Communication

For the term as used in the game of bridge, see Glossary_of_contract_bridge_terms#communication.

Communication is a process whereby information is enclosed in a package and is channeled and imparted by a sender to a receiver via some medium. The receiver then decodes the message and gives the sender a feedback. All forms of communication require a sender, a message, and an intended recipient, however the receiver need not be present or aware of the sender's intent to communicate at the time of communication in order for the act of communication to occur. Communication requires that all parties have an area of communicative commonality. There are auditory means, such as speech, song, and tone of voice, and there are nonverbal means, such as body language, sign language, paralanguage, touch, eye contact, through media, i.e., pictures, graphics and sound, and writing.

Contents

Information communication revolutions

Over time, technology has progressed and has created new forms of and ideas about communication. The newer advances include media and communications psychology. Media psychology is an emerging field of study. These technological advances revolutionized the processes of communication. Researchers have divided how communication was transformed into three revolutionary stages:

In the 1st Information Communication Revolution, the first written communication began, with pictographs. These writings were made on stone, which were too heavy to transfer. During this era, written communication was not mobile, but nonetheless existed.

In the 2nd Information Communication Revolution, writing began to appear on paper, papyrus, clay, wax, etc. Common alphabets were introduced, allowing the uniformity of language across large distances. Much later the Gutenberg printing-press was invented. Gutenberg created this printing-press after a long period of time in the 15th century.

In the 3rd Information Communication Revolution, information can now be transferred via controlled waves and electronic signals.

Communication is thus a process by which meaning is assigned and conveyed in an attempt to create shared understanding. This process requires a vast repertoire of skills in interpersonal processing, listening, observing, speaking, questioning, analyzing,gestures and evaluating. It is through communication that collaboration and cooperation occur.[1]

There are also many common barriers to successful communication, two of which are message overload (when a person receives too many messages at the same time), and message complexity.[2] Communication is a continuous process. The psychology of media communications is an emerging area of increasing attention and .

Human communication

Human spoken and written languages can be described as a system of symbols (sometimes known as lexemes) and the grammars (rules) by which the symbols are manipulated. The word "language" is also used to refer to common properties of languages. Language learning is normal in human childhood. Most human languages use patterns of sound or gesture for symbols which enable communication with others around them. There are thousands of human languages, and these seem to share certain properties, even though many shared properties have exceptions.

There is no defined line between a language and a dialect, but the linguist Max Weinreich is credited as saying that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy". Constructed languages such as Esperanto, programming languages, and various mathematical formalisms are not necessarily restricted to the properties shared by human languages.

Bernard Luskin, UCLA, 1970, advanced computer assisted instruction and began to connect media and psychology into what is now the field of media psychology. In 1998, the American Association of Psychology, Media Psychology Division 46 Task Force report on psychology and new technologies combined media and communication as pictures, graphics and sound increasingly dominate modern communication.

Nonverbal communication

Nonverbal communication is the process of communicating through sending and receiving wordless messages. Such messages can be communicated through gesture, body language or posture; facial expression and eye contact, object communication such as clothing, hairstyles or even architecture, or symbols and infographics, as well as through an aggregate of the above, such as behavioral communication. Nonverbal communication plays a key role in every person's day to day life, from employment to romantic engagements.

Speech may also contain nonverbal elements known as paralanguage, including voice quality, emotion and speaking style, as well as prosodic features such as rhythm, intonation and stress. Likewise, written texts have nonverbal elements such as handwriting style, spatial arrangement of words, or the use of emoticons. A portmanteau of the English words emotion (or emote) and icon, an emoticon is a symbol or combination of symbols, such as :), used to convey emotional content in written or message form.

Other communication channels such as telegraphy fit into this category, whereby signals travel from person to person by an alternative means. These signals can in themselves be representative of words, objects or merely be state projections. Trials have shown that humans can communicate directly in this way[3] without body language, voice tonality or words.

Categories and Features

G. W. Porter divides non-verbal communication into four broad categories:

Static Features

Dynamic Features

Visual communication

Visual communication is communication through visual aid. It is the conveyance of ideas and information in forms that can be read or looked upon. Primarily associated with two dimensional images, it includes: signs, typography, drawing, graphic design, illustration, colour and electronic resources. It solely relies on vision. It is form of communication with visual effect. It explores the idea that a visual message with text has a greater power to inform, educate or persuade a person. It is communication by presenting information through visual form.

The evaluation of a good visual design is based on measuring comprehension by the audience, not on aesthetic or artistic preference. There are no universally agreed-upon principles of beauty and ugliness. There exists a variety of ways to present information visually, like gestures, body languages, video and TV. Here, focus is on the presentation of text, pictures, diagrams, photos, et cetera, integrated on a computer display. The term visual presentation is used to refer to the actual presentation of information. Recent research in the field has focused on web design and graphically oriented usability. Graphic designers use methods of visual communication in their professional practice.

