著者

杉山 あかし

出版者

日本マス・コミュニケーション学会

雑誌

新聞学評論 (ISSN:04886550)

巻号頁・発行日

no.38, pp.111-123, 273-274, 1989-04-30

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In communication between those whose social backgrounds are different, we can expect much misunderstanding because of the difference of background knowledge, background experience, vocabulary, mays to construct conversation, and so on. In those societies that contain different social groups. we must assume 'discommunication' -communication in which inteneded meanings are not transmitted- to be the prevailing mode of communication. The theme of this article is to speculate on the social consequences of the discommunicative social situation at the level of social structure. It we accept the fact that every society has some social cleavages and that despite the existence of such cleavages the society is still one society, not two or more, then we can suspect that the discommunicative social situation contributes to social unity. Usually, every social group has its own value system that supports its social activities. The value system may be constructed as a system of meanings, or a self-evident world. Discommunication will prevent each social group's self-evident world from having real contacts with others, which may give steadiness to the self-evident worlds, and which may permit the coexistence of different elements of society. Indeed, we can expect the variety of social groups to have their own value systems, but it would be false to presume that social groups can freely have their own as they like. A group's value system usually fits the group's position in the social structure, such as the division of labor. So we must assume a mechanism that makes for coincidence between people's value system and the socially reguired value system. For this purpose, in this article I propose an ecological model of the social distribution of knowledge that is the base of the value system. The model follows a logistic-curve diffusion model which is applicable to the discommunicative social situation. As an emergent property of such a situation, such coincidence may be achieved to certain extent. In this article, there are some additional references to other emergent properties relating to the discommunicative social situation. With them, as a whole, this article can be a step toward a social theory of discommunication.