Communication under surveillance

Human communication has long been an important subject of studies. The trajectory of communication studies dates back to Greece, which thematized rhetoric, the art of effective speaking and persuasion. In modern days, as people had great interest in community building, “communication” came to be regarded as a specific part of the academic disciplines. For example, an American sociologist, Robert Park, clearly pointed out that interaction forms the essence of society, and communication plays the role of the medium of social interaction (Park and Burgess, 1921). Concerns about propaganda and the effect of media on mass society urged theorists to tackle the nature of human communication in a more serious and scientific way than before. Lasswell’s first scientific model of communication (1948) laid the groundwork for further scientific studies of human communication:

One year after Lasswell suggested a framework for the scientific study of communication, Schannon and Weaver (1949) articulated a general model of human communication based on information theory. It models communication as a process in which a source encodes and then transmits a message along a channel. This message is received and decoded at its destination, where it produces an effect.

Five years later, Schramm and Osgood suggested a more advanced model, recognizing the importance of feedback and the circular nature of human communication.

In 1960 David Berlo proposed the famous SMCR model, focusing on the fidelity of reception:

Even though the aforementioned communication models display theoretical advancement in considering the nature and process of human communication, they all are based on an unchanged premise. Schramm points out the premise as the following: “Whether face-to-face or mediated, whether immediate or removed in time or space, the communication relationship includes three elements and two kinds of action. The elements are the communicator, the message and the receiver”(Schramm, p.15). It is particularly important here to note that all these models presuppose that human communication is essentially a matter between the communicator and the receiver. Of course, in the case of the SMCR model, which considers the variable of “culture,” communication between the encoder and the decoder is an encounter between two different cultures, which encompasses something that goes beyond the two people. In the end, however, those two different cultures are incorporated into the wholeness of two people, so that the communication is finally a matter between the message’s sender and receiver anyway. Now, we can suppose an odd situation in which these models undergo an unintended and unnoticed transformation: communication under surveillance.

In a situation of communication under surveillance, communication between the message’s sender and receiver becomes a matter among the sender, the receiver and the “surveiller”; communication between two parties becomes three-party communication regardless of the intention of the two parties who initiated the communication process. Messages expected to be shared between only the sender and the receiver flow out to the surveiller. Communication is seriously deformed, yet the process of deformation is hidden and unnoticed. It is not only the communication process that is deformed here; deformation in human communication signifies a distortion of human rights. Here lies the matter’s seriousness. The right to communicate without surveillance constitutes the essence of privacy, and privacy “acts as the boundary that provides protection from the outside world and maintains human dignity” (Cusick, 2003, p.61). Cusick continues to argue, “By reducing our commitment to privacy, we risk changing what it means to be Americans” (2003, p.61).