Inauguration Oath and 7 Communications Traditions

Chapter four introduces seven traditions in communications studies, which were U. of CO professor Robert Craig's ideas. Since a lot of us mentioned the mistakes in the inauguration oath, I thought I'd make that clip our media text for discussion. So, I'll try to imagine how the video might be studied from the different approaches.



Griffin says that researchers in the Socio-Psychological Tradition study the question, "What can I do to get them to change" (p. 42). Since they try to measure how media affects attitudes, I suppose measuring people's attitudes in response to the clip could be a way to go. I know some of you discussed how the media focused on the mistake in their coverage. Maybe a socio-psychological researcher would analyze exactly how each network commented, and what they focused on.

The Yale researcher Hovland was a founder of the socio-psychological tradition, and his experiments found that source credibility and character were big factors for influencing opinions. I wonder if the stumbling oath sets a sort of tone for Obama's credibility.

You could easily look at the clip from the Rhetorical Tradition viewpoint since it is all about public address. You could look closely at the words of the oath itself and try to see what it is trying to persuade people about. Then you could make some claims about what a stumble on the first part might mean for people. It seems like President Obama himself thought it was important enough to do over.

From a Semiotics Tradition point of view, I think using Barthes ideas about the emotional and ideological meanings of visuals in broadcast media would work. Semiotics looks at signs and symbols and what they stand for. So, in a country that supposedly has a separation of church and state, why does the President take the Oath on the bible. Maybe that represents hypocrisy, but maybe it shows freedom of choice for Obama as an individual of faith. Here we could even get into how Obama himself becomes a symbol in this clip, of America, of hope, etc.

Following the Critical Tradition, I could make a very big deal about the religious meaning of using the bible as an authority for power since the tradition began with the ideas of Karl Marx, who said "religion is the opium of the people." I bet hardly anyone thinks twice about the use of the bible for swearing people into power in office or in court or anywhere. Maybe this is an example of "the mass media dulling sensitivity to repression" (Griffin, 2008, p. 49). We have seen it so many times, we don't think about how many different faiths and authorities people in our country rely on. Does this ritual "perpetuate power imbalances?"

In the video clip, language creates a new identity, literally, which really fits the Socio-cultural tradition. The Socio-Cultural Tradition is about "communication as the creation and enactment of social reality" (Griffin, 2008, p.47). Griffin describes how people who have languages with different vocabularies view reality differently (imagine there's no word for green?). I wonder what this video would mean to people who only understand the transfer of power as a violent process, which includes a large part of the world.

I'm not sure how to see the clip in terms of the Cybernetic Tradition or the Phenomenological Tradition. Cybernetics seems very technical. Weaver's model looks like an electronic circuit (p. 44). Phenomenology seems very personal, or interpersonal, about self and dialogue, but this oath was not very personal and did not involve dialogue. Can anyone think of ways to apply those two traditions? I look forward to hearing comments on my ideas above, and your ideas on other ways we could look at this clip from the view of different communication traditions.