Hi, I am Dr. Kenneth L. Hacker, Professor of Communication Studies at New Mexico State University. This is my personal home page and where I can say and do what I wish to -- I hope!

Here is my original position on Bush's War on Iraq.  My current position on the war can be found on my blog at  http://cyberdem.blogspot.com.
 

Besides being a social scientist, I am also an author, political commentator and musician. I even hope to be writing some fiction novels in the next few years. I would like to offer commentary about politics, communication technologies, academics, government, and culture. I believe that we in America have tremendous opportunities, but also that we have a great deal of work to do in order to make this society work as well as we think it does or should.
 
 

Why Communication Studies is Vital in Higher Education

Communication Studies is one the most important subject areas in higher education today. The major is growing steadily across the nation just as the social science of Communication Studies is growing.

Communication science is a sub-set of Communication Studies. I am proud to introduce and label myself as a communication scientist. What does that mean? It means that like political science, we use the goals and principles of scientific inquiry and theory construction to guide our explorations of human communication behavior. As political science is the science of politics, communication science is the science of communication. The importance of this new social science cannot be neglected.

Despite advances in every technology, the central problems that face humanity are problems of cooperation, coordination, and communication. Workplace productivity and morale are strongly affected by communication patterns. The systemic nature of an organization is essentially how the organization is organized as a system of information and communication. Personal success and happiness is clearly linked to effective relationship formation and maintenance, both of which are determined by skills in communication. I could go on and on with examples illustrating the basic truth that what organizes human life is social interaction. Communication processes create information and meanings, both of which are crucial for problem solving and making everyday decisions.

Like employers who know a good thing when they interview a person with a degree in communication studies, university administrators know the value of human communication research and studies. As we go further into the Information Age and then into an age of communication and increased interactivity, the study of human communication will take on even greater significance that it has today. I admire those who can see this basic reality in the history and directions of human culture and technological development.

In my humble opinion, we will only begin to solve the most tenacious of human and social maladies when we take the importance of human communication problems and problem solving much more seriously. This is another way of saying that we will solve our problems when we acknowledge what most causes them.
 



Future Directions for Communication Technology

Today we are still entering what is known as an age of information, something that we have been entering since the mid 1950s. Great advances have been made in computer and communication technologies. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that there was no such thing as a PC just about twenty years ago.

Processing speeds accelerate, chips get smaller, networks proliferate, and the integration of computing and communication becomes ever more transparent and effective.

What I call the "Age of Communication" may follow our present era of computer networking and new message devices. More specifically, I believe that we are coming into an age of personal communication networks with one-number locator numbers as well as portable personal communicators which integrate e-mail, voice mail, video mail, and telephone into one small unit. Additionally, we are getting close to a time of intelligent agents, knowbots, and computers that will converse with each other as proxies for their human owners. This will offer a new area of communication study perhaps called human-mediated computer communication as opposed to what we now study and call computer-mediated communication (e-mail, networks, video mail, etc.)!

I do not believe that Bill Gates or any other tycoon or futurist can tell us anything useful about future communication. We must learn more about basic communication processes without technology to understand human interaction with technology. Communication science is helping us with both. But there is much work to do and technology advances so quickly that by the time we explain the effects of something like radio, something new and different like television comes along. This will probably always happen, but we are getting better at sorting out the wild speculations about communication technologies from the generalization derived from empirical studies.
 



Virtual Democracy: Hype versus Possibilities

The hype about virtual democracy can be found in all kinds of gibberish about new communities, new empowerment, and liberation through computer networks. Can you tell that I think much of that kind of talk is nonsense?

We do know, so far, that new communication technologies are enabling technologies, but that engineering alone or programing alone does not guarantee anything.  We need effective management of new technologies, effective training, and effective methods of using communication processes to guide the design, adoption, and user
reinvention processes that come with each new technology.
 
  



Why I Do Not Listen to Rush Limbaugh

Who is Rush Limbaugh anyway? I like to call him Rush Limberger since I basically think his ideas and attempts to say anything logical stink to high heaven. While I am not mincing words, I should also admit that I like to refer to him as the Great Rhetorical Flatulator.

So who is he anyway? Well, basically he is a college dropout who figured out how to make tons of money calling people names. He is not an intellectual, not an expert, not a journalist, not a pundit, not a statesman, nor any sort of person with widespread acclamation from people of different ideologies. He IS an entertainer, an entrepreneur, a political commentator, a talk show host, an author (or co-author at least), and a fat man with a fat bank account.

I only began listening to him when others asked me for my opinion of his rhetoric. Once concluding to myself that he is devoid of any commitment to facticity or logic and is attached to gutter-level discourse, I tuned him out and wrote him off. There are now entire books about the man. I really could not care less about his role in our society today other than as one example of how propagandists appear from time to time to play upon the fears and prejudices of their audiences. As the Pee Wee Herman of American politics, it is best to let him do his thing under the protection of the First Amendment and to focus attention on much more important aspects of life and politics.

             The United States Military Needs to Deal with Sexual Harassment
 
 

 

 





 
 
 




My son, Fabien, born Oct. 1, 2001.


 

Dr. Hacker e-mail
 
 
 
 
 

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This page last updated by Dr. K. Hacker, June 13, 2007.