【正文】 have no knowledge of the writer at all. Nor does the reader need to be concerned as to the writer39。 that she be seen as thinking about her personal situation。s thinking before she tells me! The lightening storm knocked out our munication systems, and since then we haven39。 A Christmas Carol, a video tape of the CNN 6:00 news broadcast on May 5th, 1990, a written invitation to attend my sister39。s nervous system, The legal system of the United States, The U. S. Interstate Highway system. THE ROLE OF COMMUNICATIONNotice that these example systems have munication in mon. The nervous system carries messages from the nerve endings in our extremities to our brains and back. The legal system includes thousands of individuals talking to one another, laws being read and interpreted, forms being filled out, and so on. The highway system requires constant munication among drivers turn signals, brake lights, and so on and between drivers and their vehicles as, for example, when you tell your car to turn left by pulling on the steering wheel.In fact, it might be said that munication is the glue that holds a system together. This gives insight into the nature of munication itself, to wit:Communication ConnectsBut munication is not merely passive connection. Rather, munication is the process of connecting. It is a collection of renewable actions that work throughout space and over time to form relationships among objects. Communication is not an object itself。s New World Dictionary, 2nd College EditionHow often have you heard statements such as these? If you want to be promoted, you39。 most text contains some truth. Given this, scholars continue to argue as to which of the three approaches is the most effective. A fourth approach attempts to resolve this dilemma by considering text as part of the human social environment. According to this approach, each author adds to the munication environment, and each reader takes meanings from it. When considered from this point of view, the text is not separate from the world, but is part of it. Writers and readers, who are also part of the world, participate in the textual experience. As an example, consider the text called a newspaper. Because many writers and editors contribute to each edition, there is no way to identify a single author. As readers read the paper, they pare what they read to their experience in the world, and they discuss what they read with other readers. The meanings that readers take from the newspapers bee the raw material of other texts, including such as the television and radio news of the day, and the next day39。s InterpretationText is posed of symbols, and as ws discussed in an earlier section of this tutorial, the transmission of symbolic messages requires that the sender and receiver share a code by which the sender encodes and the receiver decodes the message. In military orders this code is very narrow the words attack and withdraw, for example, have very specific meanings in order to insure that the sender will not be misunderstood. But the codes used in literature, and the texts of everyday life such as newspapers and magazines, are very broad and ambiguous, with many words having more than one possible meaning. When the reader encounters such a text, he or she cannot be pletely certain as to which of these meanings the writer intended. Further, the reader has leds thoughts. But this description leads to a number of perplexing questions. For example:What if the writer is dead? Can a dead individual somehow be said to be municating with the living?There are many examples of anonymous text? Who, exactly, is the writer in these cases?What if the code is only partially known to the reader, and he or she misunderstands the text? Is munication meaningful if it is based on mistakes and errors? Attempts to answer these and similar questions have produced four basic approaches to explaining the relationship between text and meaning. Not surprisingly, these conflict with one another. As each is examined in turn, keep in mind this question: Which of these is most responsible for the meaning of a text:the writer39。s IntentionPerhaps the most familiar approach takes the point of view that the writer of the text, who is often called the author, created the text with the intention of municating meaningfully with the reader. This is the approach that many of us encountered in our high school literature classes where we were taught, for example, thats intentions. When the reader draws a meaning from the text, then that meaning is the reader39。 and that her thoughts be considered as having something to do with time. In the same way that readers of this tutorial will share these particular meanings, all members of any particular society share a tremendously rich environment of other meanings which derive from their mon codes and their mon reservoirs of text. The fourth, or cultural approach points out that these resources are applied in different ways at different times. Sometimes humans express their intention as authors, sometimes they develop unique connotations as readers, sometimes they search for eternal truths. Thus, the mon ground of text is found in the two plementary faces of human munication: the society and the self.DATA AS TEXTAn even broader definition of the term text arises from considering the maxim that you can39。t handled a single customer call. He39。s wedding. 9002 In each case the thing the actual book, the actual video tape, the actual invitation is not the munication. The munication is the process that connects the readers of the book to the story told by the author. The munication is the process that connects the watchers of the broadcast to the events of the day. The munication is the process that connects my sister and I via the announcement of her wedding. True, the book, the tape