Global Journal of Human Social Science, C: Sociology and Culture, Volume 23 Issue 4

Towards a Communicative City: Applying a New Framework for Understanding Communication and City Longfei Li α & Xiangyu Hai σ I. I ntroduction: W hy C ommunication N etwork M atters to C ity I ntegration ince the Industrial Revolution, with the productivity change brought by technology and modern mass media, the distance between time and space has been shortened and the imagined "urban community" has been brought about. Newspapers, television and other mass media can not only have information functions, but also unite and connect people into a whole through the communication network, thus promoting the integration of urban communities. However, with the development of the internet and the explosive growth of urban population, the rise of individualism has made the connection of traditional urban society declared unorganized, and the traditional mass media has also lost its unified integration ability (Bruhn, 2011:8). The city has fallen into an unprecedented communication crisis, and the construction of a coordinated and unified relationship between different individuals has become an urgent problem to be solved. In other words, the global expansion of the modernization process has led to the fragmentation of society, and people find themselves in a modern world that has lost contact with the roots of communicability. Internet technology, which originally hoped to improve the efficiency of social communication, has instead intensified social friction, conflict and differentiation, and "communicability" has become a significant dilemma faced by the media society. Nowadays, the rational communication among people in the megacity space is full of obstacles, the "filter bubble" effect under the intervention of algorithm technology makes the social consensus in the public opinion space difficult, and the embarrassment of ineffective communication exists in the network space under the distraction of information attention. Previous urban researchers paid more attention to the system integration of institutions, organizations and policies, but neglected to understand cities from the social integration of communication and interaction (Bridge, 2005; Friedland, 2001). It is precisely because of the breakdown of public communication networks that order and consensus in modern urban society are difficult to establish. With the rise of network society, urban life is becoming more networked and disembedding. Urban communication researchers believe that attention should be paid to the communication potential of urban public space, and transfer their attention to the action potential of communication technology, calling for a new value concept that can rebuild the order of public space, so as to generate "communicative city" and establish a more humanized new idea of the city (Sutriadi & Wulandari, 2014). According to Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of the English Language, communicability can be interpreted in two ways. First, it can be used as a noun "communicability", which first appeared in 1533, referring to the infectious ability of certain diseases in medicine, and also referring to the ability of individuals to communicate. Second, as an adjective communicative, first appeared in 1651, communicative and closely related to communication. It refers to the process of communication, transmission and feedback between people and groups. Therefore, understanding the city from the perspective of communication and interaction means highlighting the unique effect of communication network in forming the city, focusing on the communication, connection and integration between individuals, individuals and communities, individuals and platforms in urban public space. Facing this promising research work, the question is what kind of systematic analysis perspective should we adopt to understand the relationship between communication and city, and then carry out the research of "communicative city"? This study will first clarify the current field of academic discourse by reviewing the academic map of communicative city in communication research. On this basis, we propose a systematic framework for the study of communicative city through the theory of communication ecology. S © 2023 Global Journals Volume XXIII Issue IV Version I 1 ( ) Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2023 C Author α : Ph.D., Assistant Professor, School of Journalism and Communication, Minzu University of China, China. e-mail: longfei_sjtu@163.com Corresponding Author σ : Ph.D. Candidate, School of Media and Communication, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. e-mail: haixy-lyon@sjtu.edu.cn