What persists when claims, participants and platforms change? A rumour can spread widely and then disappear. A claim can also be corrected and replaced while familiar relations of trust, suspicion and response continue to generate further claims. The handbook examines how those relations acquire continuity through change.
Relations are logically prior to the identities they distinguish. A statement acquires meaning through what preceded it, the circumstances in which it arrives and the responses it makes possible. A witness, critic or authority becomes recognisable through recurring interactions. Each exchange changes the conditions for subsequent exchanges. A pattern becomes self-propagating when its activity renews the dependencies through which it recurs. The theoretical account is developed in Before the Message.
Accurate reporting, honest error and deliberate deception participate in the same dynamics of variation, selection, reinforcement and adaptation. Judging the accuracy of a claim and attributing deceptive intent require evidence about particular communications. Explaining persistence requires following the relations that make changing communications consequential to one another.
Observation and Intervention
Language, timing, networks and institutional responses provide different views of the same communicative activity. A record of replies shows when and where responses occurred. An account of their meaning identifies what those responses do within the exchange. A mathematical description specifies the relations it represents and how they change. Observations constrain that description, and the description identifies relationships to examine in further observations.
Control is always provisional. Changes in timing, visibility or access alter which exchanges occur and how their effects travel. Participants, technologies and institutions respond to those changes. Their responses become part of the conditions any subsequent intervention must address.
Handbook Contents
Read the chapters in sequence. Each takes up a question that follows from the preceding one.
- The relational framework examines how communicative patterns persist through changes in their participants and expressions.
- Recursive harmonics asks how recurrence, relative timing and mutual influence can be described mathematically.
- Measurement and diagnostics connects these questions to observable sequences of interaction and response.
- Relational intervention examines how changing timing and connections alters the conditions for further communication.
- Operational implementation brings observation, modelling, intervention and evaluation into a recurring analytical process.
- The synthesis draws these questions together as a research programme for the study of communication.
