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The Resonance Principle in Communication

It is difficult to imagine a person who watched Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald before live television cameras, turning to his wife or children and commenting, “That was an extraordinary message we just received.” Yet someone analyzing Oswald’s televised assassination, from a communication point of view, will be encumbered by such terms as senders, receivers, channels, and messages. In talking about communication, especially mass-media communication, we often find ourselves using terms or analytical models that distort or oversimplify the process. The vocabulary of communication theory consistently fails as a tool for analyzing the mass-media process.

It is not just that we lack adequate terms for describing communication. Our understanding of the communication process is hindered by deep-rooted perceptual and cognitive biases. We believe that communication takes place across large spaces, over a period of time, and primarily through one symbolic mode (words). Though the exchange of verbal messages (typically, written messages) constitutes only a small percentage of human communication, we generalize this one mode as the basis on which all communication is structured. This bias is founded, in part, on Western society’s problems in communicating during the five-hundred-year period prior to the development of electronic media, when print was the dominant means of non-face-to-face communication. The movement or transportation of messages across considerable distances in the briefest period of time was the central and overriding communication problem. Most of our communication theories today are still structured around this issue.

Transportation Theories of Communication

A classic transportation model of the communication process first discusses the source of communication, or the sender. A sender experiences and formulates “meaning” through his encounters with other people and objects in his world. He codes this meaning into a symbolic form—typically, words. He is now ready to send a message, but first he must choose a way of packaging his message for the trip. Writing words on paper could serve as the package, or transmitter, in such a model. Next the sender chooses a channel of communication, such as a letter, newspaper, pamphlet, or book. A channel of communication is often low in efficiency. It requires time to move information across a given space. It may also introduce noise into the message. Newspapers can be censored; pamphlets are written in various styles, and this may alter the meaning a sender intended to put into his words; and letters may be damaged in transit.

Transportation Model of Communication

At the other end of a communication channel is a receiver. He must decode the symbolic forms in the message, assess the damage produced by noise in the channel, and match the “meanings” in the message against his understanding of the world, in order to comprehend the meaning intended by the sender. Communication may be said to take place when the two “meanings” are alike, or to the extent that they match.

The transportation model is not without value. It is a useful guide in analyzing some forms of communication in our society, and it is a good model for illustrating the communication problems in Western society during the print era. Before electricity, the available channels of communication, such as drums, smoke signals, reflecting mirrors, cannon shots, and lantern signals, were subject to severe limitations in the physical environment. Cloudy weather, darkness, trees, and mountains interfered with vision. Animal sounds, wind, thunder, canyons, etc., interfered with auditory signals. Messages had to be formulated according to a rigidly precise code and were limited to only the most crucial data—owing to the inefficiency of the transportation channel. “Getting the message across” was the consummate problem. A military leader who wanted to signal his allies through a system of pennants by day or torches by night had to concern himself with rain or wind extinguishing a torch or blowing over a pennant, and thereby communicating the wrong battle instructions. The problem was compounded when a message was to be sent over a long distance. Napoleon established a network of 224 line-of-sight semaphore stations, spanning over 1,000 miles. The coded message had to be repeated accurately at each station for a correct message to get through. The chance of an error was quite high. In addition, these vehicles for transporting messages were single-channel systems. They lacked the multichannel reinforcement of most face-to-face interactions (i.e., in face-to-face encounters we see and hear a person simultaneously; both channels are likely to support the meaning he intends to communicate).

As Western culture developed more complex economic and social structures, the quick and accurate movement of information became more critical. Wars were often prolonged, and sometimes initiated, because of a breakdown in the transportation of messages. Similarly, fortunes were made and lost when one party gained a slight advantage in the time required to send and receive messages across an ocean or continent. An English merchant who discovered that the cotton crop in America was highly successful could undercut his competitors if he alone possessed this information.

As a result of these transportation problems, we came to understand communication as the movement of information across space, over a period of time. We generalized the problem area of communication as synonymous with the process itself. A transportation theory of communication is useful when the movement of information is a central problem, but such issues are only a small area in the total communication process.

