Talk:Communication

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[edit] Discussion

This page is definately improved and something really more can be done in order to make it a core articles. And the fact that its one of the most important article in wiki. I have done my contributions on this i would expect others to do the same Kalivd 11:25, 21 April 2007 (UTC)

This is page is so poor an introduction to the subject area that to edit it would entail rewriting it completely. I recommend anyone approaching the topic to read "On Human Communication" by Colin Cherry.

Yeah, no kidding. I've been working on a new version offline, but it's coming slowly. I'll probably just post what I have and we can take it from there. -- Stephen Gilbert 21:04, 25 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Hmmm... I've done some incremental stuff - want to send me something offline and collaborate? Richard Pitt Nov. 16

I'd love to collaborate, but let's let others in on it too! Collaboration is Wikipedia's middle name. Er... don't ask me what its last name is...

I've tried to work your current contributions into my sketchy notes. If anything got lost in the transition, be sure to pull it from the history and add it. -- Stephen Gilbert 19:55, 22 Nov 2003 (UTC)


I've moved the outline here; it's more of a to-do list than article material. -- Stephen Gilbert

Stephen it is much better but still too many links and chapters. If this page is to be a proper page I think a general introduction saying something like that communication happens whenever data transfers from one sentient being to another would help a lot. --BozMo|talk 13:31, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)

My name is Kyle Mullaney. I majored in Organizational Communication with an emphasis in Intercultural Communication. I would be happy to add my help in cleaning up this article.

Would it first be possible to make this into a category? Of course this page would be something of a gateway to the rest of the communication articles. It would have links to the various disciplines in the study of communication. It could contain a brief definition of communication. maybe from different aspects or other disciplines. For example the opening definition is to technical. I feel it should be more basic. Wow as I read further into the article I realize this would not even qualify for any text book we used. It is wordy somewhat technical, and jumbled. I will work on that now. The sections in the article have no consistent progression. Nor do some of the sections seem to demonstrate the authors understanding of communication but rather a specific field if anything. The article must begin with an understandable definition that is not to technical. Where technical terms are needed it would be helpful to define them. Second there needs to be a some what brief though thorough history of communication beginning with something about hieroglyphics and cave paintings then on to the Greeks not the romans because they were the first rhetoricians. Then the romans because they did make significant contributions. Then on to the various periods of communication highlighting the significant points. Sub articles can be made for more lengthy discussions of various contributors and and the development of communication fields such as Mass, Oral, etc... One of my professors has a great diagram of the communication model. She used Fred and Wanda. Sender/Encoder Receiver/Decoder. This prompts a further discussion that we would need to have, what terminology to use. In my field we used sender receiver though I did come across encoder/decoder. I feel that sender receiver is less technical. Though I see no problem in including them both with a slash. This may pose problems in the wiki community though. Kyle.Mullaney 08:00, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

important types:
- cooperative, non-cooperative
- synchronous, asynchronous
communication - Christian Hesse 21 Sept 2006 Communication a poorly written article, yet the first result under a google search for "communication"

Do you realise that a Google search for communication gives this poorly written article as the first result? I think it is imperative we get a revised article up and running immediately (ASAP).129.123.104.5 19:00, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

I see the main problem of managing this article in that the topic "communication" is huge.
If we split it by disciplines then we could use also the respective terminology in each discipline.
Example of a list of disciplines (compare with Communication_basic_topics):
Communication in
  • engineering (asynchronous...)
  • information theory (Shannon...)
  • linguistics (semantics...)
  • media (advertising...)
  • computer networks (tcpip...)
  • philosophy (concept...)
  • political science (persuasion...)
  • psychology (assertive...)
  • sociology (content analysis...)
  • ...
Some could be just links to articles that already exist, like Information_theory. But if the communication aspect is difused then a link cannot be used.
The main article would contain only the most general information applicable to all uses.
There could be an article specialized in similarities across disciplines.
--Gogino 07:10, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
sounds good --lynX

Does anyone think the second paragraph of the intro is important? I don't think it makes tons of sense and it doesn't seem to be saying much... Warlordwolf 01:03, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Overview

  • Types of communication...
moved to article and thinking about colalpsing to table like that:
x one two many
one 1 2 1000
two 2 4 2000
many 50 100 50000

[edit] Purpose of communication

    • To inform
    • To avoid misunderstanding
    • To remind
    • To review beautiful memory
    • To gain control
    • To persuade
    • To teach
    • To plan

Also:

    • To confuse
    • To create misunderstanding
    • To distract
    • To review painful memories
    • To yield control
    • To dissuade
    • To misdirect
    • To express emotion
    • To gain status
    • To avoid loneliness

[edit] Examples of communication

moved to article
  • Overview of debate: what is and isn't communication?

