Architects of Communication Scholarship

Ellen Wartella 0:02
ICA presents: Hello. I'm Ellen Wartella, and welcome to this episode of the Architects of Communication Scholarship Podcast Series, a production of the ICA Podcast Network. Today, our architect is Klaus Krippendorff. Klaus Krippendorff is Professor of Communication and Gregory Bateson Term Professor for Cybernetics, Language and Culture at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. He's published widely in communication, sociological methodology, cybernetics, and systems theory and has authored and edited six books. His various initiatives are engaged to develop content analysis techniques and continuing work on reliability measurement. Today, Klaus Krippendorff will be in conversation with Mary Angela Bock. Mary Angela Bock is an associate professor in the University of Texas at Austin School of Journalism and Media. And here is Mary Angela Bock.

Mary Bock 1:08
Hi. I'm Mary Bock. I am so glad that we are doing this today, Klaus.

Klaus Krippendorff 1:12
Hi. So nice to see you.

Mary Bock 1:14
It's good to see you as well. So, I'd like to start first by making sure that our audience understands that you are a highly cited scholar in two fields. Let's start with talking about your early years in design school.

Klaus Krippendorff 1:28
Well, I went to Germany to an avant garde school, and there were an amazing number of professors from the United States, and they introduced us to numerous new ideas that nobody ever had heard of. One of which was communication, cybernetics was another. And one thing that interested me particularly was social perception and the idea that we don't perceive reality the way it is, rather than from our background. So I wrote actually a thesis, and I was actually trying to oppose the traditional way of thinking. In design that is a form follows function by saying, “No, no, we have to think of design as communicating between designers, if you want producers and people, people among each other.” So that's where I first heard the notion of communication and did something with it.

Mary Bock 2:24
And you eventually ended up coming to the United States, but you started at Princeton. What happened at Princeton?

Klaus Krippendorff 2:31
Well, when I was in Princeton, it turns out, I came to the psychology department, and in the psychology department, there was one social psychologist. Everyone else was a rat psychologist. And since I had a very unusual fellowship, I was taking a picture at some point for the Princetonian in front of rat boxes, and I made the title underneath saying, “Here comes the German psychologist studying American rats.” And when I did this, I thought that is not the place I could possibly be. And I had a mentor, a former chair of the Psychology Department, Hadley Cantril, and he said also “Klaus, you can't be here.” And he gave me a lot of names. And so September 1961, I took my car, and I came to Illinois.

Mary Bock 3:21
So at this point, you are a former design student with an engineering background, who decided that rats weren't for him, and you start to study communication. Can you talk a little bit about the connection between cybernetics and communication, and how cybernetics led you to the other kind of work that you do with communication?

Klaus Krippendorff 3:42
Well, cybernetics has an interesting history. And it was at that time, very much one of control. And I was not interested in that part, but when I came to the University of Illinois, I found one person who particularly was an important person in cybernetics there’s Ross Ashby. I was so pleased to study with him for one year. And that's opened actually, not just for me, but also for several other students at the University of Illinois, up to the communication department, and they study also cybernetics. And I think that it was very instrumental. And I should also like to say that the University of Illinois was not just a communication department. It was very interdisciplinary. There were people from sociology, psychology, linguistics, and I studied actually with someone in anthropological linguistics, Jerry Fodor, you probably know him. And so I had, this was a very interdisciplinary program. And cybernetics was just one important element.

Mary Bock 4:43
What did you write your dissertation about?

Klaus Krippendorff 4:45
Yes, what I wrote in content analysis, and since my committee was composed of a cybernetician, an anthropologist, a social scientist, and a linguist, I wrote actually chapters for each of them. It's also allowed me to make content analysis much more broad. And this was my dissertation. And later on, I was asked to write a book about this, and this is where the content analysis book was published with SAGE.

Mary Bock 5:14
I think that maybe this is a good time to talk about your work at Annenberg and then the development of alpha.

