Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications
CURRENT COMMUNICATION DIFFICULTIES
Abstract
As young academic discipline, communication has gained a relative autonomy in the last sixty years. The social phenomenon of communication has become the unique and unitary object of a clearly structured discipline in the 1950s. Even if it cannot be asserted that communication phenomena have not been studied till the middle of the twentieth century, these phenomena have been observed, examined, experienced and analyzed only incidentally, in an isolated manner, sporadically and complementarily. Communication phenomena have been subsequently approached within research on rhetorical, sociological, psychological, anthropological, semiotic phenomena and so on (Coman & Rothenbuhler, 2005). The segregation of specific communicational phenomena has led to the foundation of a new object of study relatively homogenous and rigorously delimited: communication. The greatest issue of communication that partially remains valid nowadays is that it that not have its own research method. Communication has borrowed from its constitutive sources not only research methods, but also procedures, means and instrument of validation and acknowledgment. Delia Cristina Balaban and Mirela Codruţa Abrudan conclude that in „the domain of communication sciences we have to deal with a theoretic pluralism” (Balaban & Abrudan, 2011, p. 7). Nevertheless, difficulties and uncertainties which communication is faced with nowadays are part of its natural destiny: it has separated itself as object of study and it has borrowed methodological instruments. Its object was relatively amorphous, frail, volatile and partially contradictory. The borrowed methods were permeated by the interests that have generated them. Communication has taken them for granted by lack of something else. It has even borrowed some sectorial theories. It has become accustomed to making use of those theories and to employ those methods, for investigation and justification.
