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Communication

The word communication comes from the Latin word communicare, which means to impart, share, and make common. In its original use, communication referred to concrete social practices, such as the sharing of gifts or duties. However, in the last two centuries the word has been used to describe increasingly more abstract phenomena. Especially in contemporary Western thought, communication has become a powerful and rich metaphor utilized to account for several aspects of social reality, such as the creation of meaning, social learning, the emerging of social relations, the constitution of social groups, and the functioning of social systems.

The simplest and most minimalist way to define communication is to describe the activity of conveying information through the exchange of thoughts or messages between individuals. However, even such a concise definition does not completely gain consent in the field. In fact, beneath distinct definitions of communication stand competing theorizations of knowledge and society. It is a political and ideological matter but is also a question of development of the academic discipline. The field of communication lacks consolidation to the extent that J. A. Anderson was able to identify hundreds of distinct definitions in a handful of textbooks. One of the reasons for this disunity was that, prior to the academic recognition of communication as a discipline, multiple definitions of communication independently arose from distinct fields, such as mathematics, philosophy, sociology, political science, and psychology. The complexity in defining communication also explains the complexity of the word's relation to deception.

Deceptive Communication: Seven Primary Ways to Approach It

According to Robert T. Craig, communication as a proper field does not exist. Instead, one can identify several different domains, seven main theoretical traditions of communication, such as rhetoric, semiotics, phenomenology, cybernetics, sociopsychological, sociocultural, and critical. Each one, according to its ontological and epistemological assumptions, implies a different approach to deception.

According to the rhetorical tradition, communication consists of practical discursive persuasion; in other words, communication aims at finding an ideal identification between the position of the speaker and his or her audience. From a practical rhetorical perspective, which evaluates communicative practices based only on their rhetorical effectiveness, without contemplating morality or the content of the particular values conveyed by the rhetorical act, lying and deception may lose their traditionally negative connotations. In fact, such a point of view may potentially celebrate lying and deception as rhetorical performances in the framework of successful strategic communication.

Furthermore, rhetoric regards authentic communication and the idea of truth as dangerous myths that have favored the universalization of specific social group interests in the form of ideologies. This especially applies to the recently emerged field of critical rhetoric, which contextualizes language in a framework of production, reproduction, and contestation of power. Under such a perspective, deceptive communication should be countered by the ideology-critique capabilities of rhetoric to use the knowledge of the techniques of effective communication that are used by deceptive communication against itself to uncover it.

The April 16, 1892, cover of the French Social Party publication Le Petit Journal illustrates the arrest of French anarchist and assassin Ravachol. Media have profound negative impact on societies by increasing social conflict and confrontations between different ideologies; this is the essence of propaganda, or the use of communication to propagate specific beliefs and expectations.

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