Paradigm Shift In Communication: Inclusive And Innovative Communication In The Era Of Digital Disruption

By Prof. Fred A. Amadi

Since the title of this paper sounds oxymoronic resulting in aberrant decoding when I pilot-tested it for meaning with a miniature focus group, it is apropos to anchor it away from a possible polysemic anarchy. First let it be stated that the title is an adaptation of Kuntz’s (2020). A furtive glance at the title emits a reading suggestive [that] I’m asserting that ‘paradigm shift in communication is becoming impossible.’ Rather than that, the gravamen of the title is a demand that paradigm shift in communication, in fact, in all faculties requires not being possible i.e. not being co-opted into the prevailing onto-epistemological realities. Put another way, the title is a clarion call on all communication stakeholders to become iconoclasts who are poised to reject the contemporary modernist approaches of communicating and to replace such antediluvian approaches with innovative, elastic and autochthonous emerging postmodernist cum posthumanist possibilities.

 At this point it is helpful therefore, to start the paper by asserting that the concept of paradigm shift is marinated in the tenets of postmodernism. Postmodernism owes its popularity to the French thinker, Jean-Francois Lyotard.

“Postmodernism” rejects the view that our current modernist way of thinking, of researching, of communicating, of understanding the concept of science and so forth, are foundationally and fundamentally sacrosanct, therefore, unchangeable (Hammersley, 2023, p.165).

In rejecting these foundational grand narratives of modernism, postmodernism promotes “ontology of immanence” (St. Pierre, 2018, p.2).

 Ontology of immanence designates a near-future emergence of postmodern grand narratives, essences, rationalities, realities, cosmologies, ontologies and epistemologies that will minimize, trump, marginalize and confound the present modernist  grand narratives of  “orthodox Newtonian prescriptive science” (Hanmersley, 2023, p.165).

Let the views of St. Pierre on ontology of immanence as cited sink in within the context of what Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Intelligence Augmentation ( IA) as parts of narratives of postmodernism are already displaying.

The postulations of ontology of immanence currently-emerging as parts of the grand narratives of postmodernism resonated with the insight of two French scholars, Deleuze and Guattari (1987[1980]) who had coined in their seminal text: A Thousand Plateaus the concept of “rhizomatic view of knowledge” (Mann, 2011, p.245). Rhizomatic view of knowledge speaks to how the tenets of postmodernism inspire paradigm shift. The rhizomatic view of knowledge explains the difference between knowledge as an aborescent tree and knowledge as a rhizome.

As Deleuze and Guattari (1987[1980]) explain, knowledge as an aborescent tree designates the modernist knowledge practice whereby every sphere  of knowledge is seen as diverse luxuriant branches of knowledge that blossom but just on one stem.

Such knowledge is viewed as centered, hierarchical and fixed.  Knowledge from such standpoint is precarious because, no matter how luxuriant the branches are, the branches must revert to the stem of the tree they grow on. Knowledge that is so centered is antithetical to paradigm shift. The reason is that a centered knowledge cannot be “re-territorialized\de-territorialized” (O’Halloran, 2017, p.8).     

For knowledge to be de-territorialized and amenable to paradigm shift, it must exhibit a rhizomatic character. A rhizome is an underground plant like turmeric and bamboo (Mann, 2011, p.245).

Rhizomes have underground stems with nodes at intervals. Each node grows a separate tangle of roots and also sprouts stem at the same interval. Even when a node’s tangle of roots together with its sprout is uprooted, the other part of the underground stem re-grows a new tangle of roots and sprouts.

What Deleuze & Guattari are actually saying is that paradigm shift takes place only where thinking, knowledge, science, epistemology and so forth are de-centered, heterogeneous, diverse, versatile, multiple, disruptive, malleable, unruly and anarchic (Denzin, 20133, p.538, Vaninni, 2015, p.125, Koro, Vitrukh & Wells).

Now the question is how and where, can we as academics, scholars, researchers and policy makers leverage the rhizomatic view of knowledge to actualize our dream for paradigm shift? My guess is that you will cherish an answer to this question? The answer lies on how we operationalize and adapt concepts such as –science, research and communication and so forth.

Science

It is regrettable that our view of science in Nigeria is always self-deprecating. Our self-deprecating view of science cowardly upholds many of the fallacious claims found in modernist prescriptive Newtonian view of science.

Among others, this view holds that if it doesn’t yield to rigorous observations, experiments, weighing and measuring in a manner that generates “consensual certainty” it isn’t science (Shapin, 2005, p.315, Cajete, 2008, p.491). Worsening it is the refrain: “if it cannot be tested, it does not exist” (Cajete, 2008, p.491).

These intimidating blinkers blindside us from accepting the fact that “indigenous science has its own scientific logical validity that urges us to perfect and standardize it” (Bartiste, 2008, p.500). What the standardization requires of us is to adapt our learning of “mathematic, physics, chemistry” to our local world sensing (Bartiste, 2008, p.499).

