TRANSACTIONAL APPROACH TO HARVEY FIERSTEINS WIDOWS AND CHILDREN FIRST
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A TRANSACTIONAL APPROACH TO HARVEY FIERSTEIN'S
"WIDOWS AND CHILDREN FIRST"
The Transactional Approach
To examine a communication event and understand its significance to the participants, the transactional approach serves to make clear the effects of the environment, context, and especially the effects of one person's utterances and behavior on the other. This model gives us much more insight than an "action" model might; human communication is not so clear cut. We can, at any given moment during the communication process, arbitrarily assign roles of "sender" and "receiver" and examine the "message." But this does not provide us with a great deal of insight into meaning. We are never just senders or receivers in normal human communication, that is, when we are speaking to another person. With the exception of mediated communication such as sending or receiving a telegram or letter, we act simultaneously as sender and receiver, speaker and listener, manipulator and manipulated. Human interpersonal communication is best thought of as simultaneous responses.1
A corollary to this idea is that in conversation there are no easily identifiable sequences of events. That is, since we are simultaneously senders and receivers, we cannot say just when we are sending and when we are receiving. The idea of "question and answer" or utterance and response is limited to classrooms, churches and music...