Metacommunication

The act of commenting on, analyzing, or reflecting on another communicative act. The metacommunication may contradict the other communication, reaffirm it, or cause its meanings to be more complicated and ambiguous. Metacommunications can take place before, during, or after the communication, and their position in time can have an effect on the reception of the communication. For example, warning someone that a story about to be told may be scary can set up the listener differently than when not issuing this warning. The exact effects of a metacommunicative act cannot be any more precisely predicted than the act of communication itself, which is always prone to multiple interpretations, unexpected effects, and misunderstandings. Metacommunications may try to predispose a listener or reader to a particular interpretation or attitude toward the text or communication; a metacommunication that attempts to express the idea “I am only joking” may or may not actually do so. Body language is an easy way to identify an example of a metacommunication: While the words being exchanged may have one implication, the body language—squirming, acting nervous, looking away—may communicate the opposite. Level of voice, tone, and asides have the same function. Metacommunication affirms the idea that language itself does not convey meanings directly but rather meaning is constructed between the participants in a communication. Meanings are as much teased out of the peripheral metacommunications, the situation, and the context of the act as they are out of the communication itself. For further reading, see Bateson (1972).