Conceptualising 'communication' in environmental communication campaigns : shedding new light on common traditions

Abstract: This paper examines how practitioners of environmental communication campaigns (ECCs) conceptualize communication. Through interviews I investigate the practitioners’ way of understanding communication by looking at the metaphors they use to describe it. The interviews clearly show that communication is mainly conceptualised as a transmission of messages. The problem of communication hence becomes a challenge of de-fragmenting messages through the search for media channels with low distortion. Contrasting the transmission view with another perspective such as symbolic interactionism sheds new light on how communicative activities can be interpreted and observed in order to bring awareness to new aspects of what happens in communication. For instance, communicative activities such as dialogical situations might reveal valuable insights about how participants actively shape and negotiate meaning.