Chapter 2 Blog 3 Contexts for Observing Communication

One are we didn't cover in Chapter 2 that i really enjoyed was ethnography of communication. There are four distinct contexts for observing communication in our text. The first, Speech Community, is a group of people with a common attitude toward speech. I thought of my time in the Air Force in a flying squadron. We were our own community, even apart from the Air Force. The next context is Speech Situations, or certain occasions that call for speech. This made me think of formal Commanders Calls, Thirsty Thursdays, Booster Club events, Pre-Mission crew meetings, and Tactics and Intelligence Briefings. Each of these, even though among our small squadron, required very different forms of communication. Some communication would be very formal, and others very professional. The best would be the casual "war story" time with a beer on a Thirsty Thursday where rank went out the window and everyone sat around and bonded. Another context is Speech Events, i related this to different portions of a Commanders Call. We would be addressed by our Commander, different section officers, weather, tactics, safety, and booster club personnel. The final context is Speech Acts which is individual and purposeful acts of communication, usually broken down within a Speech Event. This might be just my Commander's portion of the meeting, and he might have expressed anger for something we failed on as a squadron, or maybe it would have been an expression of pride for a mission well done. This is just one of 5 models of communication that we have covered in chapters 1 and 2.