we are paying the penalty for the long abuse of fundamental: communicative processes in the .service of. politics, trade, and therapy.

f we follow Dewey, it will occur to us that problems of communication are linked to problems of community, to. problems surrounding the: kinds of communities: we ‘create and in: which-we live.?

These corre- spond roughly to what is found in information theory, learn- ing theory, and influence theory (power), and dissonance, balance theory, and functionalism, or uses and ‘gratifications analysis (anxiety).

e not only produce reality but we must likewise maintain what we ‘have produced, for there are always new. genera- tions coming along for whom our productions are incipiently problematic and for whom reality must be regenerated and made authoritative.

Thought-is. the construction and utilization of such maps, models, templates: football plays diagrammed. on a black- board, equations. on paper, ritual dances charting the nature of ancestors, or streams of prose like this attempting,,out. in. the bright-lit world.in which we all live; to present the. nature: of communication.

However, the ordinary method. is simply.to draw the child a.map.

“first you turn it-to.the left, then you turn. it .to the right,”

whatever it might. be for other animals, it is for us . q a vast production, a staged creation—something humanly produced and humanly maintained.

Rather, reality is ‘brought into existence, is produced, by communication—by, in short, the construction, apprehension, and utilization of symbolic forms:5 ‘Reality, while not a mere furiction’ of symbolic forms, is produced by terministic systems—or by hurnans who’ produce such systems—that ‘focus its existence in specific terms.

Things can become so familiar. that we no longer perceive them at all.

It had become academic: a repetition of past achievement, a dem- onstration of the indubitable.

Society is possible because of the binding forces of shared _information circulating in an organic system.

a:mass, a situation in which nothing new is learned but:in which a particular view of the world is portrayed and confirmed.

We have not explored ‘the ritual _ view of communication. because the ‘concept of culture. is such ‘a weak and. evanescent. notion: in-.American. social thought.

communication is linked to terms such “sharing,” “participation,” “association,” “fellowship,” and “the possession. of a common faith.”

Moreover, the superiority. of communication over transportation was assured by the observation of one nifieteenth’ century commentator that the telegraph was. important because it involved not the mere “modification of ‘matter but the transmission of thought.”

The desire to escape the boundaries of Europe, to create a.new life, to found new communities, to carve a New Jerusalem out.of the woods of Massachusetts, were primary motives behind the unprecedented. movement of white European civiliza- tion over virtually the entire globe..

Itis formed. from’’a ‘metaphor “of ‘geography or transportation. In: the nineteenth century but to a lesser extent today,

Both definitions derive, as with much:-in-secular culture, from religious. origins, though they: refer to somewhat: different regions. of reli- . gious experience..

Surely ‘most: of the ‘news’. and entertainment we ‘receive through the mass media are of the order that’ Thoreaw predicted: for the international telegraph: “the: intelligerice’ that Princess: Adelaide: had the ‘whooping: cough.”