Roles In Media

An understanding of the communication process must take account of both the language that communicators use to construct and understand messages and the media they use to deliver and receive them. Existing contextual theories of communication contribute to our understanding of these elements, but ignore the substantial commonality that exists in interpersonal, live presentational, small group, organizational, static presentaitional, correspondence, publication, broadcast, and other communication contexts. The roles that are associated with our use of media provide one of these commonalities.

This appears to be relatively unexplored ground. See Foulger (2001).

It can be argued that the question of generic roles was one of the first areas for which assumptions were made in forming the modern field of communication. Shannon's model of the communication process includes two such generic roles (sender and receiver). Almost all introductory textbooks in the field of communication make reference to this and other related models, including the interactive, transactive, and gated models of communication. All of these models make reference to variants of the sender and receiver role. One makes reference to a third role, the gatekeeper. These roles are presented as being common to all (or in the case of the third role, many) media, but are assumed to be self-evident. They are rarely discussed in any detail.

Texts associated with "mass" communication frequently make reference to specific roles in specific media, often within the context of career possibilities or a "typical" organization chart (e.g. directors, writers, and camera operators in motion pictures; producers, talent, and recording engineers in music recording; editors, correspondents, and rewrite desks in newspapers; program directors, news reporters, and engineers in radio). Little or no attention is paid to the similarities between these roles across these different media. A similar pattern can be observed in discussions of interpersonal media. Although there are discussions of roles within specific interpersonal contexts (including McLean's 1957 categorization of roles in groups, Brody's (1991) taxonomy of stakeholders in organizational environments, various organizational communication network roles), no attention is paid to the similarities between these roles in different media (managers, account executives, and secretaries in business correspondence; chairpersons, meeting participants, and recording secretaries in committee meetings; judges, witnesses, and court stenographers in judicial proceedings).

The increasingly complex communication media environment set up by networked computers increases the value of understanding the generic roles associated with media. Education of communication professionals, for instance, is generally isolated to a few key media (e.g. journalism, radio broadcasting, television broadcasting). The range of media is exploding, however. It is not reasonable to expect that we can have professional education that targets each network medium. Role commonalities and media design patterns provide a way of creating generalized programs that train people to work in a variety of related media. The design of media and implementation of media instances are another place where the generic role patterns may be important. Can we really afford to rediscover the lessons of older media in newer media because we haven't learned the generic problems and solutions associated with related roles and workflows in other media?