Ritual and Transmission: Views of communication

Transmission and Ritual Communication: How they differ from one another.

Communication involves transferring messages or information among people, and human beings spend a good portion of their time communicating their knowledge, information, and ideas with others.

When it comes to communication, two alternative concepts are quite well-known and discussed – the transmission view and the ritual view.

• The ‘Transmission’ view of communication focuses more on the imparting or sending of the information to the recipient.
• ‘Ritual’ view on the other hand is more about participation, sharing, and more importantly, encouraging a feeling of community.

For a long time, the transmission communication model was the only model known to people. However, it was James Carey who proposed the existence of another model, the ritual view. He said that there was a cultural angle to communication.

So, the ritual view is a more recent finding, compared to the transmission view.

Communication involves transferring messages or information among people, and human beings spend a good portion of their time communicating their knowledge, information, and ideas with others. Two alternative models of communication that have been widespread in use are the transmission and the ritual views. However, the ritual view is a more recent finding, compared to the transmission view.

For a long time, the transmission communication model was the only model known to people. However, it was James Carey who proposed the existence of another model, the ritual view. He said that there was a cultural angle to communication.

In the transmission model, a message is sent to the receiver who receives the message; the message itself becomes an important part of the process. However, Carey said there was another view, where the process of communication itself was important for the people. He was the one to differentiate between the transmission and the ritual view of communication and emphasized that communication can symbolically construct social reality.

Today, one can see both these views in everyday communication, and with the use of digital medium, at times, it may not be very clear as to which mode of communication is in operation.

The transmission view of communication is about imparting information to others, it’s a mode of sending and ultimately spreading messages usually as a means of control; it is a view of communication that relates to the earliest of human desires, and that is to increase the speed and effect of their messages. For example, the spreading of the teachings of a religion such as Christianity, Islam, Buddhism.

One can see the transmission view of communication at work when people are reading newspapers or watching television. This view is quite prominent in our society, especially in most industrial cultures. Business also use this model to communicate with the audience to pass specific messages about their brand and products. Although the transmission view of communication has remained the same over the years, the introduction of digital media and technology has made this communication process a lot more efficient and faster. Improvements in communication channels have made communication much more faster, efficient and convenient.

Decades back, people had to communicate using mail letters or use international calling cards to communicate with close ones over long geographical distances. However, with the introduction of new technologies such as the Internet and social media, one can communicate with others easily and information can be disseminated almost instantly. Now, people can communicate through instant messages or video chat, and even though the transmission view of communication remains the same wherein a sender is still transmitting information to a receiver, the information disseminates much more quickly and more conveniently.

The ritual view of communication on the other hand has a different purpose. More than the purpose of extension of messages in space, the purpose is to serve the maintenance of society by helping in generating a community feeling and in the representation of shared beliefs.

While the transmission model has the sender and receiver as the main participants, in a ritual model, there are many more participants. In transmission mode the receiver gets the message, but in the ritual view the participants enjoys a shared experience giving it a sense of community experience. That is why many also see the ritual view of communication as a ceremony where all the participants contribute, and no one is designated as a sender or a receiver as is observed in the transmission view.

One can see this process of ritual view in action through the reading of newspapers (or even listening to radio or watching television), as a series of situations that people discuss through reading, in order to get a sense of reality in society. With the introduction of new technologies and the way people communicate, one can now see the ritual view of communication on social media as well.

Another example where you get to see the ritual view is the response one gets to see every time there is a human-caused mass violence; one can see the general public go through the ritual of offering prayers and sending social media posts sharing their thoughts and prayers. This is a ritual that the public continues to practice as it gives them a sense of belonging.

Even though James Carey proposed the Ritual view of communication, this view has been in existence for a long time and could also be observed in religious activities such as sermons and prayers (Carey, 2009). It’s believed that ritual view was the original form of communication that brought people together as community; it was also the way in which news would spread within the community and that is via word of mouth.

Ritual views can also be seen as a projection of certain beliefs of the community (Durkheim, 2012), which is often communicated via a community’s soft power and that includes things like symbolism, dance, plays, and/or architecture. This form of communication does not necessarily transfer any new information and is often a confirmation of what the world (community) already knows. So, ritual views will often not lead to a change in someone’s attitudes, neither will it augment a person’s knowledge, and in most cases, it usually implies a social order.

For quite some time, there was a clear distinction between these two views of communication. However, with technology changing the way how people communicate, the lines between these two forms of communication has been blurring somewhat. Despite the two different definitions of ritual and transmission views, these two are not mutually exclusive and this statement becomes clearer when you view it in light of ‘new’ media in the digital age (James Carey, 1985). And even though considered archaic by many, the ritual view of communication can be still be applied to many different digital media platforms and online communities today (Foucault and Melican, 2020).

The ritual view of communication can be clearly seen in most of popular social media sites that people use nowadays, including Instagram that this report focusses on. Top social sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram attracts almost billion visitors, and these are the sites where one can find big communities around specific interests. There are digital protocols that people follow when using these social media sites and this behavior reflects a highly ritualistic behavior, and this behaviour tighter with the huge population on these sites, demonstrates the power of these social sites to function as tools for the construction of social reality (Sen, 2016).

