A new vision of reality for communication research: call for a paradigm shift to systems view of life^*

* This is a revised version of a paper presented to the Religion, Communication & Culture Working Group at the IAMCR Conference in Leicester, UK, on 28 July 2016.

ABSTRACT

This essay calls for the adoption of the systems view of life as the unifying vision for all disciplines to follow. Newtonian science eclipsed systems thinking for more than 300 years after the publication of Newton’s magnum corpus, the Principia, in 1687. Subsequent findings have challenged some of the main presumptions of classical science such as the Cartesian view of mind–body duality and the classification of variables into distinct dependent and independent categories. Modern systems view agrees with Eastern philosophy on the interdependence of all systems, which function in patterned networks, as established by organismic biology, new physics, cognitive science, ecology, and other disciplines. Part 2 of the essay examines the Conditioned Genesis paradigm as a conducive framework particularly for the field of communication.

KEYWORDS:

• Buddhist phenomenology
• Cartesian–Newtonian paradigm
• communication
• Conditioned Genesis (paticca samuppada)
• systems theories

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Professor emeritus Shelton Gunaratne, Dr Gunaratne retired in 2007 from Minnesota State University Moorhead, where he was professor of communication/journalism since 1985. Previously, he taught in universities in Queensland, Penang, Florida and Missouri. He spent his sabbatical year 1994 as a visiting scholar at Tianjin University in China and Macquarie University in Australia. Earlier in 1984, he spent a year as an exchange instructor at Fullerton College, California. Born in a village in the Matara District in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), he wrote a three-volume autobiography titled From village boy to global citizen, published in 2012 by Xlibris and iUniverse (Bloomington, IN). His other books include Modernization and knowledge: A study of four Ceylonese villages (Singapore: Amic 1975), Handbook of the media in Asia (Sage 2000), The Dao of the press: A humanocentric theory (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton 2005), and (with Mark Pearson and Sugath Senarath) Mindful journalism and news ethics in the digital era: A Buddhist approach (New York and London: Routledge 2015). His scholarly work also includes more than 70 journal articles, monographs, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries, as well as hundreds of newspaper articles. (A list of his major publications related to the topic of this paper appears in the Bibliography and References section.) Gunaratne began his career as a journalist in Ceylon (where he worked for the Sinhala daily Dinamina and the English Ceylon Daily News as a reporter and later as an assistant news editor) after graduating with a special degree in economics from the University of Ceylon, Peradeniya, in 1962. At Peradeniya campus, he collaborated with three others – Gaya Gunawardena, Sirimegha Wijeratne, and Nandasiri Leelaratne – to co-edit a short-story magazine called Pratibha. Having completed his primary education in his village school in Pathegama, Gunaratne transferred to Sri Sumangala Vidyalaya in Weligama for his secondary education. Finally, he moved to Carey College, Colombo, to study for his Senior School Certificate, and then to Ananda College, Colombo, to complete his Higher School Certificate that qualified him to enter the university in 1958. Gunaratne arrived in the United States in 1966 on a one-year World Press Institute Fellowship, which included a three-month internship at the Eugene (Ore.) Register-Guard and presenting a report on a project titled ‘Assignment USA’ for which he chose to travel to the two most northern settlements in Alaska, Barrow and Wainwright, to research on Eskimo life. A report of his findings appeared in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner on 7 August 1967. He also made headlines in the Ceylon newspapers as the first Ceylonese journalist to ‘discover’ Ceylon, MN, the birth place of US Sen. Walter Mondale. During his tenure as a professor, he spent the summer of 1989 on another internship at the Longview Daily News in Washington. At the 1976 IAMCR Conference in Leicester, approximately four years after getting his doctorate in mass communications from the University of Minnesota, he got a UNESCO travel grant to present a paper to the Developing Countries Section, thanks to Professor James Halloran and his able assistant, Peggy Grey, who ran the organization at the time. Gunaratne started his graduate studies in Oregon where he completed a master’s degree in journalism before he transferred to Minnesota.

Yoke-Sim Gunaratne (nee Chia), Yoke-Sim has been the Executive Director of a nonprofit organization ‘Cultural Diversity Resources’ of Fargo-Moorhead Metropolitan Area for more than two decades. Earlier, she worked as a research assistant at USM in Penang, and subsequently as a tutor at the Central Queensland University, Australia. She attended Pudu Girls School in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia, before she got admission to Universiti Sains Malaysia, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in social science in 1975. Three years later, the University of Queensland awarded her a master’s degree in sociology.

Notes

* This is a revised version of a paper presented to the Religion, Communication & Culture Working Group at the IAMCR Conference in Leicester, UK, on 28 July 2016.