Jakobson’s model of communication, 1958
jargon, it is a useful if not vital means of commu-
nicating quickly between expert and expert. For
those outside, jargon appears to be an unneces-
sarily complicated alternative to plain speaking,
and a barrier to good communication. Without
the growth of jargon words and expressions in
Communication and Media Studies, this diction-
ary would not have been deemed necessary.
JICNARS scale Administered by the Joint
Industrial Committee for National Readership
Surveys in the UK, JICNARS measures audi-
ence according to social class, occupation and
perceived economic status: Category A (upper
middle class; business and professional people,
considerable private means); Category B (middle
class, senior people of reasonable affluence;
respectable rather than luxurious lifestyle);
Category C1 (white-collar workers, tradespeople,
supervisory and clerical jobs); Category C2
(blue-collar, skilled workers); Category D (semi-
skilled or unskilled members of the ‘blue collar’
class); and Category E (those at the lowest level of
subsistence, casual workers, those unemployed
and/or dependent on social-security schemes).
Th is classifi cation has come under increasing
criticism over the years, especially regarding
its emphasis upon targeting the occupation
of the head of a household, traditionally male.
More ‘with it’ methods of gauging patterns of
consumption have concentrated on the notion
of lifestyle as refl ected in people’s aspirations.
Th e best known of these is VALS (Values and
Lifestyles). See hict project.
Jingoism Extreme and uncritical form of national
patriotism. Th e word derives from G.W. Hunt’s
song, written at the time of the Russo-Turkish
War (1877–78) when anti-Russian feeling in the
UK was running high and the Prime Minister,
Benjamin Disraeli, ordered the Mediterranean
fl eet to Constantinople: We don’t want to fi ght,
but by Jingo if we do/We’ve got the ships, we’ve got
the men, and got the money too. Th e Falklands
War of 1982 stirred up similar sentiments in
Britain’s popular press, which used language
as declamatory and as sensational as anything
employed during the Boer War, the two World
Wars or the British invasion of Suez (1956).
From the Sun (‘Th e paper that supports our
boys’): ‘74 Days Th at Shook the World!’, ‘Lions
Who Did The Impossible – By land, sea and
air, our boys never faltered in their fi ght against
tyranny’ and, on the front page, in three-inch-
high type, ‘We’ve Won!’ (15 July 1982). With
the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, the Sun
showed that it had not lost its jingoist panache.
Under the resounding headline ‘Clobba Slobba’about it through personal sources, and of these
a fairly high proportion were strangers – reveal-
ing the degree to which people departed from
established communication patterns.
By plotting the proportion of people eventu-
ally aware of all types of events against the
proportion who heard about them first from
personal contacts, it was possible to group them
into fi ve categories, and the line joining these
fi ve categories was J-shaped. It can be seen from
the J-Curve that the size of the total audience
increases progressively, but the proportion of
those receiving information from interpersonal
sources does not and depends on the type of
event. Th at proportion is higher for some of type
1 events than for type 2, but highest for type 3
events. See topic guide under communica-
tion theory.
▶Bradley S. Greenberg and Edwin B. Parker, eds,
Th e Kennedy Assassination and the American Public:
Social Communication in Crisis (University of Stan-
ford Press, 1965).
Jakobson’s model of communication, 1958
A linguist, Roman Jakobson was concerned with
notions of meaning and of the internal structure
of messages. His model is a double one, involving
the constitutive factors in an act of communica-
tion; each of these factors is then locked on to
the function it performs.
Th us the constitutive factors are:
Context
Addresser Message Addressee
Contact
Code
The functions form an identically structured
model:
Referential
(Reality orientation of message)
Emotive Poetic Conative
(Expressive) Phatic (Eff ect of a message
on addressee)
Metalingual
Phatic here refers to the function of keeping
the channels of communication open, and
Metalingual is the function of actually identify-
ing the communication code that is being used.
See redundancy. See also topic guide under
communication models.
Jargon The specialist speech of groups of
people with common identity – of religion,
science, medicine, art, trade, profession, politi-
cal party, etc. We can have educational jargon,
cricket jargon, sociological jargon – that is, the
in-language of people with specialist knowledge
or interest. For those creating and operating