Chapter 5: Understanding Context, Purpose & Audience

Fig. 5.2: Context of Use and Context of Production

The Context of Product/ Context of Use Model. Image description available.
Figure 5.2 The Context of Product/ Context of Use Model. [Image Description]
According to this model, there are four steps in the communication process.
1) Production: In this model, the person in yellow is the sender. They create a message. But, when they create the message, they don’t do it in isolation. Instead, they encode the message with their own beliefs, attitudes, experiences, feelings, background, environment and much more. This is called the Context of Production, or the context in which the message was created.
2) Circulation: How the message is circulated impacts how the audience receives it. For example, you would react differently if someone broke up with you face-to-face than you would if they broke up with you by text message. The sender circulates the message using the medium that they think will be most effective.

3) Use: The audience (in red) doesn’t just passively receive the message. Instead, they decode the message based on their own Context of Use. They draw on their own beliefs, attitudes, experiences, feelings, background, etc. to understand the message. The more these two circles overlap, the more meaning is created.

 

4) Reproduction: Again, the audience isn’t passive. In the final stage, the audience takes action (or doesn’t) after receiving the message. They may alter it, share it with others, or even ignore it.
If the Context of Production circle overlaps with the Context of Use circle, then then the audience understands the message. The more overlap, the more understanding. So, if your friend telling the story about the cricket match is talking quickly, if the coffee shop gets noisy or if you get distracted by an argument going on across the room, then the circles would overlap less. If you don’t understand cricket, you might appreciate your friend’s enthusiasm but not how the match actually went. If you’re listening to everything your friend says and you understand because of your shared experiences just how much the cricket match meant to him, then the circles would overlap a lot.
One of the reasons the Context of Use/ Context of Production model is useful is that it helps us think of context as something that changes and that can be individual. The scholar Godwin Agboka says that when we think of intercultural communication, we often think about “large culture” models. [1]This can lead to stereotypical thinking and making too big of a distinction between “us” and “them,” which can actually make it harder to communicate across cultures. For example, a textbook might tell you that people from India behave one way, and people from Japan behave a different way.

But not everyone within a culture has the same beliefs and experiences, and many of us go between cultures. For example, an international student from India might behave one way with friends in India, another way when socializing with other international students from India while in Canada, and a third way when interacting with domestic students who have South Asian heritage.

To understand this model better, let’s take a look at this vintage ad for ketchup:

 

A vintage ad for ketchup that shows a woman saying "you mean a WOMAN can open it?"
Figure 5.3 How have things changed since this ad was created?

 

Sometimes it’s easiest to see the Context of Production when we look at a context that’s very different from our own. This ad was created in the 1950s, almost 70 years ago. It was created in a very different context. What kind of values, beliefs and assumptions led to the creation of this ad? Who do you think created it? Who was it marketed to?

When you look at the ad, think about what’s in it and what’s not in it. Judging by the caption, we can probably make some assumptions about how North American society in the 1950s viewed women. To put this ad in perspective, women in Canada weren’t allowed to own a credit card until the 1970s; the first woman officially ran a marathon in the late 1960s. We can assume that this message was produced at a time when the dominant cultural view was that women are weak. In fact, this ad is actually marketed to women (who did the majority of the grocery shopping), so many women saw themselves this way too.

We can also think about what’s not in it. The woman in the ad looks very stereotypically feminine (red fingers and nails, dress, etc.) and we can assume that she’s maybe middle class or upper class by her jewelry. She’s also white; it’s likely that this ad was created by white people with the intended audience of white people. That’s not surprising. Around the time this ad was created, Canada had just allowed people of Japanese, Chinese and South Asian descent to vote and when these groups were depicted in advertisements, they were racist caricatures. (In fact, Indigenous people were not allowed to vote in Canada until 1960). That ad is encoded with a Context of Production that saw women as weak, that valued a particular type of femininity, and that ignored or discriminated against BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour), and the ad reflects that.

This ad was probably circulated in magazines at the time. Imagine seeing this ad in a magazine. The bright yellow would likely stand out in contrast to the red ketchup bottle, fingernails and lips and catch your attention. Sometimes, ads like this one were accompanied by recipes that used ketchup. People (mostly women) could cut out the recipes and add them to their recipe box. This ad is therefore designed to be circulated in a particular way.

Today, however, the Context of Use is very different. How do you think a modern North American audience would react to this ad? They might be insulted. That’s because they’re decoding the ad in a society where women do Crossfit and lift weights, and would not see themselves as being too weak to open a ketchup bottle. You’re also seeing this ad in a textbook or on a computer screen or mobile phone, which is something that the creators of this ad couldn’t have even dreamed of. Maybe you’re new to Canada and you don’t know much about Canadian politics or history. Still, your individual Context of Use (what people in your family and culture think about women, your own experiences, etc.) will determine how you reacted to the ad.

When this ad was created, the creators hoped that it would make people go out and buy ketchup. They obviously weren’t thinking that their ad would be reproduced in this textbook. By including this ad as an example, I’m using it for my own purposes: to teach you about a communication model. You might further reproduce it by remixing it for a project or showing it to a friend.

Because the Context of Use is so different from the Context of Production, there’s not a lot of overlap between the two circles. We can read the message, but it probably doesn’t make us want to buy ketchup. In the 1950s, there would have been much more overlap.

The benefit of studying this communication model is that it helps us to see how our own worldview influences how we communicate. Often, communicators do a lot of work analyzing their audience, but they forget to think about how their own assumptions and values influence how they communicate. A lack of self-reflection can lead to miscommunication and even cause harm to your audience. This is especially important when you are communicating with people of other cultures. As intercultural communication scholar E.T. Hall said, “Years of study have convinced me that the real job is not to understand other cultures, but to understand our own.” (Hall, 1973) This model helps us understand how our own culture influences how we judge other people.

To test your understanding of the model, explore it by clicking on hotspots on the image.

 

Image Description

Figure 5.2 image description: This model describes the context of use and context of production. There are two overlapping circles: one yellow and one red. The first circle represents the speaker’s context of production. The second represents the context of use that the audience decodes the message in. Because there’s overlap, there’s understanding. [Return to Figure 5.2]

  1. Agboka, G. (2012). Liberating Intercultural Technical Communication from “Large Culture” Ideologies: Constructing Culture Discursively. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 42(2), 159–181. https://doi.org/10.2190/TW.42.2.e ↵

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