When someone is overloaded with information, the transportation theory ceases to be meaningful. In addition, transportation theory looks at communication from a “message” point of view. It asks: How are messages created? How do they move? How are they received? Most human communication, however, involves the exchange of so much information at any moment that it cannot be isolated as message units. The transportation theory is thus inadequate in describing the human learning process, or accounting for the dissemination and flow of information in our society. Information flow is a much more complex process than the mere transportation of messages.

The transportation theory of communication is the basis of many formal models of communication as well as our everyday conception of “sending messages.” The way we use a postal service to send a letter comes very close to our commonplace analogy for all communication. We assume that communication is difficult to achieve, and that a message encounters resistance at each step along the way. This commonplace conception of communication is so basic to our thinking that we have used the new electronic media almost exclusively as message-sending devices. In my childhood, for example, the telephone was used as a surrogate for a telegram or letter, not as a new medium. If our family was planning to visit relatives in New Jersey, my mother would call long distance from New York to New Jersey to tell them when we expected to arrive. Her messages were short, loudly spoken, and to the point. She used the phone as a vehicle for sending a message across a space. Even when the line between New York and New Jersey was clear, she spoke louder than necessary—conscious of the space between them and using the phone as if it were a tunnel through a chasm. She believed that the phone, like a letter, was a low-efficiency vehicle for communicating, and she was pushing to get her message across. Today, my daughter often calls her friends to exchange giggles. They relate bits of news, giggle back and forth a few minutes, then say goodbye. My daughter accepts the telephone as a communication system with no resistance and no transformation. Communication for her is what happens when you use a telephone, not something that may occur if your message gets through.

Part of an ad for Seventeen magazine

Our misconception of communication as transportation interacts with another deep-rooted bias: the identification of print with “meaning.” Only a tiny fraction of all communication takes place through print (the U.S. national average for book purchases is 0.3 books per year, and this represents an all-time high in Western culture), yet it remains an idealized form of communicating the most important information: “I’ll believe that when I see it in writing.” More significant, print has helped foster a narrow conception of communication that accepts perceptual information as meaningful only to the extent that it conforms to the patterning inherent in print communication. One cannot approach a viable theory of communication until he exorcises the “spirit of print” that has controlled our terms for learning, understanding, and communicating.

The End of the Line

Print has dominated our non-face-to-face communications environment for the past five hundred years. During this period, the information most valued by Western societies was communicated in a fixed form, with words following one after another, left to right, on lines that proceeded down a page. All preserved knowledge, as well as those pieces of information that achieved high status throughout the society (e.g., laws) were recorded in print. The linear process, by which information was translated into print, took on a status unto itself. As a result, the linear process came to be valued in many areas of people’s lives. Our language, for example, shows a marked dependence on linearity in the terms we use for clear thinking and proper behavior. A child growing up in our culture is taught to “toe the line…keep in line…walk the straight and narrow…don’t make waves.” Similarly, he is told that a good student is one who “follows a clear line of thought.” And if someone really understands another person, we say he can “read him like a book.” Our logic has been the logic of print, where one idea follows another. “Circular reasoning” is synonymous with unacceptable logic. And we know that you never accomplish anything by “running around in circles.”

The linearity in our language is accompanied by a strong dependence on visual analogies to represent truth, knowledge, and understanding. Do you see what I mean? A really bright person—i.e. someone with hindsight, foresight, and insight—will see eye to eye with me. But a dull person, one who hasn’t seen the light, won’t agree with my point of view. Why, it’s as clear as ABC.

If seeing was believing, listening and speaking were undependable elements in the communication process. It was a common view that children should be seen and not heard. If you played it by ear, you were not very sure of yourself. And to be recognized as a trained musician, you had to be able to read a score and write notes on paper. In the courtroom, unreliable evidence, whether of a written or spoken variety, may be discarded on the grounds that it is “hearsay.” Similarly, a scholar could look back on history, and a prophet could see into the future; but if someone crudely imitated another performer, we said he was a weak echo or that he was mouthing something that had been done better. Even the early radio operators indicated that they were receiving a strong signal by saying, “Read you loud and clear.”