Understanding the Field of Communication

The field of communication is typically broken into three distinct camps: human communication, mass communications, and communication disorders [4]

Human Communication or Communication Studies is the study of how individuals communicate. Some examples of the distinct areas that human communication scholars study are:

Examples of Mass Communications include:

Examples of Communication Disorders include:

Oral communication

Oral communication is a process whereby information is transferred from a sender to receiver; in general communication is usually transferred by both verbal means and visual aid throughout the process.. The receiver could be an individual person, a group of persons or even an audience. There are a few of oral communication types: discussion, speeches, presentations, etc. However, often when you communicate face to face the body language and your voice tonality has a bigger impact than the actual words that you are saying.

A widely cited and widely mis-interpreted figure, used to emphasize the importance of delivery, is that "communication is 55% body language, 38% tone of voice, 7% content of words", the so-called "7%-38%-55% rule".[5] This is not however what the cited research shows – rather, when conveying emotion, if body language, tone of voice, and words disagree, then body language and tone of voice will be believed more than words.[6] For example, a person saying "I'm delighted to meet you" while mumbling, hunched over, and looking away will be interpreted as insincere. (Further discussion at Albert Mehrabian: Three elements of communication.)

You can notice that the content or the word that you are using is not the determining part of a good communication. The "how you say it" has a major impact on the receiver. You have to capture the attention of the audience and connect with them. For example, two persons saying the same joke, one of them could make the audience die laughing related to his good body language and tone of voice. However, the second person that has the exact same words could make the audience stare at one another.

In an oral communication, it is possible to have visual aid helping you to provide more precise information. Often enough, we use a presentation program in presentations related to our speech to facilitate or enhance the communication process.

Communication modeling

Shannon and Weaver Model of Communication
Communication major dimensions scheme
Communication code scheme
Linear Communication Model
Interactional Model of Communication
Berlo's Sender-Message-Channel-Receiver Model of Communication
Transactional Model of Communication

The first major model for communication came in 1949 by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver for Bell Laboratories [7] The original model was designed to mirror the functioning of radio and telephone technologies. Their initial model consisted of three primary parts: sender, channel, and receiver. The sender was the part of a telephone a person spoke into, the channel was the telephone itself, and the receiver was the part of the phone where one could hear the other person. Shannon and Weaver also recognized that often there is static that interferes with one listening to a telephone conversation, which they deemed noise.

In a simple model, often referred to as the transmission model or standard view of communication, information or content (e.g. a message in natural language) is sent in some form (as spoken language) from an emisor/ sender/ encoder to a destination/ receiver/ decoder. This common conception of communication simply views communication as a means of sending and receiving information. The strengths of this model are simplicity, generality, and quantifiability. Social scientists Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver structured this model based on the following elements:

  1. An information source, which produces a message.
  2. A transmitter, which encodes the message into signals
  3. A channel, to which signals are adapted for transmission
  4. A receiver, which 'decodes' (reconstructs) the message from the signal.
  5. A destination, where the message arrives.

Shannon and Weaver argued that there were three levels of problems for communication within this theory.

The technical problem: how accurately can the message be transmitted?
The semantic problem: how precisely is the meaning 'conveyed'?
The effectiveness problem: how effectively does the received meaning affect behavior?

Daniel Chandler critiques the transmission model by stating

It assumes communicators are isolated individuals.
No allowance for differing purposes.
No allowance for differing interpretations.
No allowance for unequal power relations.
No allowance for situational contexts.

In 1960, David Berlo expanded on Shannon and Weaver’s (1949) linear model of communication and created the SMCR Model of Communication.[8] The Sender-Message-Channel-Receiver Model of communication separated the model into clear parts and has been expanded upon by other scholars.

Communication is usually described along a few major dimensions: Message (what type of things are communicated), source / emisor / sender / encoder (by whom), form (in which form), channel (through which medium), destination / receiver / target / decoder (to whom), and Receiver. Wilbur Schram (1954) also indicated that we should also examine the impact that a message has (both desired and undesired) on the target of the message.[9] Between parties, communication includes acts that confer knowledge and experiences, give advice and commands, and ask questions. These acts may take many forms, in one of the various manners of communication. The form depends on the abilities of the group communicating. Together, communication content and form make messages that are sent towards a destination. The target can be oneself, another person or being, another entity (such as a corporation or group of beings).