[edit] Communication Theory

To risk saying the obvious: There are so many theories of communication out there that it is probably fruitless to try and list them here. They even let quacks like me come up with new theories! It is not a particularly selective club. . .

Perhaps it would be easier and more helpful to link to an article that features one theory or a group of theories.

For example:

Many of the "directional" sorts of theories (up/down, sender/receiver, cycles and spirals, information load, channels, noise/signal, interference

all pretty much view human communication as the transmission of a message. This isn't necessarily bad, but it is fairly dated (there has been relatively little new work in these models for at least a decade) and often now considered somewhat limiting.

It's a great start to introduce some of the basics of some forms of communication in a quick way, which is why so many "Introduction to Human Communication" textbooks start there.

But our discussion shouldn't end here.

Some examples: If there are so many possible interpretations of words and ideas (and the "correspondent" or "representational" views have some real problems). This view of language would suggest that each word refers to or points to a corresponding idea so that when you think of a chair and you say the word, "chair" I hear the word "chair" and follow the pointer to the the correct idea "something to sit upon." So if where I end up is where you started then we have a successful communicative interaction.

But there are some really big (read: so far unsolved) problems with some of these premises.

For example, Who decides what is and is not an acceptable, or "true" idea? This perspective can't easily accommodate ambiguity: By definition if some word symbol doesn't point to an idea it is a nonsensical utterance--words without meaning. But with this model how can we deal with someone who intentionally picks a word symbol that might point me to the wrong idea? If you point to one meaning and I refer to another, are you (the speaker) always right? Is the hearer always wrong? How would an observing third party ever hope to figure out whether the communication was successful? Surely we can't vote on it!

How many of these unique ideas are there? Who gets to decide which are "real" and which are "false" ideas? If you have every possible false idea as a potential to be pointed to by some word or combination of words, the ratio of "bad words" to "good words" (that is, those words which correctly can be pointed to vs. those which cannot) is disturbingly high.

Also, how can we deal with the various levels of abstraction? "Chair" can be very specific ("this chair, my favorite chair, and no other") or very general ("that line of hills with those clouds looks like a big overstuffed chair") and if I can't directly access your set of word pointers and you can't access mine, how can we ever know if we are talking about the same thing? Now how can we account for the matches (or mismatches) of meaning when there is one speaker and a thousand listening? Or a recorded radio program so that the multiple speakers and the multiple listeners are never present in the same place at the same time.

These are not just important distinctions, they are vital. If communication is a process of transporting a meaning, we better be able to say just what is and what is not a meaning.

Because of these problems and many others like them, most people who would be considered by their peers to be communication theorists, have moved on to different sorts of models that focus more on creating meaning than on pointing to pre-defined meanings.

That said, let me be quick to point out that the types of communication theorists that are not dealing with "human communication" but with concepts such as "communication of a charge" among molecules the linear, mechanical transportation of meaning might be entirely useful.

So it is certainly fine to list these sorts of communicative models as falling within the vast range of communication theories, but we probably would be doing our readers a disservice to suggest that these are the principal models used in human communication today.

Roy 20:36, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Communication models

Wikipedia:Diagram needed
About this image

A diagram is needed in this article
  • encoding, sending and receiving messages

I've done this one Yupi666 09:56, 15 June 2007 (UTC)


  • Shannon-Weaver Model
  • symbols, language
  • verbal communication:
  • nonverbal communication:
    • body language (including Facial and Bodily Expressions)

also did another based on information on the article Yupi666 09:58, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Information & Communications Technologies (ICTs)

[edit] The study of communication

  • historical sketch
  • important people, theories

[edit] Communication Topics

[edit] Importance of Communication

Communication as the process that builds Community. See Portal:Community, Social network, Sense of community, etc. -- CQ 10:34, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Communication in XX Century

[edit] Communication in War

[edit] Written Communications

  • Grammar

[edit] eo: Information technology

The eo: article is about information technology. I think the interwiki link should be removed. Andres 07:02, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Information

