Context and Meaning

p. 85. One of the functions of culture is to provide a highly selective screen between man and the outside world. In its many forms, culture therefore designates what we pay attention to and what we ignore. This screening function provides structure for the world and protects the nervous system from “information overload”. Information overload is a technical term applied to information-processing systems. It describes a situation in which the system breaks down when it cannot properly handle the huge volume of information to which it is subjected. Any mother who is trying to cope with the demands of small children, run a house, enjoy her husband, and carry on even a modest social life knows that there are times when everything happens at once and the world seems to be closing in on her. She is experiencing the same information overload that afflicts business managers, administrators, physicians, attorneys, and air controllers.

p. 86. The solution to the problem of coping with increased complexity and greater demands on the system lies in the preprogramming of the individual or organization. This is done by means of the “contexting” process…

The importance of the role of context is widely recognized in the communication fields, yet the process is rarely described adequately… Closely related to the high-low-context continuum is the degree to which one is aware of the selective screen that one places between himself and the outside world. As one moves from the low to the high side of the scale, awareness of the selective process increases. Therefore, what one pays attention to, context, and information overload are all functionally related.

In the fifties, the United States Government spent millions of dollars developing systems for machine translation of Russian and other languages. After years of effort on the part of some of the most talented linguists in the country, it was finally concluded that the only reliable, and ultimately the fastest, translator is a human being deeply conversant not only with the language but with the subject as well. The computers could spew out yards of print-out but they meant very little. The words and some of the grammar were all there, but the sense was distorted. That the project failed was not due to lack of application, time, money, or talent, but for other reasons, which are central to the theme of this chapter.

The problem lies not in the linguistic code but in the context, which carries various proportions of the meaning. Without context, the code is incomplete since it encompasses only part of the message. (p. 87) This should become clear if one remembers that the spoken language is an abstraction of an event that happened, might have happened, or is being planned. As any writer knows, an event is usually infinitely more complex and rich than the language used to describe it. (…) This is what intelligence is: paying attention to the right things.

The rules governing what one perceives and is blind to in the course of living are not simple; at least five sets of disparate categories of events must be taken into account. These are: the subject or activity, the situation, one’s status in a social system, past experience, and culture.

p. 90. In less complex and fast-moving times, the problem of mutual understanding was not as difficult, because most transactions were conducted with people well known to the speaker or writer, people with similar backgrounds. It is important for conversationalists in any situation – regardless of the area of discourse (love, business, science) – to get to know each other well enough so that they realize what each person is and is not taking into account.

Like a number of my colleagues, I have observed that meaning and context are inextricably bound up with each other. While a linguistic code can be analyzed on some levels independent of context (which is what the machine translation project tried to accomplish), in real life the code, the context, and the meaning can only be seen as different aspects of a single event.

p. 91. Earlier, I said that high-context messages are placed at one end and low-context messages at the other end of a continuum. A high-context (HC) communication or message is one in which most of the information is either in the physical context or internalized in the person, while very little is in the coded, explicit, transmitted part of the message. A low-context (LC) communication is just the opposite; i.e., the mass of the information is vested in the explicit code. Twins who have grown-up together can and do communicate more economically (HC) than two lawyers in a courtroom during a trial (LC), a mathematician programming a computer, two politicians drafting legislation, two administrators writing a regulation, or a child trying to explain to his mother why he got into a fight.

Although no culture exists exclusively at one end of the scale, some are high while others are low. American culture, while not on the bottom, is toward the lower end of the scale. We are still considerably above the German-Swiss, the Germans, and the Scandinavians in the amount of contexting needed in everyday life. While complex, multi-institutional cultures (those that are technologically advanced) might be thought of as inevitably LC, this is not always true. China, the possessor of a great and complex culture, is on the high-context end of the scale.

One notices this particularly in the written language of China, which is thirty-five hundred years old and has changed very little in the past three thousand years. (…) To use a Chinese dictionary, the reader must know the significance of 214 radicals (there are no counterparts for radicals in the Indo-European languages). For example, to find the word for star one must know that it appears under the sun radical. To be literate in Chinese, one has to be conversant with Chinese history. (p. 92) …the spoken pronunciation system must be known, because there are four tones and a change of tone means a change of meaning; whereas in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, etc., the reader need not know how to pronounce the language in order to read it. Another interesting sidelight on the Chinese orthography is that it is also an art form. To my knowledge, no low-context communication system has ever been an art form.

The level of context determines everything about the nature of the communication and is the foundation on which all subsequent behavior rests (including symbolic behavior). Recent studies in sociolinguistics have demonstrated how context-dependent the language code really is. There is an excellent example of this in the work of the linguist Bernstein… In the restricted code of intimacy in the home, words and sentences collapse and are shortened. This even applies to the phonemic structure of the language. The individual sounds begin to merge, as does the vocabulary, whereas in the highly articulated, highly specific, elaborated code of the classroom, law, or diplomacy, more accurate distinctions are made on all levels. Furthermore, the code that one uses signals and is consistent with the situation. A shifting of code signals a shift in everything else that is to follow.

