COMM 1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Crowdsourcing, Linguistics
1/25/17
●Communication in digital age (continued)
○How digital channels affect communication
■Privacy & control over messages
●Stored messages have replicability
○The more replicability the Less control
●Must manage “context collapse”
■They allow us to harness the power of the “crowd” - crowdsourcing
●Info sharing
●Social support
●movements/causes
○Digital challenges
■Social comparison
■Documenting the moment rather than living in the moment
●Verbal communication (language)
○Important features of language
■Language is rule-governed
■Language allows for displacement (of ideas, time, etc.)
■Meanings of symbols/words are arbitrary (random)
●Human- made conventions
●Language and meaning
○The referential function
■We use language to “refer” to things & ideas
■We categorize things & label them
●Example : peach - specific fruit vs “fruit” vs “citrus fruit”
○The triangle of meaning
○Symbol (word) “kick” ————arbitrary ———object (referent) “picture of kicking”
■Thought (reference)
○Basically the only reason we know what words mean is because we know what it
means (experiences)
○We must recognize two different kinds of meaning
■Example word : “rock”
●What does it mean?
○Pebble, stone
○Motion (back and forth)
○Type of music
○“That rocks!”
○“You are my rock”
○A diamond
○“On the rocks” - ice
●All these different meanings have Denotative meaning
