James Carey argued that there are two ways of thinking about communication. The first is the transmission model: communication as the transfer of information from a sender to a receiver. The second is the ritual model: communication as the shared enactment of a common world — not delivering messages so much as constructing reality together.
Most institutional thinking about communication — in business, in education, in government — operates on the transmission model. We ask: did the message get through? Was it received? Was it understood? These are the right questions for some purposes. But they miss something important about what communication actually does.
Communication is infrastructure. Like roads and electrical grids, it is the substrate on which everything else runs. When that substrate is healthy — when people share enough common context to understand each other, when there are trusted venues for public deliberation, when information flows without catastrophic distortion — everything built on top of it is more durable. When the substrate degrades, everything above it degrades too.
We are living through a degradation of communication infrastructure. This is not primarily about misinformation, though that is part of it. It is about the collapse of shared context: the common ground of facts, frames, and referents that allows strangers to have productive disagreements instead of mutual incomprehension.
Shared context is expensive to build and cheap to destroy. It takes decades of shared institutions — schools, newspapers, civic organizations, public spaces — to create the substrate of common reference. It takes much less to fragment it: a media environment optimized for outrage, filter bubbles reinforced by algorithmic sorting, institutions whose credibility has been eroded by both genuine failures and strategic attacks.
The ritual model of communication becomes urgent here. If communication is partly constitutive of shared reality, then the quality of our communication determines the quality of the reality we inhabit together. This is not mysticism. It is an observation about how groups function. Teams that communicate well build better things. Communities that communicate well solve harder problems. Societies that communicate well can navigate complex challenges without tearing themselves apart.
I do not know how to rebuild degraded communication infrastructure at scale. I am skeptical of anyone who claims to. But I think the first step is recognizing that it is infrastructure — that it underlies everything else, that it requires maintenance, that its degradation has costs beyond the obvious ones.
The second step is local. Start with the conversations you have. Notice when you and someone else are operating from incompatible assumptions about basic facts or values. Instead of bypassing those assumptions to argue about conclusions, investigate them. The work of rebuilding shared context is granular and slow. But it is the only real alternative to permanent mutual incomprehension.
James Carey argued that there are two ways of thinking about communication. The first is the transmission model: communication as the transfer of information from a sender to a receiver. The second is the ritual model: communication as the shared enactment of a common world — not delivering messages so much as constructing reality together.
Most institutional thinking about communication — in business, in education, in government — operates on the transmission model. We ask: did the message get through? Was it received? Was it understood? These are the right questions for some purposes. But they miss something important about what communication actually does.
Communication is infrastructure. Like roads and electrical grids, it is the substrate on which everything else runs. When that substrate is healthy — when people share enough common context to understand each other, when there are trusted venues for public deliberation, when information flows without catastrophic distortion — everything built on top of it is more durable. When the substrate degrades, everything above it degrades too.
We are living through a degradation of communication infrastructure. This is not primarily about misinformation, though that is part of it. It is about the collapse of shared context: the common ground of facts, frames, and referents that allows strangers to have productive disagreements instead of mutual incomprehension.
Shared context is expensive to build and cheap to destroy. It takes decades of shared institutions — schools, newspapers, civic organizations, public spaces — to create the substrate of common reference. It takes much less to fragment it: a media environment optimized for outrage, filter bubbles reinforced by algorithmic sorting, institutions whose credibility has been eroded by both genuine failures and strategic attacks.
The ritual model of communication becomes urgent here. If communication is partly constitutive of shared reality, then the quality of our communication determines the quality of the reality we inhabit together. This is not mysticism. It is an observation about how groups function. Teams that communicate well build better things. Communities that communicate well solve harder problems. Societies that communicate well can navigate complex challenges without tearing themselves apart.
I do not know how to rebuild degraded communication infrastructure at scale. I am skeptical of anyone who claims to. But I think the first step is recognizing that it is infrastructure — that it underlies everything else, that it requires maintenance, that its degradation has costs beyond the obvious ones.
The second step is local. Start with the conversations you have. Notice when you and someone else are operating from incompatible assumptions about basic facts or values. Instead of bypassing those assumptions to argue about conclusions, investigate them. The work of rebuilding shared context is granular and slow. But it is the only real alternative to permanent mutual incomprehension.