International Encyclopedia of Communication Online

Extract

Texts are vehicles of meaning in human expression and communication. Growing out of centuries of literary, →  hermeneutic , and other humanistic scholarship, the concept was originally reserved for written and other verbal messages. From the 1960s onwards, however, texts came to denote all meaningful entities, including images, everyday interaction, and cultural →  artifacts generally (→  Modality and Multimodality ), as examined through increasingly interdisciplinary approaches in communication and related fields. Deriving from classical Latin texo (to weave, to construct) and textum (fabric as well as speech and writing), the concept of text directs attention toward the process in which ideas and insights are given concrete shape and offered in communication to others. Compared to the concept of a message , which is commonly said to contain and transmit →  Information , and which is sometimes used interchangeably with text, this latter concept emphasizes that meaning is only articulated in the meeting of form and content, aesthetics, and propositions. Importantly, the →  meaning of a given text is considered open to questioning and interpretation both by contemporary audiences and by posterity. The complexity of textual meaning helps to account for the preferred methodologies of the humanities, probing the subtleties and nuances of the individual text for what is being ... log in or subscribe to read full text