[1.2.2.1]

Communication. The term "communicate" has the same root as community, communal, communion, and so on. The morpheme element co- indicates a joining. To the lecturer, the audience of individuals is a problematic source of imaginings and delusions. The experience of lecturing to an audience in a large room changes in particular ways with recurrent routines; familiarity brings confidence, and confidence brings on the vivid hallucination that communication, i.e., a joining, has taken place. To justify the conviction, the instructor may list further evidence which is also delusional.

• that he can to some specific degree, differentiate from among the audience, who is listening and who is not;
• that when he adds a comment by way of further elaboration of a topic, the audience will differentiate that from the opening of a new topic; and vice versa, that a new topic will not be seen as an elaboration of the ongoing one;
• that when he answers a student question, others in the audience will notice a question is being answered; and that it will also be plain he has answered the question, rather than avoided it;

Psy 222 (1), Fall 1977
Dr. James

DAILY FEEDBACK SHEET

1. YOUR SECRET I.D. NUMBER:

2. TODAY'S DATE:

3. ANSWER TO QUESTION NO. 1:

4. ANSWER TO QUESTION NO. 2:

5. GIVE OVERALL PERSONAL RATING: 0% = MINIMAL; 100% = MAXIMAL
   a. Degree of Your Preparation for this Lecture:
   b. Degree of Your Comprehension of this Lecture:
   c. Degree of Your Satisfaction with this Lecture:
   d. Degree of Intrinsic Interest of this Lecture:

6. OTHER COMMENTS AND SUGGESTIONS, IF ANY:

• that when a student is prompted to ask a question and does not, the individual is therefore uninvolved or non-cooperative;
• etc. etc.

One interesting use for the DFS is that of being a source of information that helps rectify delusions. This is the function of interpersonal feedback, namely successive correction of delusional accounts. Communication without feedback may drift into delusion since there are no corrective mechanisms for successive and cumulative errors in interpretation.

The instructor employed the DFS as well to provide feedback to the students about each other. This was done by reporting from time to time on their contents. The situation can be depicted as follows:

Simple but important instances of the above dynamics may be mentioned. One category includes routine requests and instructions. Thus, on 11/15/77, the instructor commented to the class (=f₂) that he had difficulty reading the handwritings on the DFS (=f₁) and recapitulated the principle of little communication with excessive noise (illegible messages). On 11/17/77, the instructor indicated satisfaction (=f₂) with the greatly improved legibility and neatness of the DFS entries (=f₃).

Another routine example: on 10/20/77, the instructor discussed in class (=f₂) the meaning of ethnicity and its functional roles in an account of individual variation in daily round behaviors and instructed students (=f₂) to list on their DFS items they thought relevant to determining the dimensions of variations in ethnicity on the daily round; on 11/3/77, the instructor presented to class (=f₂) a summary inventory of the items students had written down in answer to the instructions (=f₁); the presentation of the summary inventory to the class thus provided the class with information about itself (=f₃).

A third example of interest are the messages that the instructor inserted from time to time into a student's folder (=f₂) in answer to a direct question asked by the student in a DFS comment (=f₁). Note that the rate of diffusion of this exchange is much slower and depends on the availability of occasions for students to view each other's folder (=f₃) and, the messages in them.

Finally, note the case where the instructor is responsive in his lecture to various questions asked by students on their DFS. Here the process depicted in the diagram is not operative unless and until the students have occasion to note, in one way or another, that the communication is a response to a specific student question, and what the circumstances are that motivated the question. Otherwise the exchange is dyadic (between one student and the instructor) rather than communal. Dyadic exchanges are analyzable into psychodynamic propositions while communal exchanges are analyzable into ethnodynamic propositions. The diagram we are discussing depicts an ethnodynamic field.