Earnest Bormann

Fantasty Theme Analysis & Symbolic Convergence Theory

Bormann: Central Assumptions

Communication creates reality via a connection between the words we use and the experience/knowledge we gain.
Individual's meanings for symbols can converge to create a shared reality.

Fantasy Theme Analysis

From small group research, via Bales.
The Minnesota program.
Bales Interaction Process Analysis.
Fantasizing

Fantasy Theme Concepts

Fantasy

The activity of dramatizing.

Dramatizing Message

The type of communication in which the fantasy occurs.

Fantasy Theme

The content of the dramatizing message, chained by participants.

Fantasy Types

Repetition of particular scenerios that stress a specific ideological emphasis.

Rhetorical Vision

Sharing a fantasy theme and types across a wider community.

Rhetorical Community

Gets made via shared rhetorical visions.

Symbolic Convergence: Genesis

Problems with Fantasy Theme Perspective.
Broader theoretic notion: A General Communication Theory.
A communication practice which cuts across conventional usage and recurring forms.
A set of symbols comes to have a common meaning across diverse populations.

Symbolic Convergence

Doesn't require tracking of fantasy chains or of small group processes.

Locates sets of symbols in diverse communities; shows how the meanings for those symbols can converge.

Example: Donald Shields on Malcom X.

education
self sufficiency
legal process

When X first presents these, they sound radical and scary to white people. But X used themes which are consonant with mainstream American culture, so in time, the symbols came to mean the same things to the diverse communities which heard them.