Communication Theory by C. David Mortensen

Author:C. David Mortensen
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017-09-04T04:00:00+00:00

2 Accessible Engagements

When a face engagement exhausts the situation—all persons present being accredited participants in the encounter—the problem of maintaining orderly activity will be largely internal to the encounter: the allocation of talking time (if the engagement is a spoken one); the maintenance of something innocuous to talk or act upon (this being describable as the problem of “safe supplies”); the inhibition of hostility; and so forth.

When there are persons present who are not participants in the engagement, we know that inevitably they will be in a position to learn something about the encounter’s participants and to be affected by how the encounter as a whole is conducted. When a face engagement must be carried on in a situation containing bystanders, I will refer to it as accessible.

Whenever a face engagement is accessible to nonparticipants there is a fully shared and an unshared participation. All persons in the gathering at large will be immersed in a common pool of unfocused interaction, each person, by his mere presence, manner, and appearance, transmitting some information about himself to everyone in the situation, and each person present receiving like information from all the others present, at least in so far as he is willing to make use of his receiving opportunities. It is this possibility of widely available communication, and the regulations arising to control this communication, that transform a mere physical region into the locus of a sociologically relevant entity, the situation. But above and beyond this fully common participation, the ratified members of a particular engagement will in addition be participating in interaction of the focused kind, where a message conveyed by one person is meant to make a specific contribution to a matter at hand, and is usually addressed to a particular recipient, while the other members of the encounter, and only these others, are meant to receive it too. Thus, there will be a fully shared basis of unfocused interaction underlying one or more partially shared bases of focused interaction.

The difference between participation in the unfocused interaction in the situation at large and participation in the focused interaction in a face engagement is easy to sense but difficult to follow out in detail. Questions such as choice of participants for the encounter or sound level of voices have relevance for the situation as a whole, because anyone in the situation will be (and will be considered to be) in a position to witness these aspects of the face engagement, which are the unfocused part of the communication flowing from it. But the specific meanings of particular statements appropriately conveyed within a face engagement will not be available to the situation at large, although, if a special effort at secrecy be made, this furtiveness, as a general aspect of what is going on, may in fact become quite widely perceivable and an important time in the unfocused interaction that is occurring. That part of the communication occurring in a face engagement that could not be conveyed through mediating channels is

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