Robert S. Cathcart

Mediated Interpersonal Communication: Toward a New Typology.

Traditional conceptualizations of communication have excluded media or relegated them to a minor role as components of channel. Furthermore, the exclusive identification of media with “mass communication” has restricted understanding of the symbiotic relationship of media and interpersonal communication. This essay argues that media pervade all dimensions of human communication and must be considered in all research. It examines the category “mediated interpersonal communication” and suggests that it be added to the communication typology.

Movements: Confrontation as rhetorical form

The author of this essay argues the thesis that the true movement is a kind of “agonistic ritual” whose most distinguishing form is confrontation.

Media grammars, generations, and media gaps

This essay argues that the traditional concept of the “generation” as the signifier of separate human time relationships be replaced by the concept of human groups based on media relationships. It takes the position that today people are connected or separated more by media experience than by chronological years. This position is developed through an examination of how new media develop their own grammars, the way individuals acquire media literacy, and the effects of media literacy on ways people relate to the world and each other. It concludes that people develop different states of media consciousness based upon the order of acquisition of media grammars, and that particular media consciousness produce media gaps which separate people.

Defining social movements by their rhetorical form

How do we know that some collective behavior is a social movement? At what point is a movement perceived to exist? How do movements progress? The relevance of these three questions to a rhetorical theory of movements is discussed in this essay?

I am a camera: The mediated self

This paper argues that an individuals self image is in large part media dependent. The case is made for this position by first establishing George Herbert Meads theory of self and the role of interpersonal communication in the formulation of self image. The concept of mediated interpersonal communication is then explained and linked to Meads position that the self can be known only through communication, thereby expanding the crucial function of communication to include medias role in the formulation of a self image. Specifically, the role of the photographic media in the formulation of a self image is analyzed and a new research paradigm for studies of the self is suggested.

Jimmy Carter on human rights: A thematic analysis

The analysis of Jimmy Carters public statements on human rights reveals a calculated attempt to infuse an ambiguous catch phrase or slogan with the symbolic power of an ultimate term.