Klaus Krippendorff 5:20
Well, at Annenberg, I taught a course in Introduction to Content Analysis, and another one that's called Models of Communication, in which I introduced cybernetic ideas, the idea of feedback, etc. And then, of course, on cybernetics, and society. At Annenberg, George Gerbner was the Dean. And he got a request from the Senate who was investigating at that time television violence. And he was asked to provide some data for the discussion there. And he came to three people, one is Martin Brewer, another one who was a postdoc, and myself. And we worked on developing coding instructions. One of the things that I was particularly fearful of because it was a controversial thing, there were so many people that were opposed to even listening to the idea of violence and television, and the television industry didn't want to be regulated. So that's why I started to develop this reliability coefficient, very primitive first, and then it grew into a more complicated approach. Basically, to defend scientific findings.

Mary Bock 6:31
So I think that a lot of people know and appreciate the work that you've done with content analysis. Thousands of people have used Krippendorff’s alpha to improve their content analyses projects. But I'm interested to know next, how you have watched the use of content analysis and the application of content analysis change over the years, and the different kinds of content analysis out there, and some of the potential with computerized and big data content analysis.

Klaus Krippendorff 7:06
I was a research assistant and everything was very primitive. This has changed quite radically because we can now process text by computers. Berelson who wrote in 1956 the first major book on content analysis, as he said typically we analyzed content without ever defining it. So, one of the big problems was to define it in such a way that it could be analyzed and could be used in these various kinds of computer programs. Now, you mentioned big data. That is a big problem for me because I think data are made by human beings. There are no data that are found. Data are not just objective facts. That's a reason why I think I push awareness of, reliability, who does it, for what purpose, what is omitted, and what is highlighted. These are, I think, important methodological issues that many big data people ignore to the detriment of the findings.

Mary Bock 8:09
Looking at the way your career has gone so deeply into content analysis, and then you started writing about metaphor, power, and emancipatory communication scholarship. Content analysis can't answer all of the interesting questions, and you started to pursue some new questions. So talk to me a little bit about some of those other new questions, that once you conquered content analysis?

Klaus Krippendorff 8:38
That goes really deep into what I'm most interested in. I think content analysis should not be just limited to some sort of record keeping of what is being said, rather than what could we do to change things. And that is in a sense my design orientation. And so that gets me to the issue as you mentioned power. I mean, it's very easy to say someone has power, but then one should ask, on what grounds? Who is giving someone power? Nobody has power unless someone gives it to him. And so I'm interested in how one can undo power, or how one can overcome power when it is not desirable. I'm not saying that all powers are negative, but I think one has to be careful to delegate power and then feel oppressed.

Mary Bock 9:27
And that comes to one of the articles that you wrote. It was the metaphors of communication and some constructivist reflections on their use, in which you do talk about emancipatory scholarship and constructivism, and you hinted at power. I'd like to hear you talk a little bit more about what that means, emancipatory scholarship, and how we as scholars can undo power by understanding communication.

Klaus Krippendorff 9:59
That's a big question. One thing is to establish the facts and not realize that most facts are actually socially constructed, by the language that we use. And power is a good example. What is the history of somebody gaining that power? Well, there is a process from someone acquiring power over someone else. And if there is a process, one may be able to reverse it, or at least question whether that is the right direction. So I think emancipatory scholarship, is in a way to question the epistemological assumptions that someone has power, as opposed to being given power or delegated power, and looking at these epistemological problems of language, and then trying to see what kind of language we can use to undo that.

Mary Bock 10:56
So I want to shift a little bit to what about teaching is meaningful to you. Why do you continue to teach, and why do you continue to want to teach? What does it bring to you?

Klaus Krippendorff 11:11
I think teaching is a way of opening up to questions from students. It means you have to prepare, and then you say something and you revise it depending on what questions that students have. You learn actually a lot from students. And that's to me, I think, the most important part, that it's not just the teacher knows everything and students have to repeat it. It's a dialogue. Dialogue with students with other people that maybe think differently, or have other contributions to make. I'm learning a lot from just teaching, even though I'm a professor and the students are students, but they have also a mind of their own. And this interaction makes one think differently and learn something.

