The
conversation about communicology is advancing at a vertiginous
rythm. When you looked up the word communicology on Yahoo
at the end of the past century, 6 years ago, it turned up
eight results. Today, in May 2006, the same search on Google
offers 21,600 mentions, 12,210 more than 5 months ago. All
the same, many continue to question even the validity of
the word communicology. (The increase in the speed and quality
of search engines contributes to this explosion of results,
of course.)
It is
not easy to say that one is a communicologist, or that one
practices communicology. Even just pronouncing the word
in many Latin American countries draws immediate expressions
of irony or distrust to other people's faces. Gandhi used
to say that "most of our misunderstandings reside in
distrust and the origin of distrust, in most cases, is fear"
.
The
word communicology appears in the RAE dictionary in 1992
as "f. Interdisciplinary science that studies communication
in its different means, techniques and systems". From
the moment we decided to inhabit this word, to expand and
explore this vanguard territory, to transform these 13 letters
into a discipline, we felt uncomfortable with a definition
so broad that it lent itself to the study of anything from
mobile phone technology to the ethology of penguins. In
numerous articles we promoted the establishment of limits
for this discipline, in the realm of human communication.
In June 2004, for the twenty-third edition of the RAE dictionary,
the academic community made an amendment and specified:
"f. Science of an interdisciplinary character, which
studies systems of human communication and their means".
This
clarification is very important in our approach to communicology.
We were interested in constituting and inhabiting communicology
not as an academic effort to build an "explanatory
discourse about communication" as the etymology of
the word describes, but because we assumed that better understanding
communication between human beings, we could solve many
of the so-called communication problems that produce anything
from wars to the lack of attention to famine, from labor
conflicts to the bankruptcy of businesses, from a candidate's
victory to the successful installation of a company in the
opposite corner of the world.
While we searched for the elements that constituted the
specificity of our observation, and above all of how it
is that we observe, we realized that the difference with
other disciplines and techniques that share the study and
practice of communication was that for us, people and not
products are at the center of communicational processes.
The main questions for other methods of communication are
always related to the "message": in publicity,
for example, it is "how and what message did we install";
in media relations it is "how many inches did we publish";
in journalism "the axis is the article, not the reader
or TV viewer". The main question in communicology is
"whom am I communicating", using communicate in
the sense of relating - in other words, what community do
I build.
Communicology
sounds complicated, but really it's very simple, we want
to simplify in a good way. To communicate, comes from to
put in common, to share, in other words, to build community.
Though simple and unassuming, it implies a change in our
point of view that is not automatic. On the contrary, we
say it is uncommon, even if it makes sense. For example,
when we think campaigns, we think posters, billboards, street
signs, television time... products and activities. Some,
the strategists, have considered the voters. But how different
would it be to think of campaigns as the construction of
communities. I'm not saying there wouldn't be posters, brochures,
billboards, and television time, maybe the elements would
be the same, but they would be articulated in a different
way, a better way. It's like letters, with the a, the o,
the r, and the m, I can build amor (love), roma (rome),
aroma [smell), morar (to reside), etc... The same elements
articulated in different ways acquire a different power.
Will
this change in focus have any immediate effect? What does
it contribute to a presidential campaign today? What remains
with voters when a candidate loses, what remains within
the community, within the country? Do we build community,
is there a new common project, a shared point of view, a
style, is a new relationship possible? Do they share or
have a common identity which has been strengthened, that
it may drive them to undertake a common project? I dare
say part of the crisis of representation in politics is
our incapacity to build communities, and so we attempt to
replace this shortage with an abundance of messages and
communicational instruments.
¿Why
isn't it done? Perhaps because common sense leads us to
think of "communicational problems", of products,
campaigns, activities. How to get our "emitter's"
message to "the receivers". Common sense relates
communication to transmission. When we think of a communication
problem in a company, we think of sending a notice, emitting
a press release, not of listening and creating new possibilities
for the community.
Therefore,
when we decide to change our point of view, it is not an
easy task to change the common sense understanding of what
communication is. It is evident that someone who observes
differently, builds differently, for example, as communicologists
we do not build problems, we build communicational situations.
I say
that we decided to inhabit communicology in order to develop
a discipline that would allow us to better intervene, that
would allow us to better understand how systems of human
communication are articulated, how they move, so that our
interventions may influence them.
Last
year was brimming with cases and results. The team that
I manage worked on several relevant processes which we feel
proud to have contributed to, as much from a technical point
of view, due to the clarity and evidence of the results,
as from an ethical point of view, because we helped to solve
serious crises and to disentangle important knots in the
development of two nations.
In Nicaragua,
he helped to integrate the nicaraguan community, to build
and install a new view of themselves and of the international
community towards them. We stood before a country that had
achieved enormous and important progress in development
and growth, but whose imaginary, discourse, and emotions
had remained crystallized in a previous time, which created
a depressive and fearful identity of the country. Today,
a year later, a different national sentiment has been installed,
the indicators have changed, international opinion has advanced
faster than the internal view, but it is clearly a different
country. The job, let us be clear, was not to develop a
country. The elements of development had been showing, the
figures and statistics demonstrated this. It was about creating
an upgrade in the state of mind, a change in the perception
of "who we are", otherwise the poor internal and
external perception could indeed become an insurmountable
obstacle for development. Today, Nicaragua has other conversations
and expectations.
In Panama,
we intervened in a setting where a health, construction
and education strike paralyzed the country for a month,
with a huge fall in the acceptance rate of the president
from 65 to 13%, with a new social security law rejected
by 80% of the population. We collaborated arduously to install
a national dialogue that could be trusted by citizens, that
would permit a discussion about new and possible solutions.
At the end of the dialogue process, we obtained the acceptance
of a majority of citizens for its results, a new social
security law, as much for how it had been conceived as for
its contents, and the president recovered his leadership.
In short,
in both cases, we contributed to the creation of stronger
and more united national communities, with shared projects
and meanings.
To inhabit
communicology, to generate a better understanding of the
communicational processes between human beings. Reason,
emotion, and conduct, all with the same degree of importance,
constitute the braided threads that unite human beings through
communicational actions and products. In a world that becomes
smaller each day and is at the same time enriched in its
possibilities and opportunities, to understand how these
communicational processes occur, flow, are blocked or distorted,
is an indispensible ability for survival, as much as economics
or the law. The free trade and commercial integration agreements
that are being signed in our times, are not just a set of
legal and customs rules, in some cases they require deep
cultural transformation in order to take advantage of the
opportunities, creating new communities.
The
world moves fast, being attentive to identity and its adaptations
to context and change is an unavoidable necessity of human
communities in our century. It's not about being prepared
to change everything and letting yourself go under the vertiginous
wave of transformation; on the contrary, it is about being
alert in order to identify what to preserve, what to eliminate
and what to transform, so that we may continue to be managers
of our own identity.
*This
column is an edition of the speech given by the author at
the graduation ceremony of the class of 2005 Communicology
Training for Identity and Change Management.
*Special thanks to Francisca Escobar for the english traslation.
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