Why no Nobel prize in Communication?
There are Nobel Prizes in:
Physics
Chemistry
Medicine/Biology/Physiology
Literature
Peace
Economic Science
The exception here is economics, which technically is not a Nobel Prize, but one that came later as a sort of sponsorship. It was started in 1969 and is supported by the Swedish National Bank.
What is it sponsoring? Market-driven economics of course!
But that’s not the argument I want to make. I want to argue that if economics can come along much later and be that important, surely communication is of that level of importance.
The Peace Prize is a strange metric. It’s often awarded to people who talk about peace but don’t really accomplish a lot. Perhaps that should be the communication prize. But instead of talking about peace from a position of power (or being a victim of someone who has a lot of power) perhaps it could be awarded to someone who offers a variant on a theory or practice on how to communicate with one another about intense or controversial things.
There are so many international communication and dialogue organizations not to mention debate organizations that focus a ton on practice. This could be motive to focus on theory and develop some new approaches.
Scholars do this all the time in communication in university departments but there’s no incentive to do it. The best you can hope is a prize at the mile long, 3 inch deep National Communication Association conference. But this does not fund research, nowhere even close. There’s no contest or real help for grants. The trouble with applying for big humanities grants is the barrier most grant readers accept: Communication seems a given. The challenge is very hard for communication scholars to get the sort of funding that one gets in other fields.
Maybe the Nobel Prize in Literature is closer than Peace for a model? The qualifications seem a bit better than the seeming randomness of the Peace Prize:
It’s all about quality. Literary quality, of course. The winner needs to be someone who writes excellent literature, someone who you feel when you read that there’s some kind of a power, a development that lasts through books, all of their books. But the world is full of very good, excellent writers, and you need something more to be a laureate.
This is a quote from Ellen Mattson who helps choose the winner. Seems like Communication could adapt from this. Someone who has worked on the challenges of Communication consistently for a long time with an extra spark of energy or effort, something that sets them above and beyond the typical researcher. Seems like a good way to decide.
The Nobel Prize in Communication won’t solve all the issues
with the communication field with it’s perception or attitude. But it would
change the field of communication work, elevating the perception globally to a
different level of importance. That would change the way research is done,
read, and ironically communicated to others. Maybe this would move the journalists
away from interviewing psychologists and political scientists on communication issues
every time one makes the news cycle.