Mary Bock 11:56
Many PhD programs in the United States no longer require students to take a second language. And given your mastery of multiple languages, your interest in the connection between language communication, construction, and reality I wonder what you think of this trend that we are not required to take extra languages anymore?

Klaus Krippendorff 12:22
Well, I feel really sad about this. At the same time, I have to also say the way it was handled is different. If you are required to have a foreign language, you take one course, you pass a test, then you don't really know that language. The best students I have are students who have been maybe for a year outside the United States, learn a different language, live a different language, and that is a very different kind of approach to language. I think communication students would benefit greatly if there would be not just learning another language, by the book, so to speak, but also live another language. To me, language is not just a set of characters. But it is living a different form of language.

Mary Bock 13:11
It's time for me to turn to ICA and your history with the organization. Do you remember your first ICA conference?

Klaus Krippendorff 13:19
I do, but this was a very different kind of organization. There were four divisions. Information systems was one, interpersonal, mass communication, and political. So I joined that. And there was Randy Harrison, who was kind of almost my mentor, he was a chair. And he encouraged me to do things. And then I wrote a paper that was actually an effort to be opposed to the formula dividing the world of communication into four different studies. I think this is bogus, we would not learn how this all connects. So I wrote a paper that we should collect data not just separately but put them together and analyze them together. It's important to connect phenomena to many variables, not just partitioning the world into separate buckets.

Mary Bock 14:18
I learned that you developed the organization's first software for organizing the conference, according to time and space, so that it was possible for everybody to attend their various panels.

Klaus Krippendorff 14:35
I became at some point Chair of the Information Systems Division. And later on, I was elected president and as elected president, you have to organize conferences. And I was afraid if I get so many different papers, I have to read them and sort them into buckets and organize it, that this would be too much. And I was at that time already interested in computer programming. And I decided to write a program that would simply automatically put these papers into buckets and make sure that the co-authors would always be together and never have to be in two rooms at once. Everyone could go to their conferences, and so it was very well organized.

Mary Bock 15:24
When you started with ICA, you weren't really sure it was adequately international. And we are still working to try to make ICA truly more international. I wonder if you have any ideas or any observations about how international efforts have been over the years and maybe what more we ought to be doing.

Klaus Krippendorff 15:44
When ICA was founded, the word “international” was used only to say we are broader. Nobody had really an interest in other countries. Actually, at the conference in which I was finishing up, we had a meeting of many, many organizations that are found in the world. And they said we don't want to really all become members of the ICA, we want to have a federation of different organizations. And that was actually initially quite successful. We had a newsletter informing each of these, the division, each of the national organizations. But then, at the same time, ICA was simply more powerful intellectually, and therefore many more people came to the ICA. And I think ICA has made a lot of strides, and then the federation basically collapsed. The ICA is a better meeting ground, but the idea of making it international, that is still I think a dominant question, and it's very difficult to do that because of the language issues. That's a severe limitation.

Mary Bock 16:57
You also made an effort for more gender equity early on, by trying to organize a session on gender studies and also pushing for women in leadership with ICA. Can you talk about that?

Klaus Krippendorff 17:09
Yes. I had a friend who said, Why don't you organize a panel to do just women's studies, gender studies? This was very exciting. And they immediately said, Well, we have to get a division. Up to my point, all presidents were males. And so as a president, you have the power to appoint a nomination committee. And I said, Please make an effort to get women on board. And they succeeded. In fact, from then on, there was a mixture of men and women, and I'm very pleased with that.

Mary Bock 17:48
When you look at what people are studying these days in the field, where do you think communication scholars should be focusing their attention?

Klaus Krippendorff 18:01
This is a difficult thing. I have to note that we have lost a little bit of, let's say, a common language, a common concepts. And I think very few people study actually communication, they study different issues, political issues, and the aspect of communication is a little lost. I would like to see more of the process of interaction between people on different kinds of levels, on levels of organizations or the public is in the public sphere, on individual sphere.

