Communicating effectively with those around you requires empathy and sympathy. Does this mean that you, as an effective communicator, must be a touchy-feely person or ascribe to new age values? Not at all (unless you want to, of course!). Rather, empathy and sympathy can be learned. But before you can be empathic and sympathetic, you [...]
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Tonight I led my first on-line tutorial with my class of professional communicators in the Communication Theory course I teach for the Master of Communications Management program (joint between McMaster U’s DeGroote Business School and Syracuse U’s Newhouse School of Public Communication). We had an excellent session. The students in the class, whom I have [...]
There is very little that is natural about communication. Word associations. Metaphors. Our vision of the world is like a kaleidoscope of moving bits of glass, settling in a slightly different configuration every time we pause to ponder. In fact, most of concepts, symbols and metaphors that we process as we communicate are of a [...]
I have always been fascinated by hermeneutics, which is the study of meaning and understanding. What does it mean to mean something? More importantly, how what does it mean to understand something that someone else is communicating? In my PhD thesis, I explored whether it was possible to use the structures in a text (syntax, [...]
Mass broadcasting systems permitted the marketing revolution of the 50s and 60s. Now, the social media revolution is opening up the same radical possibilities for public relations. PR is the business of building relationships, in Canada that means preferably symmetrical relationships between an organization and its various publics. In the past, it was very hard [...]
People no longer live one life, but many. Physical. On-line. With whom are we really communicating? You may think that this is a silly topic, if you’re someone who hasn’t grown up on-line or thrown yourself into the world of the Internet and social media. But you would be mistaken – a significant proportion of [...]
Yesterday, we completed day 5 of the summer residency for MCM733: Communication Theory, offered in the Master of Communication Management Program at McMaster University. It was an excellent class – quite intense, quite a whirlwind, very engaging. The class was very active – we had many in-depth discussions on how a solid grasp of communication [...]
Public relations was born out of idealism, elitism and a desire to perfect democracy. The founder of the field, Edward T. Bernays, was the nephew of Sigmund Freud. He created the field and named it on a whim. This video, produced in the United Kingdom and called The Century of the Self, while quite critical [...]
Today we had our first introductory class in MCM733: Communication Theory. It went very well! We worked through the following questions: “What is communications theory? and why is it useful to public relations practitioners?” I focused on the idea that theory provide vision, language and strategy. When you use communication theory, you stand on the [...]
I have always believed that humans have feelings and that these feelings impact our reasoning. Current trends in neuroscience seem to be bearing this belief out. For me, my thinking about emotional cognition started during a philosophy seminar in which we discussed René Descartes notion that cognition is purely rational. Cogito ergo sum. He also [...]