Even after we recognize the predominance of linear analogies in our language, it becomes important only when we understand that many non-linear patterns in our present communication structure are described and analyzed as linear patterns. Our linear bias also prevents us from understanding preliterate auditory cultures. Few readers of the passage in Genesis, “In the beginning was the Word,” recognize that it refers to a spoken word. Jesus said, “It is written but I say unto you” to assert a new world order based on his spoken words. Linearity and a strong visual orientation are not endemic to all cultures. A society that depends on auditory communication for the exchange of messages will organize their “world” in a very different way from our own. Space, time, the concept of self, etc., take on very different meanings when auditory patterns replace a linear, visual orientation.

You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round. In the old days when we were a strong and happy people, all our power came to us from the sacred hoop of the nation and so long as the hoop was unbroken the people flourished… . Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The Sky is round and I have heard that the earth is round like a bail and so are all the stars. The Wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round.

Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood and so it is in everything where power moves. Our tipis were round like the nests of birds and these were always set in a circle, the nation’s hoop, a nest of many nests where the Great Spirit meant for us to hatch our children.

— Heháka Sápa (Black Elk)1

In many ways, we are today experiencing a return to an auditory-based communications environment. However, lacking the terms to describe this shift, as well as a perceptual orientation to recognize it, we often fail to understand what is happening. If one keeps his ears to the wall, he will begin to hear this new base echoed in the language of the young. Here, people in agreement are “on the same wavelength” or “on the same frequency.” A person learns by “getting around.” Someone who “plays it by ear” is open to new possibilities that may emerge in a situation. Truth is conveyed by “telling it like it is.” An individual who learns how to behave properly in a situation “tunes in on what’s happening.” And effective communication “strikes a responsive chord.”

Our social organization clearly reflects the shift from a predominantly linear to an acoustic base in communication structure. Lines are disintegrating all around us. The NBC Today show has a one-handed clock that indicates minutes past the hour.

Since the program is viewed simultaneously in different time zones, it makes sense to tell the audience, “It’s ten minutes past the hour” and assume that they know which hour, rather than to state, “It’s ten past eight in the Eastern Standard zone, ten past seven in the Central Standard zone,” etc. This sharing of information across time zones demonstrates how time lines have lost significance. Indeed, two western states have petitioned to change their time zone because they receive most television programming from stations in border states with a different time zone. Also, Congress is considering a redistricting of congressional zones to match media districts. Similarly, instantaneous information has reduced the need for datelines in newspapers. One of the cornerstone assumptions in the transportation theory of communication—that a period of time is required for information to move across space—has been undermined by the near-instantaneous speed of electronic communication.

The line, as a means of social organization, is being replaced by acoustic space principles. The “Party line” no longer explains patterns of voting behavior. The railroad line no longer explains transportation patterns in our society. Even the lines or rows that organized seating patterns in schools, churches and theaters are giving way to new patterns.

Theater-in-the-round has returned. Conference tables and classroom desks are organized in circular patterns. And recently, the governor of a large eastern state defined his role as “Trying to tune government to the needs of citizens.”

The Auditory Base of Electronic Media

Television and film, as well as radio, tapes, and records, have contributed to a radical transformation in our perception of the world—from a visual, print base to an auditory base. Each of these media conditions the brain to receive and process all information in the same way it has always processed information received via the ear. The ear receives fleeting, momentary vibrations, translates these bits of information into electronic nerve impulses, and sends them to the brain. The brain “hears” by registering the current vibration, recalling the previous vibrations, and expecting future ones. We never hear the continuum of sound we label as a word, sentence, or paragraph. The continuum never exists at any single moment in time. Rather, we piece bits of information (millisecond vibrations) together and perceive the entire three-stage process as “hearing.”