Mary Bock 18:35
Where does communication scholarship fall into trying to help the world combat serious misinformation problems?

Klaus Krippendorff 18:45
Well, one of the problems is the concept of communication. If you think that communication is sending a message, you read the message, and then you get it, then you invite, in a way, this information by creating messages that have nothing to do with truth. And I'm also not too sure the truth is always not really a good criteria because sometimes you want to make a proposal for the future, there is no truth yet. But the point is actually you have to hold people accountable for what they say. And it doesn't matter whether experiences behind it, if somebody is held accountable for it, or can show what is happening, the message makes a difference. And that is I think a misconception of communication And I think to me, accountability for what one says is critical. And that goes back again to the issue of conversations, etc. I think communication scholars could do a lot of things by making clear that the conceptions of communication are broad enough to get rid of these insanities.

Mary Bock 19:58
I really want to ask you about Bateson, and why you decided to name your professorship after Bateson.

Klaus Krippendorff 20:04
Bateson was an amazing character, he was an anthropologist. And he was actually more interested in communication very early on. And he's stimulated discussion of communication from a very different perspective than me, from an anthropological one. And actually, once I invited him at the Annenberg School for a conference. And I invited him also in my seminar to which I invited former students. So that was really a fantastic interaction in which he just enlightened us to lots of ideas that bridged different areas. Bateson bridged various kind of disciplines in ways that I would like to do too.

Mary Bock 20:49
So what is next for you? What are you working on next in terms of your design, research?

Klaus Krippendorff 20:55
I came as a designer to the United States, within kind of a vague notion of communication. I am still interested in shifting the design in the direction of communication. And I'm saying also, designers are actually the ones that keep a culture going by constantly inventing new things that improve somehow a culture. Designers are actually the motors as far as technology is concerned, to keep culture going. So, that's my kind of design orientation, and I'm making contributions as much as I can.

Mary Bock 21:33
What are you working on these days in terms of communication?

Klaus Krippendorff 21:37
Actually right now, I'm preparing for a lecture in China. And they wanted to talk about content analysis as you can expect, and I said in order to talk about content analysis, I want to first talk about language. The Chinese language is so different from the Western language. I thought that I would have to make an entry into the direction of making content analysis possible for the Chinese. The second one they wanted to talk about is cybernetics. In cybernetics, I am now increasingly developing an approach called critical cybernetics. When cybernetics was invented, they were so enthusiastic about this, but forget that there are externalities. These externalities, cannot be understood in cybernetic terms, because they deal with social phenomena, and I would say with language. So I am saying that we should first change cybernetics from designing cybernetic systems to a discourse of cybernetics. And I'm citing actually there Margaret Mead who at some point in 1987 invited cyberneticians and said, “Look, you have a language, you should study the language and not just the machines.” I think increasingly, that cybernetics is a discourse, that means where language is important, and you have to incorporate these social consequences of the machines and not just the machines. So that is one thing. And to me, the most important aspect now is what I call “critical cybernetics”. Critical not in the sense of criticizing, rather in the sense of exploring alternatives that nobody dared to think about. And so that is what I'm now increasingly working on. It is to identify epistemological problems like, for example, that the content is a message. But doing something that helps people to get over their oppressions. And in this case of cybernetics, the oppression by machines, by having to comply with the algorithms that institutions impose on us and do something better.

Mary Bock 23:56
Thank you for this conversation. I'm always thankful to you for your intellectual leadership, your teaching, and your friendship, Klaus.

Ellen Wartella 24:11
Architects of Communication Scholarship is a production of the International Communication Association Podcast Network. This series is sponsored by the School of Communication at Hong Kong Baptist University. Our producer is Jacqueline Colarusso. Our production consultant is Nick Song. Our executive producer is DeVante Brown. The theme music is by Humans Win. For more information about our participants on this episode, as well as our sponsor, be sure to check the episode description. Thanks for listening.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai