is the case of the Beale ciphers, which involves Wild West escapades, a cowboy who amassed a vast fortune, a buried treasure worth $20 million, and a mysterious set of encrypted papers describing its whereabouts—papers that have baffled generations of cryptanalysts and captivated hundreds of treasure hunters. A speedier end to a bloody war was the only reward that could be promised to the Allied code breakers of World Wars I and II, whose selfless contributions altered the course of history; but few of them lived to receive any credit for their top-secret accomplishments. Among the most moving of these stories is that of the World War II British code breaker Alan Turing, who gave up a brilliant career in mathematics todevote himself to the Allied cause, only to end his years punished by the state for his homosexuality, while his heroism was ignored. No less heroic were the Navajo code talkers, who volunteered without hesitation to risk their lives for the Allied forces in the Japanese theater, where they were routinely mistaken for the enemy. Interspersed with these gripping stories are clear mathematical, linguistic, and technological demonstrations of codes, as well as illustrations of the remarkable personalities—many courageous, some villainous, and all obsessive—who wrote and broke them. All roads lead to the present day, in which the possibility of a truly unbreakable code looms large. Singh explores this possibility, and the ramifications of our increasing need for privacy, even as it begins to chafe against the stated mission of the powerful and deeply secretive National Security Agency. Entertaining, compelling, and remarkably far-reaching, this is a book that will forever alter your view of history, what drives it, and how private that e-mail you just sent really is. Included in the book is a worldwide Cipher Challenge—a $15,000 award will be given by the author to the first reader who cracks the code successfully. Progress toward the solution will be tracked on The Code Book website.

Protecting Patients from Harm: Terfenadine and Potential Drug Therapy Interactions

Communication of drug interactions has been the focus of reports surrounding the use of terfenadine. Two studies reported in the literature indicated that coprescription events between terfenadine and contraindicated drugs occurred despite communications to health professionals regarding potential harm. Recent studies have found that pharmacists frequently dispense such drug combinations without concern or appropriate counseling. Throughout 1996, reports in journals and the public press created concern over drug interactions and the practice of pharmacy. The terfenadine case study highlights weak links in the chain of communication of serious medical information. Early warnings to health professionals did not result in the elimination of potential events. Additional communications decreased the rate of coprescription events but did not eliminate them. Current investigations show that these events continue. All health care professionals involved in the distribution of pharmaceuticals should use the experiences related to terfenadine as a means to improve their handling of drug interaction and other medical information.

Rewriting for, and by, the Children

Stories have often been rewritten for children. Children themselves are onlookers to the “chain of communication” that unfolds, as stories are rewritten by perceived ideological conservatives and, in turn, by perceived ideological liberators. In this article, I both present and dialogize this vision of children as receptors of adults' ideological messages. I begin by reviewing examples of adults' rewriting for children, drawing primarily on the rewriting of folk stories. Then, using ethnographic data collected in a study of urban school children's use of common story material (from the poplar media), I reconstruct one branch of a classroom chain of communication. The chain features a girl-next-door figure from a film well-known by the children. In so doing, I illustrate the dialogic process through which children's rewriting becomes a mediator of their ideological concerns. The article concludes with a discussion of the classroom conditions that seemed to support the activation of such a dialogic event.

Communicating performer intent through musical performance. I. Mapping intent to perception

Although several recent studies have involved experimental approaches to aspects of musical performance, most have focused on ‘‘emotive’’ communication or analyses of timing profiles in isolation. In this work, several frames of reference are integrated: notational (musical style), performer-generated messages (performer-intent), generator class (different instrument types), the link to the listener and listener knowledge (musician and nonmusician), and, finally, the mappings among frames. In this talk, methodological issues in the study of expressive musical performances are discussed, focusing on convergent operational definitions of variables. It is demonstrated, by experimental results, how different listener operations explicate different aspects of expressive communication. A unique feature of this work is the use of different musical style categories (baroque, classical, romantic, and early 20th century) which initiate the chain of musical communication, providing different contexts for the performer–listener mapping.

Matched filtering by a photoreceptor membrane

This study demonstrates how phototransduction cascades and membranes tune photoreceptor response dynamics to image quality, and eliminate noise introduced in cell signalling. Intracellular recordings from intact retina confirm that the light-adapted photoreceptors of the crane fly Tipula paludosa (Diptera; Tipulidae) have a slow response, appropriate for their visual ecology. To provide a slow response, the phototransduction cascade's impulse response fails to narrow with light-adaptation, despite reductions in the timescales of latency and quantum bumps. The photoreceptor membrane acts as a passive RC-filter, because light induced depolarization inactivates voltage-gated potassium currents. The frequency response of the membrane equals the cascade's and, as a result, the membrane is a matched filter that suppresses photon shot noise. This type of broad-band filter, matched to the predictable dynamics of preceding processes to remove noise, could be widely employed in vision and in many other chains of cellular communication.

Instrument‐specific constraints on musical performance: Playing the piano and the guitar.

Kendall and Carterette (1990) propose a chain of musical communication similar to linguistic communication, whereby composers, performers, and listeners all share some amount of musical knowledge. Although the authors emphasize the extent to which information is communicated, there are also important transformations which take place. The physical constraints of an instrument may play a significant role in the interpretive process by operating as musical filters. Improvisation is considered as a task in which all three links in the communicative chain (composer, performer, and listener) are simultaneously represented by a single musician. An experiment was conducted in which participants were asked to perform improvisations on a guitar or piano, each of which functioned as an MIDI instrument. The sounded timbre was independently varied, to produce either a guitar or a piano sound. Participants displayed different patterns of key choice and note usage depending upon which instrument they were playing, suggesting that the physical constraints of the instrument influenced their performance. Participants also employed expressive guitar pitch bends only in the guitar timbre, suggesting that higher‐level knowledge of instrument characteristics, as well as external physical constraints, can influence musical performance. [Work supported by NIMH grant R29‐MH45764.]

An investigation into how the health care assistants perceive their role as ‘support workers’ to the qualified staff

This qualitative study investigates the support worker's role as perceived by health care assistants (HCAs) who have undergone some training and National Vocational Qualification assessments. The findings suggest that the HCAs consider that they support the trained nurses by acting as a link in the communication chain between the patient and carers, and by providing 'time' for the trained nurse to use in therapeutic activities. The indications are that the HCAs perceive little difference between their roles and those of qualified nurses, and they experience ambiguity as to their proper role. The researcher sought to apply role theory in an inductive approach to data interpretation, from which it is posited that the HCAs' role ambiguity arises because the qualified nurses' own role lacks clarity and this affects their expectations of the HCA's role. Having had some training, the roles are more ambiguous now than before as the HCAs are no longer untrained carers but nor are they qualified professionals. It is also suggested that the qualified nurses perceive the HCAs as a threat to their own roles in that the HCAs are seen as depriving them of their 'real' nursing role; thus they are experiencing 'role deprivation'. Recommendations to clarify role expectations and reduce role ambiguities are suggested to alleviate an avoidable source of stress for both the qualified nurse and the HCA.