The dispersal pattern of a radio signal is circular. Thus, while we pay taxes and vote within the irregular boundaries of city and state lines, we are united to those who share electronically mediated information with us by a circular pattern, the limits of the radio station’s audience. This experience has fostered a sense of community that resembles the days before print, when the circular dispersal pattern of a person’s voice, or drums, determined social patterns of interaction.

In auditory- based cultures, the flow of information is analogous to the dispersal pattern created by dropping a pebble in a bucket of water.

As a wider range of new material reached the public through telephone, radio, film, records, and television, we developed a stronger orientation toward the auditory mode of receiving and processing information. A greater percentage of the information that affected our lives was reaching us in auditory form. This was true not only for sound, but also for electronically mediated visual information, which is patterned like auditory information. Man had never before experienced a world of visual sensation patterned in an auditory mode.

Film transmits visual information by projecting a series of still pictures in rapid succession. Each still frame is projected for approximately one fiftieth to one seventy-fifth of a second. Following each frame, the screen is black for a nearly equal length of time. The same frame may then be projected a second time, or the next frame may be shown—depending on the projector. But in any one-second period, the screen is black approximately half the time. The brain “sees” motion by registering the current still picture, recalling previous frames, and anticipating future frames that will complete the movements. This differs considerably from visual experience in everyday life, where the eye is bombarded with a continuous stream of information, which is always emanating from the sources we are observing.

On film, the everyday visual experience is fractured, and the brain must function in a new way to “reconstruct” a continuous visual image. On television, the real-life visual image is fractured in a far more radical way. If we were to set up a series of two thousand still cameras focused on a TV, each shooting at one two-thousandth of a second and firing sequentially (so that we would cover a one-second time span completely), no single camera would record a picture. The image we “see” on television is never there. A still camera, shooting at one two-thousandth of a second, will capture only a few dots of light or perhaps a single line across the television. In everyday visual experience, of course, a still photograph of a landscape shot at one two-thousandth of a second will capture a complete visual image of the landscape.

A television set creates a visual image by projecting dots of light, one at a time, onto the front screen. The succession of dots moves across the screen and down alternate “lines.” In all, there are 525 such lines on American television sets. During each one-fifteenth of a second, the scanning process will have completed two sweeps, once on each alternate set of lines.

In watching television, our eyes function like our ears. They never see a picture, just as our ears never hear a word. The eye receives a few dots of light during each successive millisecond, and sends these impulses to the brain. The brain records this impulse, recalls previous impulses, and expects future ones. In this way we “see” an image on television. The process differs from film in that it requires much faster processing of information and more visual recall:

1.With film, the brain has to process twenty-four distinct inputs per second. With television, the brain has to process thousands of distinct inputs per second.

2.On a film screen, we always see a complete visual image, even if only for a brief instant (one fiftieth to one seventy-fifth of a second), but the presence of a visual image alternates with periods of nearly equal length in which no image is present. On a television screen, we never see a complete image, since there is never more than a dot of light on the screen at any one time.

3.With film, the brain does not “fill in” the image on the screen—it fills in the motion between the images. With television, the brain must fill in (or recall) 99 percent of the image at any given moment, since the full image is never present on the screen.

Watching television, the eye is for the first time functioning like the ear. Film began the process of fracturing visual images into bits of information for the eye to receive and the brain to reassemble, but television completed the transition. For this reason, it is more accurate to say that television is an auditory based medium. Watching TV, the brain utilizes the eye in the same way it has always used the ear. With television, the patterning of auditory and visual stimuli is identical.

Media and Violence

There has been great concern about the effects of TV on children. If we found more violence only by children against other children, or by children against adults, there might be reason to investigate the harmful influence of TV on children. But the increased violence in our world is among all groups, including adults to other adults, adults to children, and by our society toward other societies. If there is a relation between TV and violence, it must be on a broad societal level, not just in relation to children.