Communication can be seen as processes of information transmission governed by three levels of semiotic rules:

  1. Syntactic (formal properties of signs and symbols),
  2. Pragmatic (concerned with the relations between signs/expressions and their users) and
  3. Semantic (study of relationships between signs and symbols and what they represent).

Therefore, communication is social interaction where at least two interacting agents share a common set of signs and a common set of semiotic rules. This commonly held rules in some sense ignores autocommunication, including intrapersonal communication via diaries or self-talk, both secondary phenomena that followed the primary acquisition of communicative competences within social interactions.

In light of these weaknesses, Barnlund (2008) proposed a transactional model of communication.[10] The basic premise of the transactional model of communication is that individuals are simultaneously engaging in the sending and receiving of messages.

In a slightly more complex form a sender and a receiver are linked reciprocally. This second attitude of communication, referred to as the constitutive model or constructionist view, focuses on how an individual communicates as the determining factor of the way the message will be interpreted. Communication is viewed as a conduit; a passage in which information travels from one individual to another and this information becomes separate from the communication itself. A particular instance of communication is called a speech act. The sender's personal filters and the receiver's personal filters may vary depending upon different regional traditions, cultures, or gender; which may alter the intended meaning of message contents. In the presence of "communication noise" on the transmission channel (air, in this case), reception and decoding of content may be faulty, and thus the speech act may not achieve the desired effect. One problem with this encode-transmit-receive-decode model is that the processes of encoding and decoding imply that the sender and receiver each possess something that functions as a code book, and that these two code books are, at the very least, similar if not identical. Although something like code books is implied by the model, they are nowhere represented in the model, which creates many conceptual difficulties.

Theories of coregulation describe communication as a creative and dynamic continuous process, rather than a discrete exchange of information. Canadian media scholar Harold Innis had the theory that people use different types of media to communicate and which one they choose to use will offer different possibilities for the shape and durability of society (Wark, McKenzie 1997). His famous example of this is using ancient Egypt and looking at the ways they built themselves out of media with very different properties stone and papyrus. Papyrus is what he called 'Space Binding'. it made possible the transmission of written orders across space, empires and enables the waging of distant military campaigns and colonial administration. The other is stone and 'Time Binding', through the construction of temples and the pyramids can sustain their authority generation to generation, through this media they can change and shape communication in their society (Wark, McKenzie 1997).

The Krishi Vigyan Kendra Kannur under Kerala Agricultural University has pioneered a new branch of agricultural communication called Creative Extension. An outlook on International Communication a subject that I have been studying for my Mass Communication major in Graduate school. The purpose is to show an introduction of about International Communication and how it has shaped its way in today's society. International Communication is important and what things may have contributed to its importance.

As we have seen in many movies, documentaries, films, books, journals etc. Social Media has taken a different outlook on International Communication. In which it has shown and allowed communities all across the world to come and work together instantly. Places that are all over the world have come together some shape or form and begin to help and work together because of social media and its connection in International Communications. International Communication gives opportunities and challenges that create social media abroad. In my Mass Comm class I learned a Little bit about Cross cultural Communication in which it requires some type of knowledge of social media when effective. I also noticed that its geers and understanding of online and offline cultures. Communication has always been a broad area of study, and what I have noticed about communication it is expected or developed to provide some type of advice or wording to help people engage with each other in various parts of the world.

What I have found out this semester about International Communication is case studies. As we worked on in last class we studied cases and used the case study questions to navigate through the problem and topic to find solutions. Many case studies can build an inescapable argument from the articles I read through from class. I took a copy of all that were passed out to each group and I tried this step by step outline/checklist to assist me in forming more solutions to these problems and situations in the world all over the world. There are so many new ways of speaking, talking to others and mostly interacting that are not even discussed or made applicable to society to use and gain useful and powerful information. All are used to educate people and create powerful models new/old that can be used to help everyone from professionals to all the way to communicators as a whole. It is used to study and adapt a changeable environment for people living in all parts of the world.

A study of Globalization is a huge representation all over the world. If everyone just stays inside their own national borders or work abroad, its will not be crazy to rethink not just what we say as people but also how we say things and the channels we use to communicate is all important. especially now in today's society it all has to be channeled so way and not just through speaking with our mouth. We should all pay attention to our theme of social media and International Communication as we channel ourselves and not miss the real risk of becoming irrelevant to the people in the world.

Communication noise

In any communication model, noise is interference with the decoding of messages sent over a channel by an encoder. There are many examples of noise:

Environmental Noise: Noise that physically disrupts communication, such as standing next to loud speakers at a party, or the noise from a construction site next to a classroom making it difficult to hear the professor.

Physiological-Impairment Noise: Physical maladies that prevent effective communication, such as actual deafness or blindness preventing messages from being received as they were intended.