Shouldn't communication come under information? Right now, the categories are the other way around. Brian Jason Drake 08:43, 22 October 2005 (UTC)

Having not seen any response for a long time, I made each of Information and Communication be within a category of the same name only and Category:Communication be under Category:Information, not the other way around. Brian Jason Drake 11:45, 18 February 2006 (UTC) [signed Brian Jason Drake 05:46, 12 March 2006 (UTC)]

Brian I am not so sure I understand why they would have to be combined in a hierarchy since communication is the process of sharing information and there can be no communciation with out information to share. While on the other hand with out communication information cannot be shared. My point is simply why join them together? Can they not exist on their own? Just a question. Kyle.Mullaney 08:00, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Maritime communication methods

Just wanted to add some methods of communication from the maritime area that are still in use but didn't get a mention, as yet.

1. Flashing Light (Morse code) 2. Flag signals (Nelson's famous 'England expects....' message) 3. Lighthouses (definately one way communications)

Glenn Burton--203.213.8.11 07:39, 14 May 2006 (UTC)


[edit] The tampering

Someone tampered with some of the communication pages. I have begun the reconstruction process, but I will need assistance, from those who have half a brain at least. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 69.245.172.44 (talk • contribs) 23:47, 4 December 2006 (UTC).

[edit] too linear, mechanical

Yeah, communication *can* be seen as the transmission of information, but that's a fairly restrictive/reductionist view. It surely should not be cast in a way that implies this is the "overall principle" under which other discussions will sit. Communication is sometimes not related at all to information (at least in a non-tautologic "everything is information" sense). If that's all communication is, it probably does deserve no better than a list under "Information."

Communication is culture, organization, metaphysics. Some postmodern theorists talk about the decentered self. Although developed in many different ways and apparently embedded with different teleological "genes", most of the presentations of decenteredness rely on communication as a basic process through which our identities are constantly being recreated. Much, perhaps all communication is negotiation, competition, coalition-building as various communities strive with each other to produce meaning.

The whole linear thing just falls apart on so many levels. It is an exceptionally useful perspective--along with cybernetics, information science and systems models.

[edit] Semiotics/Semantics

This is one view of Semiotics for sure. There are other views: Sassure and Peirce gave us mutually incompatible frameworks. It would be nice to clarify this to make the article's statements a bit less modern-like in its sweeping and totalizing positions?

[edit] ==

[edit] The Gauntlet

Perhaps that is too connotative of conflict for what I am looking at.

I have taken the really bold step of trying to fashion an introduction that takes a pass at the huge amount of material falling within the "Communication" name. I probably do have at least some of the background useful to such a task, I do hold a Ph.D. in Communication, with additional concentrations in Semiotics and "Anthropological Linguistics" and "Philosophy and Communication". I've worked in Advertising, journalism, corporate purchasing, as an executive director for a non-profit organization, designed small business accounting systems, led board training, worked in radio (domestic and international), tutoring graduate students in statistics, publishing an academic communication journal, review, analysis, purchase, installation and support of computer systems, information management, database design and implementation, public and private higher education (including stints in MBA programs)and one especially sorry stint delivering telephone books! My current research interests involve collaborating with my wife (a research psychologist) on a postmodern model of the decentered self--drawing heavily on the marketplace metaphor. Given the mess the whole "communication thing" is in, this probably does more to disqualify me than anything. . .I'm probably a walking example of some of the problems!

This is my hope:

The topic is much, much too broad for any particular definition of communication to cover everything and it seems like an unnecessary waste of effort for us to replicate here the debates that (perhaps) our wiser ancestors simply handled by ignoring one another. A common response I get to my "organizational communication" focus is "so you design telephone systems for big corporations?" Well actually I have a couple of friends who do design, program and install such systems and they call what they do "Corporate Communications." Perhaps instructively the things we have in common have nothing to do with any of our education or professional responsibilities.

[edit] A bit of a plan?

So with this (hopefully) broad enough introduction I hope that many others who happen on this page will "write their own section." I would encourage folks to stay away from chopping up sections with which you have little direct experience or knowledge. It would be wonderful, however, if some of those civil disagreements and requests for more information come here for a full hearing that would be great!

One more suggestion. Because of the immenseness (immensity?)of the topic it would probably be most helpful for us all to devote a good hunk of our available energy, time and brain power to developing the ton of other smaller (in scope, not necessarily size) pages that this page will point.

