Lance Strate

Lance Strate is Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University in New York City, and President of the Institute of General Semantics. He is a founder of the Media Ecology Association, and served as the MEA’s president for over a decade. He is also a past president of the New York State Communication Association, and the New York Society for General Semantics, and the current co-chair of the Global Listening Centre’s Academic Board. He held the 2015 Harron Family Chair in Communication at Villanova University, and received an honorary appointment as Chair Professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at Henan University in Kaifeng, China, in 2016. He is the author of elevn books, including Not A, Not Be, &c (in press); On the Binding Biases of Time and Other Essays on General Semantics and Media Ecology; Amazing Ourselves to Death: Neil Postman’s Brave New World Revisited; Media Ecology: An Approach to Understanding the Human Condition; Concerning Communication: Epic Quests and Lyric Excursions in the Human Life World; and three poetry collections. Dr. Strate is the co-editor of seven anthologies, including two editions of Communication and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment; The Legacy of McLuhan; and Taking Up McLuhan’s Cause: Perspectives on Media and Formal Causality; and he has served as editor of the Speech Communication Annual; General Semantics Bulletin; and Explorations in Media Ecology, a journal he founded and edited for 9 years. He is the recipient of the Media Ecology Association’s Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book and their Walter J. Ong Award for Career Achievement in Scholarship; the Eastern Communication Association’s Distinguished Research Fellow Award; the New York State Communication Association’s Neil Postman Mentor Award and their John F. Wilson Fellow Award for exceptional scholarship, leadership, and dedication to the field of communication; the Global Listening Centre’s Outstanding Research Award; and the J. Talbot Winchell Award for Service from the Institute of General Semantics. Translations of his writing have appeared in French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Hungarian, Hebrew, Mandarin, and Quenya.

Steps to an Ecology of Meaning

While the term semantics is intimately bound up with the term meaning, the discipline of general semantics has traditionally eschewed meaning as a key term in favor of semantic reaction. For Christine Nystrom, however, meaning is central to understanding human thought and action. What both approaches have in common is a behavioristic orientation that allow for them to be reconciled. Korzybski’s general semantics draws on Ivan Pavlov’s model of stimulus-response, labeling the response as semantic reaction, and distinguishing between signals and symbols, and signal reactions and symbol reactions. Semantic reactions are also based on the process of abstracting, the process of receiving and interpreting information. Nystrom’s understanding of meaning, while influenced by general semantics, is based on the behaviorism of George Herbert Mead’s symbolic interaction, which goes beyond Pavlov (and BF Skinner), in including mental activity as a form of behavior. Meaning in this tradition includes both actions and mental processes that are responses to stimuli, and which can include empathy as well as generalization and prediction. Additionally, for Claude Shannon’s information theory, a stimulus performs the function of information, which is ambiguity reduction within the receiver. And taking Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics into account, this can exist as an interactive process in which responses serve as stimuli and that there may be an interdependent relationship in which one cannot be distinguished from another. Following Gregory Bateson, we can apply a relational or systems view to the process of meaning-making, which emphasizes the role of active projection in semantic reactions, as opposed to mere filtering of information and stimuli, as well as the role of learning and experience, and the importance of culture and intersubjectivity in the process of meaning-making.

Website

https://www.generalsemantics.org/