Specific content on TV, in itself, does not foster violence. There has been a good deal of research attempting to show a stimulus-response relation between seeing an act of violence on TV and imitating that behavior in real life. Although some psychologists have managed to create this effect in a controlled laboratory situation, there is no evidence in society’s laboratory that supports such a conclusion. There is no increase in the number of gasoline stations robbed the day after thirty-six million people watch such a robbery on “Ironside.” And the news coverage of a skyjacking or murder does not cause others to imitate this behavior.

TV fosters violence, first, by conditioning people to respond instantly to stimuli in their everyday lives, and by focusing people’s attention on the current moment. On TV, the only thing that exists is the current, momentary dot of light or sound vibration—each exists for a millisecond. People develop an orientation to everyday life based on the patterning of electronic information. We become very impatient in situations where information does not move at electronic speed. And we process new information instantly, rather than think out decisions. The increased violence in our society is generated by impulsive reactions to stimuli in a situation. This is largely a perceptual problem. We seek meaning in the world that conforms to the perceptual patterning of electronic media.

Second, constant exposure to TV over a period of time, and the sharing of TV stimuli by everyone in the society, creates a reservoir of common media experiences that are stored in our brains. In a group situation, commonly shared media experiences may overpower the previous non-media experiences of each member of the group as the basis on which a collective response will be formulated. The same is true for interpersonal encounters that must later be communicated to many people. It is easier to explain or justify action based on some experience we share with others. For example, in a political demonstration, there may be a flare-up between a policeman and one demonstrator. Seeing this, other demonstrators may refer the incident to the body of stored personal experiences where similar incidents took place. Their previous personal experiences will all be different, and therefore are not likely to foster an instantaneous collective response. However, if they refer what they see to previous media experiences of seeing demonstrations (commonly shared by all who watch TV), a collective reaction is more likely. Furthermore, since TV tends to show violent moments in demonstrations, the stored media experiences of people in the crowd makes violence commonly available to everyone in the group—as an appropriate collective reaction.

In addition, media depiction of the good life as typical throughout our society contradicts the everyday experiences of many people. This can be an element conducive to violent behavior, when people who do not experience the good life attempt to get what everyone has. Here too, constant exposure to TV makes certain solutions to this dilemma commonly available. The important point here is that we will get nowhere if we try to establish a direct cause-and-effect relationship between TV and violence in society. TV has a very mild effect in one sense—it makes certain knowledge available to us. The strength of the effect lies in TV’s ability to make this knowledge available to everyone.

Truth is a Print Ethic

Truth, as a social value, is a product of print. In preliterate tribal cultures, the truth or falsity of a statement is not as important as whether it conforms to the religious and social beliefs of the society. Similarly, during the greater part of the Middle Ages, an imprimatur by the Church superseded any question of truth or validity regarding printed material. As print became a mass medium, literacy emerged as a social value. In order to learn about the world and communicate this knowledge to others, a person had to be literate. But men soon realized that print information, unlike other sensory data, could be true or false, fiction or nonfiction. Philosophers and men of letters spent a great deal of time and energy on this question, and truth emerged as an important social value (though the “white lie” was reserved for those occasions when another social value took precedence over truth). They did not recognize that truth is a particular problem in one medium of communication: the printed word.

No one ever asked of a Steichen photograph, “Is it true or false?” And no one would apply a truth standard in analyzing a Picasso painting. Yet no one would argue that a painting or photograph cannot communicate important and powerful meaning. Likewise, the question of truth is largely irrelevant when dealing with electronic media content. People do not watch Bonanza to find out about the Old West. So it makes no sense to ask if the program is a true depiction of that historical period. And we could not ask whether a children’s cartoon program is true.

We can and should ask about the effects of television and radio programming. Electronic communication deals primarily with effects. The problem is that no “grammar” for electronic media effects has been devised. Electronic media have been viewed merely as extensions of print, and therefore subject to the same grammar and values as print communication. The patterned auditory and visual information on television or radio is not “content.” Content is a print term, subject to the truth-falsity issue. Auditory and visual information on television or radio are stimuli that affect a viewer or listener. As stimuli, electronically mediated communication cannot be analyzed in the same way as print “content.” A whole new set of questions must be asked, and a new theory of communication must be formulated.