I am being really bold here. I'm doing it with some care, however. What I see so far is an article that is one of Wikipedia's most important (in terms of breadth) but that lacks any single organization. It reads as though various people jumped in and wrote awhile until they became overwhelmed (or ran into something *else* to do with a few hours of their lives!) and someone else started in somewhere and went a different direction.

[edit] I'm not volunteering! Just suggesting

Please don't get me wrong. I am *not* going to take any sort of further responsibility for this page, I am *not* going to assign anything or mediate any scuffles and I am highly unlikely to write any more big blocks. So my humility in the opening here is sincere. I just don't have the breadth to even comprehend most of what is called "communication" (my eyes spin in weird ways when I hear Quantum and high-energy physicists talk about how some atomic particles communicate with other atomic particles a long way away. Something about the uncertainty principle and tied in with dark matter (by some). I really get lost quickly in this sort of discussion--but it is critical that we include it and a hundred like it.

Please take a careful look at what I've written. Revise, edit, delete--whatever makes the article better. Do you agree with the general outline I'm suggesting? If not, change it whether you think it needs some fine tuning or properly should be sent in its entirety to the digital Valhalla (where all valiant bytes fallen in battle end up--Ok, not really, but it sort of sounded good for a minute.)

In this topic especially--due to the breadth and complexity of all the subparts--I would hope that we could all be bold and continue to ruthlessly revise. (I forgot to list Bonsai as communication. . .)

Thanks.

Roy 19:47, 26 January 2007 (UTC)


[edit] Suggestions/Possibilities for structure?

This is a bit of a follow-up note to my diatribe of a few days ago.

What do you think about this possibility?

[edit] (1) Introduction:

Way too big to deal with, so we are doing just that (grin). Strategy: focus on breadth of topic to disarm any testostrone-based lifeforms that might want to come in swinging about how his (almost always "hes") experience with communication is the only real one. By painting the canvas broadly, we set it up for a quick separation of "threads" based on some sort of criteria. That is, after highlighting the breadth of the topic, the reader will be expecting some sort of division. It also allows us the luxury of simply adding in a word or phrase if someone else steps up and says "what about . . .?" We can make any number of those additions without much pain.

Another "come clean" time: Another part of my research interest has to do with classification. In my dissertation I make the argument that classification should not be random, that there are defensible groupings, and that these groupings are user/utility based rather than given in the items themselves. In short, we are presented disparate sense data, based on our experience and constrained by the limits of our sensory capabilities, we "create" things by chunking together this sensory information (e.g., the sound of the hawk, the visual quick form in my peripheral vision and the observations of lots of voles scurrying around my feet in the field all contribute to me "deciding" or "thingifying" a hawk. There is nothing that requires me to group my sensory data this way, and different groupings would not have any greater or lesser ontological status. (e.g., I might be a painter looking for a nice place to paint, in which case these sensory data I previously mentioned would tend to be bumped down my "relevance" list while colors and shadows occupy the places at the top.)

This is to lead up to a defense of my proposed schema. Because it is likely that the majority of people coming to a "communication" entry in Wikipedia will be looking for a particular sort of communication--one specific frame in which communication means some specific and definite things (otherwise they wouldn't have included "communication" as the starting place of their search). Instead of trying to agree upon "what really belongs together" in a global categorization of communication (and thus setting up our little entry as a place of lots of intellectual violence and rhetorical scalping) we could take the utilitarian approach and ask ourselves "are there broad categories of nouns clustered around the word symbol "communication" and do these specific clusterings tend to themselves cluster around particular mindsets or expectations that are responsible for bringing seekers to us?

So instead of immediately going into either a massive listing of communication-like terms drawn from any conceivable discipline, or of smuggling in a certain bias in what "the most important classifications" might look like, we could offer a few paragraphs each for the broadly conceived "disciplines" or "contexts" which are likely to be guiding a specific reader's search.

Another way of putting it would be to say "If you are looking for this sort of thing when you think 'communication' then head here ("here" being a specific daughter-page which handles the communication construct in a relatively consistent way. For example, "wires", "satellites", "treaties", "signal jamming", "internet" might all share a certain sensibility invoked when uttering the word "communication" and even though there might not be a razor-sharp dividing line between two disciplines (surprise! academic disciplines aren't identical to outside-world usages!) I think we could reasonably start with an assumption that a reader might recognize this sort of word set as "in the right ballpark" of why that reader ended up here.

