The Changing Landscape of Content Analysis: Reflections on Social Construction of Reality and Beyond

Prof. Klaus Krippendorff is Gregory Bateson Emeritus Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. He received his PhD in communications from the University of Illinois (Urbana) in 1967. He has received numerous awards and honours over the years. To name just a few, he received a Doctor of Philosophy honoris causa from the Linneaus University in Kalmar/Växjö, Sweden in 2012. He is an elected Fellow of the International Communication Association (ICA) and was its president in 1984–85. He is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 1982. His book Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology received the ICA Fellows Book Award in 2004. He has published extensively in many fields including communication, research methodology, semantics, information theory, design, cybernetics, etc. In this academic dialogue, he talks about how he first came to the U. S. from Germany and his early encounter with the method of content analysis. He elaborates on his unique approach to the methodology of content analysis, its changes in practice over the years, as well as his insights on communication scholarship. His organic involvement in and cross-pollination of many related fields listed above is also revealed

Conversation: Possibilities of Its Repair and Descent Into Discourse and Computation

This essay contends that radical constructivism makes a mistake by focusing on cognition at the expense of where cognitive phenomena surface: in the interactive use of language. By contrast, it advocates a radically social constructivism grounded in the conversational nature of being human. It also urges to abandon the celebration of observation, inherited from the enlightenment’s preoccupation with description, in favor of participation, the recognition that speaking and writing are acts of continuously reconstructing reality, only partly conceivable by participants yet interactively realized. It distinguishes between conversation as observed and conversation as articulated by its participants. It postulates accountability as a chief conversational move through which conversations can regain their natural flow when disturbed and construct inherently ethical realities for their participants. Unwillingness to repair problematic conversations amounts to acquiescence to constraints that are typical of discourses and the construction of institutional realities. It suggests that the ultimate institutionalization consists of replacing institutional artifacts by computational ones, which was the aim of early cybernetics. Computational artifacts have no agency and cannot be held accountable for what they do. This essay proposes a continuum of possible discourses between authentic conversation and computation. It concludes by calling for drawing finer distinctions within that continuum and expresses the hope for not closing off the possibility of returning to authentic conversation where humans realize their being human, not institutional actors or machines

Human-Centeredness: A Paradigm Shift Invoked by the Emerging Cyberspaces

Against the background of growing cyberspaces, I am exploring here some consequences for understanding digital technologies along three paths. The first path begins by noting how the increasing efficiency of computation has given birth to a new kind of artifact, the interface. Its characteristics require us to abandon naturalistic conceptions of technology and call, instead, for an effort to understand their users\u27 diverse understandings, to a second order understanding of technology. My second path starts from the curious fact that 17th Century Enlightenment ideas still permeate our celebrations of what the new technologies do while blinding us to the coordination of human activities they cause on an unprecedented scale. This leads us to a new image of human beings as dialogical constituents of networks. My last path begins with interfaces, with what is left in cyberspaces after data, algorithms, and networks have taken up their places, and leads us to languaging as a window to a second-order understanding of others, as a community’s way of co-ordinating co-ordination (of technology), and as our opportunity to redirect our creative attention towards keeping technology human-centered