The problem of applying a truth-falsity paradigm to electronic communication is illustrated most clearly in the case of advertising. Periodically, the Federal Trade Commission clamps down on advertisers, demanding that they substantiate the truthfulness of their claims. How, they ask, can three different headache remedies claim to get into the bloodstream the fastest? And how can every brand of toothpaste claim to make teeth whiter than any other brand of toothpaste? Advertising agencies, forked tongue in cheek, respond by assuring the FTC that truth is essential if they are to convince the public to buy a product. Ironically, the ad agencies are very much concerned with truth, but they simply want to appear truthful. However, both the FTC and the agencies are dealing with an irrelevant issue. Neither understands the structure of electronic communication. They are dealing with TV and radio as extensions of print media, with the principles of literacy setting the ground rules for truth, honesty, and clarity.

Many advertising agencies believe that if a claim is accepted as true, the product will be considered better than all others in the field, thus increasing sales. The continuing proliferation of words like “best,” “most,” “cleanest,” “purest,” “whitest,” etc., testify to the agency proclivity for leaning on a truth image. For years, the agencies produced ads that made incredible claims for products, and that created arbitrary product differences where none in fact existed. The effect of such advertising was to produce a general cynicism in the public mind regarding all radio and television advertising. Perhaps to combat this, many large agencies recently adopted a policy of faking “straight talk” in commercials. That is, since the effect of their commercials was to create a negative attitude toward the product being advertised, maybe they could use a tone of voice that would sound truthful. Of course, the result has not been “straight talk,” but announcers who sound like they are faking “straight talk.”

The only important question for the FTC and advertising agencies alike is: What are the effects of electronic media advertising? For an advertiser, the issue of concern should center on how the stimuli in a commercial interact with a viewer’s real-life experiences and thus affect his behavior in a purchasing situation. Here the key is to connect products to the real lives of human beings. As long as the connection is made in a deep way, and as long as the experience evoked by the commercial is not in conflict with the experience of the product, purchase is possible, or probable. At the moment, agencies could skirt an end run right around the FTC by producing commercials that get to the heart of the human use of products. People take aspirin because they need relief from a headache, not because it has monodyocycolate in it. People enjoy soup for much simpler reasons than the Heinz commercials would lead one to believe. Eating Heinz soup does not give one the feeling that he is part of a 102-piece band riding on top of a gargantuan can of Heinz soup. Commercials that do not connect and resonate with real-life experiences build an incredibility gap for everyone who uses the medium.

From the FTC point of view, “telling the truth” should be the least important social concern. If electronic communication deals with effects, then government agencies responsible for safeguarding public well-being should concern themselves with understanding the effects of a commercial, and preventing those effects that are not in the public interest. A recent television commercial for children’s aspirin was 100 percent truthful by the most rigid FTC standard, but the effect of the commercial was to make children feel that aspirin is something to take when they want to have a good time. The commercial clearly demonstrates that truth is a print ethic, not a standard for ethical behavior in electronic communication. In addition, the influence of electronic media on print advertising (particularly the substitution of photographic techniques for copy to achieve an effect) raises the question of whether truth is any longer an issue in magazine or newspaper ads.

At present, we have no generally agreed-upon social values and/or rules that can be readily applied in judging whether the effects of electronic communication are beneficial, acceptable, or harmful. Our print-based conception of electronic media prevents us from making social decisions based on a correct understanding of our new communication environment.

Toward a Resonance Theory of Communication

In discussing electronically based communication processes, it is very helpful to use auditory terms. Words like feedback…reverberation…tuning…overload…regeneration… fading describe many of the characteristics of social behavior in relation to electronic media. Similarly, the elements of electronic auditory systems serve as useful analogies for social communication problems. In a public address system, for example, too much output produces feedback. This “fed back” sound becomes re-amplified until the system overloads, producing distortion. Someone using such a system must learn to control the output and anticipate feedback. In mass communication, we experience a parallel problem. The interaction of program output with audience feedback can easily produce an information overload.