We don't have to begin by deciding "satellite communication belongs to mass communication in the human communication discipline. Mass com will likely talk about satellites and communication but their "satellite" will be pointing to a different place than the person looking into international treaties and the distribution of wavespace. As long as we don't start with Mass Communication, International Communication Treaties and "Worldwide Communication Technology" as discrete topics we will be comfortably situated among people meaning similar things when they each say "communication". I don't have to fight to keep "satellite" in the mass com subtopic.

This also allows us, through the liberal use of internal links, to spare the reader coming here with a specific form of communication in mind the task of reading through the entire article in order to get to the "links" section at the end. If readers are interested only in a very specific phenomenon that is called "communication" (e.g., dropped here by using "communication" in the key words of their search) we can send them on their merry way without forcing them to listen to a lecture about the various theories of how we create and accept symbols as placeholders for certain groups of meanings.

[edit] (2) General topics:

Those with a larger goal--perhaps all of "human communication" or "computer communication technology" can perhaps best be served with this sort of grand title for a section. Each of these sections will be further divided, of course, but each will start with a few links/redirects to other more specific articles elsewhere in Wikipedia. If someone is coming here with a specific purpose in mind (e.g., ethics of communication ala' Habermas' "Ideal Speech Situation") it seems they would be well served by quickly scanning a section titled something like "Communication in Philosophy and Ethics" from which they might want to explore several different threads--including, of course, Habermas.

I'm thinking here of broad swaths of related things/ being careful to group the subtopics that would likely be grouped together in a reference book or college course. We won't have to waste too much energy deciding which subtopics belong where because there is no requirement that our entries be mutually exclusive.

By that I mean that if "dyadic communication" ends up being a term used in several fields, we don't have to choose just one place to put the term. We might easily have a "dyadic" under com theory, human communication, rhetoric/public speaking/forensics, and perhaps robotic control theory (I'm still making this up as we go!). The term "dyadic" might point to different places when it is used in different sections.

more to come. . . Vagabundus 06:39, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

the word communication is how people respond to each other and how people and animals understand each other

[edit] Electronic Communication

I remember there is a special term for communicating with electronics, anyone know what that term is?68.161.21.39 22:41, 19 March 2007 (UTC)JLiu

[edit] You speak German, don't you.

"You speak German, don't you" is a phrase used in reprimand, in the German-speaking areas of the world, to remind others that they can simply communicate their questions and other difficulties to others, if they need. I learned this from a Swiss colleague. --Ancheta Wis 11:15, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Real-time vs. Delayed

I came to this article hoping to refresh my memory on the proper terms for real-time and delayed communication and was surprised to not see any discussion of this dimension (unless I just missed it). For example, in-person and telephone and chat rooms (mostly) are real-time communication, while mail and printed materials and online message boards and recorded tv/movies are "delayed" (published? less temporal?). Just a suggestion for those more familiar with the article and topic. : ) --Hebisddave 12:49, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] First paragraph

The first paragraph of this article currently states:

Communication is a process that allows organisms to exchange information by several methods. Communication requires that all parties understand a common language that is exchanged.

and goes on to talk exclusively about communication between living things, mainly humans. This leaves out the very important subject of communication between machines, most of which happens in order to allow humans to communicate more easily. I haven't read the *whole* talk page, but it seems like this issue was raised but then cast aside. I can understand if the consensus is that the article should focus on human communication, but I think there should at least be some mention of non-human communication (even if it is just 'for non-human communication, go [[here]]). --carelesshx talk 16:52, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Cleanup & overhaul begun

Having just spent the last two hours cleaning out a whole lot of frankly sophomoric drivel (as well as doing a bit of reorganizing), I thought a short comment was in order. I've done a good deal of this sort of "salvaging" on a wide variety of articles, but it was truly dismaying to encounter such a display of garbled writing and woefully deficient communication skills in this, of all articles. What an embarassment for Wikipedia.

I wish I could stick around and finish the job I've begun, but I'm afraid this just isn't my main area of interest -- so I hope other knowledgable editors will pick up where I left off. Cgingold (talk) 18:32, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Ignoring of this page

This page has been ignored and since it has been constantly edited and improved I think the tag should be removed.

Confederatemarine95 (Confederatemarine95) 1900 Monday, March 31, 2008

fuck off