What adaptation means here is that we should stand, as china did, on the shoulders of giants of mathematics, physics and chemistry to enable us have a more creative and panoptic view than those ‘giants.’

Many anti-colonial scholars have been promoting the viability of this kind of adaptation.  These scholars have been swotting on how the immaterial cosmologies found in dreams can open a communication vista that might rival what modernist material science offers in terms of emails (Tracey & Reutlinger, 2020; Coronado, 2015).

Readings in Idowu (1978) provoke introspections on how astral projection might be perfected to enable individuals who are miles apart to interact in different ways.

Amadi (2024) writes about how the adaptation of chemistry in Nigeria’s Niger Delta region can turn the region into a hub of glue and niche perfume production.

 Langmia, (2024) writes about how African juju can be adapted to give Africa an autochthonous immaterial communication technology portal that might draw the envy of Global West.

Abbott (2012) cites Alexander Okonda, a Kenyan rain maker. Okonda has leveraged British and Canadian funding to perfect the chemistry of rain-making and prevention. His expertise has drawn the patronage of the Kenyan Meteorological Department (KMD) in weather forecast.

Is it not embarrassing that despite these indigenous scientific potentials, Nigeria a country that clamors for paradigm shift, does not include indigenous science in courses like ‘Science Reporting’ in its current Core Curriculum and Minimum Academic Standards (CCMAS) prescription for Nigeria’s universities?

Adapting Social Science Research Away from Epistemological Coloniality

Another sphere where the noise of paradigm change needs to be taken seriously in Nigeria is in the sphere of social research. For a long time, Nigeria’s hoopla over paradigm shift has proven to be hypocritical. If not for the grudging and facile yielding of ground to accept the qualitative research method as an authentic method, an acceptance that just started in the 2020s.

Nigeria’s social science, management science and communication professors had always sneered at and frustrated scholars and students who dared to deviate from the time-honored nomothetic ‘positivist’ quantitative research method (Amadi, 2025).

We need urgent change in our research paradigm. That change must accept that “enlighten societies must have multiple ways of knowing” Meyer, 2008, p. 224). We must also accept that “to imagine another system is to extend our participation in the present system” (Kuntz, 2020, p.4). We have to accept the fact that “to live is to create and be open to transformation” (O’Halloran, 2017, p.8).

When Professors accept the above they will stop asking students who do qualitative content analysis to provide inter coder-reliability since the “culture capital” (Birkhead, 1991, p.228) that determine how people read a text is always in a flux.

Asking students/scholars to provide such betrays nothing other than ignorance of the communication pathology known as “null context hypothesis” –a pathology which posits in error that the literal meaning of a word or a phrase is the only accruable meaning to the word or phrase in every context” (Searl, 1979, p.117).

Communication and Research Coloniality

Development communication is an area of communication that suffers more from a colonized social research tradition. The highest objective of development communication is to catalyze positive social change. Close to a century, different theories – modernization to dependency theories – have unsuccessfully tried to hasten development in regressing countries (Pant, 2009, pp. 541-545). A diagnostic analysis links this lack of success to a pedagogic pathology in communication research.

The wrong pedagogy is linked to a flawed theory of knowledge – the “spectator theory of knowledge” (Brinkmann, 2015, pp. 227-229). A spectator’s theory approach in communication research mutes respondents, restricting them in a research situation to  only  ‘yes’ or ‘no’ robotic monotones. A robotic monotone approach in communication research data collection misses a fact that’s fundamental to communication itself.

That fact is that it is through face-to-face conversation not through ‘yes’ or ‘no’ monologue that development ideas emerge (Grisprud, 2002, p. 150, Brinkmann 2015, p. 225).

 The implication is that a communication research that targets positive social change in people must embrace a data collection approach that allows a face-to-face conversation, not robotic monotonic responses.

 It’s indisputable that the only social research method that parades a galaxy of approaches tolerant of dialogic epistemology is the qualitative research method –more so its “Critical Social Science (CSS)” approach (Neumann, 2014, pp.97-123).

This approach doesn’t pamper research respondents/ participants by tolerating infantile ‘agree’ or ‘disagree’ responses as if the respondents are “customers who are always right” (Brinkmann 2015, p. 225).

Treating respondents like customers betrays a serious ignorance about human beings. It betrays the ignorance of the principle of “ephemerality of the human identity” (St. Pierre, 2015, p.108, Robinow, 1997, xix).

 Ephemerality of human identity holds that the identity of any individual is not given a priori but “constructed” and “constituted in the vagaries of everyday existence” (Butler, 1990, p.42; 1995, p.125). Pant (2009) remains categorical in asserting that any study\research tradition in development communication that overlooks the conversation approach found in (CSS) is in liminal stasis.