Today, we live in an era where people are also able to participate in media creation, thanks to the various digital platforms, and are not just confined to passively receiving the various kinds of messages (Couldry, 2003). So, one can see the ritual view of communication in use in most recent communication technologies, including Instagram, and almost all the popular social sites that garner millions of visitors display the ritual view of communication.

Questions and Answers

Question. Discuss a type of communication technology (e.g. newspaper, social media platform, podcast) from both the ritual view and the transmission view. In addition to outlining these two views of communication, you may like to consider your chosen communication technology in terms of the social practices that surround it, the relationship between producer-receiver, its dominant purpose, the communities involved with it, and so on. Which view of mass communication do you believe most effectively describes your chosen communication technology and its surrounding practices? Why?

Let’s take a look at the various social practices that one gets to observe on Instagram. Instagram is a popular visual medium and it’s all about great visuals and exciting content, so it’s a place where people post engaging and high-quality images as well as videos. The senders on Instagram are people who want to tell great stories about themselves, about their passion, about what they like, and/or about their business using visual content. The social site attracts close to a billion users, so people put some great images and videos that arouse the interest of viewers, and in turn garner thousands of likes and views. The receivers, on the other hand, crave for authentic pictures and videos, something that arouses their own desires to do something passionate.

So, the more original the content posted on Instagram, the more like and followers one can expect. Hashtags are another important feature of the social media platform. People who upload pictures or videos can use hashtags which lets you tie the picture to a topic. This makes it easier for others to search images based on their topics of interests. One can find a big community of followers who would interested in certain topics, with whom they can share their thoughts (Elizabeth Arens, 2019). The application allows a person to be followed, or it allows a person to follow other people which in turn lets a person keep a tab on all their photos and videos.

No doubt Instagram has lots of features, but one of the main reasons for its popularity is that it’s a social media network and fosters the feeling of a community. And for many people today, accessing social media is almost like a ritual (Spencer Barney, 2017) and sharing or commenting on things together with other like-minded people is like a celebration. Also, like in the old days, once in a while, they get to know about new things through their community, such as a new tourist location, or a new restaurant in town, a new way to do things, etc.

Whenever people have some free time, they will most likely spend that time to check out updates on their favorite social media, to see if one of their posts has gotten more followers, or if anyone else has posted some interesting stuff. Most of the time, the new content generated or information shared could be minimal, the knowledge acquired could be negligible, but for many the process of checking has now become a routine, and they enjoy doing it. The main purpose of Instagram is to let people generate more followers and/or make more friends, and overall, a person gets the experience of a friendly, laid-back social community on Instagram.

So, one gets to see the ritual view of communication in use on Instagram. Having said that, the influencers on Instagram, at times, can indulge in transmission view of communication as well.

Influencers are sort of celebrities on Instagram, who have a huge number of followers, who have an established credibility. These influencers have the power to influence the audience due to their authenticity and trustworthiness (Paris Martineau, 2019). People and entities with seemingly more symbolic power are able to create and transmit symbolic content and in turn shape social reality (Thompson, 1995). That is one of the reasons why top Influencers are paid handsomely by companies to promote their products (Connor, 2017) to talk about their brand and products. In such a case, the influencer could pass some message/s specific to the brand to their respective followers, and such messages would then reflect a transmission view.

The digital age presents people with the opportunity to be part of the media. Technology has also transformed the way in which businesses and people communicate. So, at times, it may not be very clear if the transmission or ritual view is being played out. Nevertheless, as the boundaries between media production and consumption of media keeps diminishing, it may not be fair to view communication that takes place on new media platforms from the purview of just transmission or ritual view; instead, it makes sense to view it more through a more unified approach.

Also, in todays’ world, marketers may need to use either or both of the models to reach out to the audience. People are hugely influenced by what they see on social media, so the transmission model of communication alone may not be able to give the desired results to businesses. As a result, companies may have to use both the transmission view as well as the ritual view of communication to promote its brands, to communicate better with the audience, and to reach out to a wider audience.

References

• Carey, J. W. (2009). Communication as culture: essays on media and society. Rev. ed.: Routledge (15-16).
• Couldry, N. (2003) Media, symbolic power and the limits of Bourdieu’s field theory Media@LSE electronic working papers, 2.
• Durkheim & Swain, J. W. (2012). The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (95). Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino Publishing
• Foucault B., Melican J. (2007) The Digital and the Divine: Taking a Ritual View of Communication and ICT Interaction. In: Aykin N. (eds) Usability and Internationalization. HCI and Culture. UI-HCII 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4559. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
• James Carey (1985), Two Views of Communication: Transmission & Ritual. [Online]. Available at http://www.postcolonialweb.org/poldiscourse/2views.html [Accessed 30 May 2020]
• John, R. and Carey, J., 1992. Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. Technology and Culture, 33(1), p.200.
• Sen, B. (2017) ‘Information as Ritual: James Carey in the Digital Age’, Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies, 17(6), pp. 473–481. doi: 10.1177/1532708615625687.
• Spencer Barney (2017), Ritual Communication Model Today. [Online]. Available at http://spencerbarney.com/uncategorized/ritual-communication-model-today/
• Thompson B. (1995) The media and modernity : a social theory of the media, Location: Polity Press, Cambridge.