Why I study communication (and why it matters)

When I talked with anxious undergraduates about the job market, I always joked that I had a degree in dead languages (classics) and a doctorate in a field nobody could define (rhetoric). I still get strange looks when I tell people what I studied. It sounds pretentious, academic, unclear.

Over the years, I’ve learned to skip over the confusion and just say I study communication. That’s better, but then most people think I’m a media specialist or someone who talks all day about PowerPoint techniques. I’m neither of the two.

So what do I study when I study communication?

Let me start by acknowledging that communication is a broad field. Because communication touches everything people do, people who study communication study a diverse array of things. The National Communication Association, in fact, has 49 divisions covering everything from media and pop culture to politics and debate to religion and ethics to families and aging. 

When you talk with two communication scholars, then, you’ll get two completely different pictures of what communication is and what communication studies looks like. In fact, that’s the beauty of communication as a field. So when I’m talking about what I do and what interests me, know that I’m answering mostly for myself. Others will answer the question differently. 

Within academia, communication occupies a strange place. Some people see it more as a pure social science—something like psychology or political science, for instance—while others see it as being a division of the humanities like English or philosophy. I see it as a blend of the two, what you could call a human science. 

For me, calling communication a human science splits the difference between the humanities (English, philosophy) and the social sciences (psychology, political science). It takes into account communication’s deep artistic dimension and the ways it speaks to fundamental ideas about who we are as human beings. And it also recognizes that communication is also profoundly important for how we relate to each other, build institutions, and create a healthy society.

But what, exactly, do communication scholars study? Most disciplines are easy to peg because they can point to something that's clearly defined:

• Literary scholars study texts. 

• Philosophers study wisdom.

• Theologians study God.

• Historians study the past. 

• Political scientists study power. 

• Anthropologists study culture. 

• Sociologists study social structures.

• Psychologists study the mind.

• Economists study scarcity.

My apologies to anyone who studies these fields, which are much broader than any single sentence can capture. But even if they drive purists up the wall, there’s some truth to each of these statements. And even more to my point, communication scholars can’t do this as easily—if at all. 

We don’t have a single domain. We cross them.

Communication’s ability to cross domains is part of its strength as a field of study and why so many of us are drawn to study it. And while it may not seem so, this interdisciplinarity also begins to suggest the start of a working definition for communication. Communication, in a sense, is a study of “betweens”—what goes on between people, or between cultures, or between institutions.

So we don’t study human minds like psychology does, but we study what goes on between those minds when they start coming together. We don’t study power like political scientists do, but we study how people decide to use that power. We don’t study God like theologians do, but we study how people bring their beliefs into their everyday lives to live, love, and work together. And so on.

But that working definition of communication only gets us so far. The interrelationships it examines are not only incredibly important. They are also extraordinarily complex, constantly changing, and, today, under increasing amounts of pressure. In fact, some of the most important relationships we have—the ones that we depend upon most as a society and as living, breathing, loving people—are fraying, and we don’t have anything to replace them yet. 

This complexity, pressure, and fraying, as well as the extraordinary uncertainty we are living under today, means seeing communication simply as exploring relationships—however important they may be to us—just doesn’t cut it. It doesn’t capture the drama, the extremity of where we are right now, of where we’ve always been.

At this point, I think of the German philosopher Karl Jaspers, who wrote in the middle of the twentieth century. Trained as a psychiatrist, he broke with Freud to become a philosopher exploring the depths of human life and existence. 

Communication, interestingly enough, plays a central role in his work. While his ideas are too broad to summarize completely here, and while he uses language many readers won’t be familiar with, I like to describe his definition of communication like this: 

Communication is the loving struggle that happens when our backs are against the wall.

And in a world of uncertainty, conflict, and pain, our backs are often against a wall—and maybe many walls at once.

I find this definition compelling because it captures communication’s existential urgency. It names the between as a struggle. And there’s a reason why we’re engaging with each other. We’re thrown into a world we don’t understand and into problems we may not even be able to define, let alone control. We’re wrestling with each other and ourselves in the dark to find out what we need to do. 

So we need each other, even though we may come from profoundly different cultural, religious, ethnic, and political backgrounds, speak different areas of experience and expertise, have incompatible interests, and not like each other very much. The need to encompass this diversity is why NCA has 49 divisions, and why good communicators need to know so much about so many different things.

Yet, despite the uncertainties we experience and the conflicts that divide us, we always need to make a choice—even though we may end up being completely wrong. After all, not making a choice is a choice, too.

And as in any wrestling match, communication is hard, messy work. Injury isn’t just possible but to some extent inevitable.

Because it’s so easy to be hurt and to hurt others, and because we will need to wrestle again tomorrow or five minutes from now, we need to see, as best we can, communication as a loving embrace, not mortal combat. When it starts feeling like mortal combat, as it so often is in today’s society, we need to learn to wrestle differently.

As a coach, I participate in this loving struggle everyday with clients. Every session is, to some extent, a playful wrestling match, in which clients work through the transitions they’re experiencing, the places where they may be hurting and uncertain, and the challenges they want to embrace. 

In the process, they grow their capacity to engage life in a more constructive and purposeful way. Strengthened, they show up for others and themselves in new ways. They advocate better, navigate confusing relationships, become more comfortable with uncertainty, and make more grounded decisions.

Communication, as a field, helps us navigate all of these things, things we need now more than ever. This is what I study when I’m studying communication, and how I use that knowledge to help others.

Want to learn more? Drop me a line here.