These analogies suggest a new theory of electronic communication, based on the patterning of information inherent in auditory communication. Transportation theory assumes that communication is difficult to achieve and that a message encounters resistance at each step in its movement across space, over a period of time. In our electronic communication environment, it is no longer meaningful to assume that communication is a low-efficiency process, or that messages must be pushed across a vast chasm in order to be received and understood. The space between phoning from one room in a house to another room in the same house is equivalent to the space between a caller in New York talking to someone in London. In both instances, space has no effect on the flow of information. Similarly, time is no longer relevant when communication takes place at electronic speed, and editing of film, sound, and video tape replaces the linear sequence of events in time with events juxtaposed in a time relationship established by the communicator.

In formulating a new theory of communication, it is valuable to build on Ray Birdwhistell’s finding that a state of communication is nearly always present in our environment. This state of communication is like an electric circuit that is always turned on. The juice is present in the line, and our problem is to make the current behave in such a way as to achieve the desired effect. Today, there is a nearly constant flow of information at all times. Indeed, one has to expend considerable effort hypothesizing a situation in our culture in which communication does not regularly occur. We take in electronically mediated auditory and visual information as part of our life process. It is part of our immediate physical surround, and we sit in it, absorbing information constantly. The vital question to be posed in formulating a new theory of communication is: What are the characteristics of the process whereby we organize, store, and act upon the patterned information that is constantly flowing into our brain? Further, given these processes, how do we tune communication to achieve the desired effect for someone creating a message?

In electronically mediated human communication, the function of a communicator is to achieve a state of resonance with the person receiving visual and auditory stimuli from television, radio, records, etc. Decoding symbolic forms such as pennants, drums, lantern signals, or written words is no longer our most significant problem. Words transform experience into symbolic forms. They extract meaning from perception in a manner prescribed by the structure of the language, code this meaning symbolically, and store it in the brain. But the brain does not store everything in this way. Many of our experiences with electronic media are coded and stored in the same way that they are perceived. Since they do not undergo a symbolic transformation, the original experience is more directly available to us when it is recalled. Also, since the experience is not stored in a symbolic form, it cannot be retrieved by symbolic cues. It must be evoked by a stimulus that is coded in the same way as the stored information is coded.

The critical task is to design our package of stimuli so that it resonates with information already stored within an individual and thereby induces the desired learning or behavioral effect. Resonance takes place when the stimuli put into our communication evoke meaning in a listener or viewer. That which we put into the communication has no meaning in itself. The meaning of our communication is what a listener or viewer gets out of his experience with the communicator’s stimuli. The listener’s or viewer’s brain is an indispensable component of the total communication system. His life experiences, as well as his expectations of the stimuli he is receiving, interact with the communicator’s output in determining the meaning of the communication.

A listener or viewer brings far more information to the communication event than a communicator can put into his program, commercial, or message. The communicator’s problem, then, is not to get stimuli across, or even to package his stimuli so they can be understood and absorbed. Rather, he must deeply understand the kinds of information and experiences stored in his audience, the patterning of this information, and the interactive resonance process whereby stimuli evoke this stored information.

The resonance principle is not totally new or unique to electronic communication, It has always been an element in painting, music, sculpture, and, to a limited degree, even in print. However, resonance is now a more operational principle for creating communication because much of the material stored in the brains of an audience is also stored in the brain of a communicator—by virtue of our shared media environment. Also, the process of evoking information is quite different today. It is much like the difference between riding a motorcycle under or over ninety miles per hour. Under ninety miles per hour, a driver should turn into a skid. Over ninety miles per hour, he should turn out with the skid. The physical forces working on a skidding motorcycle are reversed as the cycle crosses this speed barrier, so the driver has to reverse his behavior to pull out of the skid. Similarly, in communicating at electronic speed, we no longer direct information into an audience, but try to evoke stored information out of them, in a patterned way.