Why phenomenology in communication research?
Lenore Langsdorf1994, Human Studies
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Abstract
Phenomenology is, at the very least, a choice to study an environment from a situated location in actual experience and oriented toward particular aspects of the spectrum of human activity. Communication is, at the very least, a process of informing someone about something, and so forming and perhaps transforming both the environment and those who communicate within it in particular ways. The essays in this issue of Human Studies show various sorts of phenomenological analysis at work in studying diverse aspects of human communicative activity. Thus, the essays themselves provide illustrations of how phenomenology can be useful, and actually is used, in communication research. Rather than summarize those investigations here, I would like to preface them with a consideration of why phenomenological analysis is suited to the subject matter of interest to these authors. Although readers of Human Studies typically are knowledgeable about phenomenological research, that comprehension may well not extend to reasons for using phenomenology to investigate communicative phenomena as distinct from, although also correlated with, phenomena of interest in longer-established disciplines within the human/social sicences. In what follows, therefore, I want to tell something of the character of this research area, and will focus on two topics in doing so. The first is the predominant mode of theorizing in the discipline; the second is the predominance of practice over theory. After this brief depiction of these dimensions of the field, I will set out some reasons in support of my claim that phenomenology is a preferable alternative orientation for communication research. Communication research as an academic discipline began in the early years of this century with assumptions which many in the human/social sciences now characterize as empiricistic, scientistic, or even, positivistic. Certain conceptions of human beings and our environments-and thus, of the subjects and objects of communication-were borrowed from academically acceptable and generally admired practices in the physical sciences,
Key takeaways
- Also, both subjects and objects were presumed to be given to the research situation; that is, the researcher as well as the communicating subjects of research, and the objects they communicated about, were assumed to exist prior to communicative activity as independent, already formed entities.
- Tracing out the implications of this activity incites understanding of how humans are constituted in their intrinsically social and communicative activities.
- From that plateau of generality, the researcher can inquire into the extent to which that meaningfulness is present in more or less varient form in other instances of communicative activity.
- It is to say that adopting a phenomenological orientation commits researchers to staying with the communicative context itself and maintaining a descriptive focus on how those conditions and products function in the genesis of meaningfulness in and for that context.
- It asks descriptive, rather than metaphysical, questions: the phenomenological question is always, how are entities present as meaningful for participants, rather than, what are entities in themselves, outside of communicative interactivity.
