Timothy Stephen, a professor at The University at Albany and long-time director of the Communication Institute for Online Scholarship (CIOS), a pioneering digital service he co-founded with Teresa Harrison in 1986, has announced (see the screenshot above) a free online tool for exploring communication theories and models.
The Communication Theory Index presents an ever-growing alphabetical list of "named theories" mentioned in the recent academic communication literature and links each one to a Google search that leads off with an AI overview of the theory and its key concepts. If you have studied communication theory at all, you have probably heard that there are "a lot" of theories in the field. The Index confirms that observation with an actual count of theories: 756 as of this writing.
The alphabetical list of theories may be kind of overwhelming but if you know the general sort of theory you are looking for you can filter the list by writing something in the search box at the top. Begin to type "interpersonal" in the search box and you'll soon see a short list of theories with "interpersonal" in the name.
When you click on the name of a theory, you enter a Google search with the prompt: "what is [Name of Theory] in communication theory and what are its key constructs and concepts" and voilà! there you have a brief AI Overview followed by a bullet point list of Key Concepts and Constructs and then some web links.
Of course, if you know the name of a theory, you can use the same prompt to search Google by yourself and will get much the same results, so you don't really need to use the Communication Theory Index. I confirmed this by using the prompt to search Google for a couple of theories and did get the same results as using the Index. I also used those same prompts on the Microsoft Bing search engine with, again, very similar results.
It's important to know this because you may want to look up a theory that is not in the Index. Yes, it's true, even with 756 theories and still counting, the Communication Theory Index does not include all of them! For an example close to my own heart, the Index does not currently include the Constitutive Metamodel, but you can still search Google with the prompt "what is the Constitutive Metamodel in communication theory and what are its key constructs and concepts" and get a quick, not-too-bad overview.
The results are not always ideal. I filtered the Index with "metadiscourse" (because, well, it's my thing) and found just one theory called the Metadiscourse Model. The Google AI overview and search results are almost entirely about Ken Hyland's systemic functional linguistic theory of metadiscourse, which is oriented to English composition studies and refers to certain linguistic devices used in writing. It's a fine theory for its purpose but it misses the broader and more significant role of metadiscourse in communication that I have tried to address in my work (and that inspires this blog). The result is not surprising because the Google overview is based on a general web search and there is a lot about Hyland's theory on the web.
If these critiques seem overly self-centered, here's another example that is not about me. Click on Field Theory in the Index, and what you get is a misleading mash-up of two theories, by Kurt Lewin and Pierre Bourdieu, that in reality have nothing to do with each other. I don't know if this would count as a case of AI hallucination.
What I draw from these examples is a reminder of the limitations of web searching as a way of doing research. If you want to learn about communication theories, you can find some quick starters of variable quality by clicking links in the Communication Theory Index. It's a useful tool and a nice resource to have. However, if you really want to learn about communication theories, a better place to start might be with a textbook that would give you an organized introduction to the subject, grounded in the communication literature. It would also be helpful if the Index were to link theories to the applications in the communication literature that were the basis for including them in the Index, but you can do those searches on your own using ComAbstracts or another database.
Any reactions or further thoughts about the Communication Theory Index? Please post a comment here!
