 Photo by Xiaphias Em Griffin likens interpersonal communication to games. He gives three game metaphors: bowling, pingpong, and charades.
In bowling, Griffin tells us, the player is the Sender, the bowling ball is the Message, the lane is the Channel, bumps on the lane make up Noise, and the set of pins is the Receiver. When I asked my students to comment on this metaphor, they added the score as Feedback.
In pingpong, Griffin says the players alternate as Sender and Receiver, the ball is the Message, the table the Channel, and the net is the Noise.
In charades, Griffin says the players are both Senders and Receivers, the verbal and nonverbal symbols are the Messages, the Channel is the space separating the players, and the wrong guesses make up Noise.
But Griffin adds that what differentiates charades from bowling and pingpong is in the exchange. Charades is more of a transaction than the one-way or two-way interaction in bowling or pingpong.
Griffin then presents three communication theories that exhibit this transactional approach to interpersonal communication. These theories include Symbolic Interactionism, Coordinated Management of Meaning, and Expectancy Violations Theory.
 Dada comics art manipulation by Crummy
The philosopher George Herbert Mead proposed some ideas that his students, including Herbert Blumer who coined the term "Symbolic Interactionism," published posthumously under the title Mind, Self, Society (1934). Blumer based his Symbolic Interactionism theory on three (3) core principles gleaned from Mead (as quoted from Griffin 56-58):- Meaning – “humans act toward people or things on the basis of the meaning they assign to those people or things”
- Language/symbols – “meaning arises out of the social interaction that people have with each other” (though people also have default assumptions based on social associations of language/symbols)
- Thought – “an individual’s interpretation of symbols is modified by his or her own thought processes” (the term Mead uses is minding)
These interconnected principles of meaning, language/symbols, and thought lead to what Mead refers to as the self.The self, according to Mead and echoed by Blumer, are portraits of ourselves made by “taking the role of the other” and by distinguishing the “I” from the “me” through talk/language.The "me" is also a product of the community, as the expectations of society that make up our mental image of a generalized other.Because meaning is usually a product of this dialogic minding between the individual and his/her community, Symbolic Interactionists proposed participant observation as an ethnomedological approach to research.
Erving Goofman also proposed his concept of “framing” the self within the context of "social interaction as a dramaturgical performance." This "drama," according to his associate Joan Emerson, is what accounts for how doctors and nurses "frame" themselves as impersonal medical personnel attending to a gynecological examination. Because the doctors and nurses play these roles, the patient is put at ease (Griffin 62).
Symbolic Interactionism also accounts for how "naming" becomes constitutive of identities, and how our individual expectations contribute to the "self-fulfilling" actions of others.
However, Saul Alinsky provides a positive application of the theory in his concept of “symbol manipulation” as an emancipatory technique in community organizing.
Symbolic Interactionism, according to Griffin, is often criticized for its "fluid boundaries" and "vague concepts" (for instance, the differences between the "I" and "me"), as well as for its "undisciplined approach" to analyzing communication phenomena. Also, Griffin points to the "overstatement on the human capacity for language" as rather biased against those with speech or mental impairment.However, these critiques aside, the principles of Symbolic Interactionism allowed other interpretive communication scholars to propose their own theories. CMM whole model You might want to visit this site by Richard W. Dillman, called the Happy Fun Communication Land. It presents a very interesting explanation of W. Barnett Pearce and Vernon Cronen's Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM).
Pearce and Cronen argue that “persons-in-conversation co-construct their own social realities and are simultaneously shaped by the worlds they create” (Griffin 69). They look at individuals as social constructionists creating their narratives, their realities, “strange loops,” and dialogic communication.Pearce and Cronen present the following theoretical tenets undergirding CMM (Griffin 70-71):- “The experience of persons-in-conversation is the primary social process of human life”
- “The way people communicate is often more important than the content of what they say” (logic of meaning and action)
- “The actions of persons-in-conversation are reflexively reproduced as the interaction continues”
- “As social constructionists, CMM researchers see themselves as curious participants in a pluralistic world”
CMM theorists differentiates between (Griffin 72-73): - “Stories lived” – co-constructed actions performed with others
- “Stories told” – individual stories open to interpretation, with stories embedded in multiple contexts or frames (episode, relationship, identity, culture)
These frames are defined as (Griffin 74-75):- "An episode is a communication routine that has boundaries and rules -- a recurrent language game."
- "[T]he relationship between persons-in-conversation suggests how a speech act might be interpreted."
- Speech acts between persons-in-conversation are always interpreted by the other in terms of each person's identity or self-concept.
- "[T]he term culture describes webs of shared meanings and values, [and so] people who come from different cultures won't interpret messages exactly the same way."
For CMM theorists, “coordination” is the fitting of stories lived with other’s stories lived, and the “management of meaning” as the adjusting of stories told with stories lived, and vice versa.CMM is usually critiqued for the following characteristics:
- Wide scope
- Imprecise and confusing definitions of concepts
- Jargon (left out here, but a sample of which includes: constitutive rules, regulative rules, reconstructed context, gamemastery, grammars, the daisy model, the LUUUTT model, etc.)
Please watch the video above, if you haven't yet.
The video illustrates several concepts contained in Judee Burgoon’s nonverbal expectancy violations model. Burgoon initially worked on her theory using the concept of “personal space,” first popularized by Edward Hall. Hall also coined the term proxemics – “study of people’s use of space as a special elaboration of culture” (Griffin 84).Hall proposed four (4) proxemic zones typical in American culture. These zones include the following (Griffin 85):- Intimate distance: 0 to 18 inches
- Personal distance: 18 inches to 4 feet
- Social distance: 4 to 10 feet
- Public distance: 10 fee to infinity
Burgoon’s theory proposes that “violating social norms and personal expectations is ‘a superior strategy to conformity’” (Griffin 86).
She abandoned the earlier premises based on “arousal” and “threat threshold,” and came up with three (3) core concepts of Expectancy Violations Theory (EVT) (Griffin 88-92):
- Expectancy
- Violation valence
- Communicator reward valence
Burgoon says that expectancy refers to “what is predicted to occur rather than what is desired.” She points to three factors involved in this concept:
- Context – cultural norms
- Relationship factors – similarity, familiarity, liking, relative status
- Communicator characteristics – demographic info, physical appearance, personality, communication style
Burgoon defines violation valence as “the positive or negative value we place on a specific unexpected behavior, regardless of who does it.”
She then points to communicator reward valence as “the results of [the] mental audit of likely gains and losses” in the face of expectancy violations.Griffin cites several critiques against EVT (93-94):
- It is still a work in progress
- Empirical tests do not yield uniform results
- Predictive standard is not that reliable
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