Introduction to Communication Science week 6: 6.2 Metaphors

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1. not in the Coursera site:

Transcript of all Week 6 videos: https://d396qusza40orc.cloudfront.net/commscience/transcripts%2FTranscript_Week_6%20Coursera.pdf

This lecture in .webm: http://d396qusza40orc.cloudfront.net/commscience/recoded_videos%2F6.2.704ffaec4b9c71745fd5d2d8595537a0.webm

2. In the Coursera site, but apparently unaffected by the login block, for this lecture:

Subtitle text: https://class.coursera.org/commscience-001/lecture/subtitles?q=93_en&format=txt
Video mp4: https://class.coursera.org/commscience-001/lecture/download.mp4?lecture_id=93

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Week 6 description:
Student questions and debate
This week I will be discussing student questions from the forum and subjects that we did not have time for during the lectures, such as metaphors. I will also tell you a bit about the upcoming exam.

I received several questions about the use of
metaphors throughout this course.

A metaphor is a figure of speech, when we
describe something by calling it something else.

So it’s an implicit comparison.

If I call an enterprise a ‘sinking ship’ everyone
will know it’s doomed to fail.

If parents call their kid’s room a pig sty, they
think it is a huge mess LIKE a pig sty.

If they would actually say “your room is so dirty,
it looks LIKE a pig sty’,

that would officially be a simile,

an explicit comparison, not a metaphor, which is
as I said, implicit.

Quite some metaphors have passed in these
last weeks:

Fourth Estate, hypodermic needle, the media
agenda, to name just a few.

'Why do scientists do this?' asked one student,
'It seems a bit strange to me...

...that people who are trained in only talking
about facts and things they can prove,

use all of these colorful expressions'.

And indeed we do, they are in fact quite
important in scientific and

non-scientific discussions about our field.

That is why this is the first question I want to
cover: metaphors, why do scholars use them?

Well, the answer to this is quite simple really:

because they are such a powerful
communication device.

Metaphors contain a wealth of information, that
most people immediately grasp,

all buried beneath a simple concept.

A good metaphor has a high level of shared
connotation,

in other words, most people will have the same
associations.

Most will understand that the hypodermic needle
theory has this name

because it refers to directly injected messages

that have an immediate effect. That the audience
has no defense for it.

All of this associated meaning automatically
pops up

when you think about a hypodermic needle.

Therefore metaphors are well-suited to discuss
complicated issues.

And … using metaphors saves a lot of time.

Probably most people will understand what you
mean with a metaphor intuitively

and without further explanation.

So, if you are arguing a greater point and don’t
want to pause to explain each step on the way,

metaphors are a useful tool.

If I compare the audience of a message to a
group a spoon-fed babies,

then everyone will understand that I don’t mean
that audience members are new to this world,

or that they are regarding this world with curious
ever-learning eyes.

No, I am saying that the audience is not active,
and not blocking information,

and not selecting channels or content, and all
experiencing communication,

their food which is fed to them, in the same way.

If you think about it, a lot was communicated
implicitly when I used this metaphor.

And it took a lot more time to explain it.

That’s exactly the reason why we use
metaphors in science.

This is all a bit abstract of course.

So in the next unit I want to discuss some actual metaphors that we use in our field.

And you will see how much information one
metaphor actually contains.