COMM 250 Lecture 2: COMM250 Exam 2 TXT notes.docx

• School: University of Maryland
• Department: Communication
• Course: COMM 250
• Professor: Jennifer Hubbard

Document Summary

3 central themes and 7 central assumptions: the importance of meanings for human behavior, humans act towards others on the basis of the meaning those others have for them, behavior is explained through stimulus and response, researchers assign meaning to communication (encounters, meaning is created in interaction between people, inter subjective basis of meaning, meaning only exists when people share a common interpretation of the symbols they exchange in interaction, 3 ways to account for the origin of meaning: meaning can be intrinsic to the thing, meanings are created through the people not the things, meaning is created between people (social products, meaning is modified through an interpretive process, interpretive process has two steps: communicators point out the things that have meanings, then (2) communicators select, check and transform the meaning into the context in which they find themselves, shared meanings are culturally accepted, the importance of self concept.