In his highly influential essay “A Cultural Approach to Communication” (1975/1989), James W. Carey introduced his thesis that our understanding of communication has been dominated by two distinct perspectives. The transmission view of communication emphasizes the distribution of messages in space for the purpose of exercising control, while the ritual view emphasizes the role of communication in creating shared values and belief systems necessary for maintaining societies over time. The essay consists of two parts, the first discussing the historical dominance of the transmission view and the second showing how the ritual view can be developed into a model with which to better understand the complexity of communication.