Communication and Control in The Fabric of the Social Construction of Reality
Keywords:
communication, social control, communication history, communication epistemologyAbstract
This article aims to reestablish the dialog between communication and control by providing central arguments that the relation between both concepts is not only documented in many authors’ works on the subject, but also by reflecting that these works helped maintain the central point that social control and communication lie in the very fabric of the social construction of realities, from the regulation of interactions to whole societies. Communication science, too, is a result of this process, not merely a consequence of the development of industries, but rather an outgrowth of knowledge of regulatory problems of society in general. Communication science was built in America upon the necessities of understanding the control of human affairs and politics through public opinion and mass media in the urban areas. The history of communication science has taken the concept of control for granted and connected it either to cybernetics and “mainstream sociology” as in the work of functionalists, creating a stalemate in the discussions around communication and its means of control developed in many the
ories, as well as preventing our studies from connecting to larger social and criminological grand narratives.
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