From the practical viewpoint of communications strategy, one must decide how much time to invest in contexting another person.

p. 93. HC actions are by definition rooted in the past, slow to change and highly stable.

p. 95. Contexting probably involves at least two entirely different but interrelated processes – one inside the organism and the other outside. The first takes place in the brain and is a function of either past experience (programmed, internalized contexting) or the structure of the nervous system (innate contexting), or both. External contexting comprises the situation and/or setting in which an event occurs (situational and/or environmental contexting).

p. 100. Barker demonstrates that in studying man it is impossible to separate the individual from the environment in which he functions.

In summary, regardless of where one looks, one discovers that a universal feature of information systems is that meaning (what the receiver is expected to do) is made up of: the communication, the background and preprogrammed responses of the recipient, and the situation.

p. 101. …what an organism perceives is influenced in four ways – by status, activity, setting, and experience. But in man one must add another crucial dimension: culture.

Any transaction can be characterized as high-, low-, or middle-context. HC transactions feature preprogrammed information that is in the receiver and in the setting, with only minimal information in the transmitted message. LC transactions are the reverse. Most of the information must be in the transmitted message in order to make up for what is missing in the context (both internal and external).

In general, HC communication, in contrast to LC, is economical, fast, efficient, and satisfying; however, time must be devoted to programming. If this programming does not take place, the communication is incomplete.

HC communications are frequently used as art forms. They act as a unifying, cohesive force, are long-lived, and are slow to change. LC communications do not unify; however, they can be changed easily and rapidly. (…) A system of defense rocketry can be out of date before it is in place and is therefore very low-context. Church architecture, however, was for hundreds of years firmly rooted in the past… Even today, most churches are still quite traditional in design. One wonders if it is possible to develop strategies for balancing two apparently contradictory needs: the need to adapt and change (by moving in the low-context direction) and the need for stability (high-context).

7. Contexts, High and Low

p. 105. Is there anything more frustrating than being unable to make things work? I am thinking of the child struggling to tie his shoes, or the agony of the man who has suffered a stroke, striving to make himself understood, …or even to feed himself. Equally frustrating though not quite so obvious are the common, everyday problems people face such as disorientation in space… or failure to progress in school or on the job or to control the social system of which one is a part.

In American culture, depending on our philosophical orientation, we blame such failures on either the individual or the social system. Seldom do we look to our lack of understanding of the processes themselves or entertain the notion that there might be something wrong with the design of our institutions or the manner in which the personality and the culture mesh.

p. 106. Cultures, however, are extraordinarily complex… So how does one go about learning the underlying structure of culture? (…) Any of the basic cultural systems and subsystems can serve as a focus for observation. These include matters such as material culture, business institutions (Boorstin, 1973), marriage and the family, social organization, language, even the military (all armies bear the stamp of their culture), sex, and the law. These activities and many more besides reflect and are reflected in culture. I have chosen to compare some differences in the way the law, as it is observed to function in trials, relates to context in different cultures.

p. 113. Context, in one sense, is just one of many ways of looking at things. Failure to take contexting differences into account, however, can cause problems for Americans living in Japan, and even at times inconvenience the sheltered tourist. High-context cultures make greater distinctions between insiders and outsiders than low-context cultures do. People raised in high-context systems expect more of others than do the participants in low-context systems. When talking about something that they have on their minds, a high-context individual will expect his interlocutor to know what’s bothering him, so that he doesn’t have to be specific. The result is that he will talk around and around the point, in effect putting all the pieces in place except the crucial one. Placing it properly – this keystone – is the role of his interlocutor. To do this for him is an insult and a violation of his individuality.

Also in HC systems, people in places of authority are personally and truly (not just in theory) responsible for the actions of subordinates down to the lowest man. In LC systems, responsibility is diffused throughout the system and difficult to pin down – a point that President Nixon exploited in his Watergate defense. Paradoxically, when something happens to a low-context system, everyone runs for cover and “the system” is supposed to protect its members. If a scapegoat is needed, the most plausible low-ranking scapegoat is chosen. In the My Lai incident, a lieutenant took the rap.

p. 114. Moving from law to literature, one again finds a tremendous resource – a stockpile of cultural data – albeit raw data which must be mined and refined before their meaning is clear. Japanese novels are interesting and sometimes puzzling for Westerners to read. To the uninitiated, much of the richness as well as great depths of meaning pass unnoticed, because the nuances of Japanese culture are not known.

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 1004