Semantic Noise: Different interpretations of the meanings of certain words. For example, the word "weed" can be interpreted as an undesirable plant in your yard, or as a euphemism for marijuana.

Syntactical Noise: Mistakes in grammar can disrupt communication, such as abrupt changes in verb tense during a sentence.

Organizational Noise: Poorly structured communication can prevent the receiver from accurate interpretation. For example, unclear and badly stated directions can make the receiver even more lost.

Cultural Noise: Stereotypical assumptions can cause misunderstandings, such as unintentionally offending Jews by wishing them a "Merry Christmas."

Psychological Noise: Certain attitudes can also make communication difficult. For instance, great anger or sadness may cause someone to lose focus on the present moment. Disorders such as Autism may also severely hamper effective communication.[11]

Nonhuman communication

Communication in many of its facets is not limited to humans, or even to primates. Every information exchange between living organisms — i.e. transmission of signals involving a living sender and receiver — can be considered a form of communication.[12] Thus, there is the broad field of animal communication, which encompasses most of the issues in ethology. Also very primitive animals such as corals are competent to communicate.[13] On a more basic level, there is cell signaling, cellular communication, and chemical communication between primitive organisms like bacteria,[14] and within the plant and fungal kingdoms. All of these communication processes are sign-mediated interactions with a great variety of distinct coordinations.

Animal communication is any behavior on the part of one animal that has an effect on the current or future behavior of another animal. Of course, human communication can be subsumed as a highly developed form of animal communication. The study of animal communication, called zoosemiotics' (distinguishable from anthroposemiotics, the study of human communication) has played an important part in the development of ethology, sociobiology, and the study of animal cognition. This is quite evident as humans are able to communicate with animals, especially dolphins and other animals used in circuses. However, these animals have to learn a special means of communication. Animal communication, and indeed the understanding of the animal world in general, is a rapidly growing field, and even in the 21st century so far, many prior understandings related to diverse fields such as personal symbolic name use, animal emotions, animal culture and learning, and even sexual conduct, long thought to be well understood, have been revolutionized.

Plants and fungi

Among plants, communication is observed within the plant organism, i.e. within plant cells and between plant cells, between plants of the same or related species, and between plants and non-plant organisms, especially in the root zone. Plant roots communicate in parallel with rhizome bacteria, with fungi and with insects in the soil. This parallel sign-mediated interactions which are governed by syntactic, pragmatic and semantic rules are possible because of the decentralized "nervous system" of plants. The original meaning of the word "neuron" in Greek is "vegetable fiber" and as recent research shows, most of the intraorganismic plant communication processes are neuronal-like.[15] Plants also communicate via volatiles in the case of herbivory attack behavior to warn neighboring plants. In parallel they produce other volatiles which attract parasites which attack these herbivores. In Stress situations plants can overwrite the genetic code they inherited from their parents and revert to that of their grand- or great-grandparents.[16]

Fungi communicate to coordinate and organize their own growth and development such as the formation of mycelia and fruiting bodies. Additionally fungi communicate with same and related species as well as with nonfungal organisms in a great variety of symbiotic interactions, especially with bacteria, unicellular eukaryotes, plants and insects. The used semiochemicals are of biotic origin and they trigger the fungal organism to react in a specific manner, in difference while to even the same chemical molecules are not being a part of biotic messages doesn’t trigger to react the fungal organism. It means, fungal organisms are competent to identify the difference of the same molecules being part of biotic messages or lack of these features. So far five different primary signalling molecules are known that serve to coordinate very different behavioral patterns such as filamentation, mating, growth, pathogenicity. Behavioral coordination and the production of such substances can only be achieved through interpretation processes: self or non-self, abiotic indicator, biotic message from similar, related, or non-related species, or even "noise", i.e., similar molecules without biotic content-[17]

Communication as academic discipline

Communication as an academic discipline, sometimes called "communicology,"[18] relates to all the ways we communicate, so it embraces a large body of study and knowledge. The communication discipline includes both verbal and nonverbal messages. A body of scholarship all about communication is presented and explained in textbooks, electronic publications, and academic journals. In the journals, researchers report the results of studies that are the basis for an ever-expanding understanding of how we all communicate.

Communication happens at many levels (even for one single action), in many different ways, and for most beings, as well as certain machines. Several, if not all, fields of study dedicate a portion of attention to communication, so when speaking about communication it is very important to be sure about what aspects of communication one is speaking about. Definitions of communication range widely, some recognizing that animals can communicate with each other as well as human beings, and some are more narrow, only including human beings within the different parameters of human symbolic interaction.

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ "communication". office of superintendent of Public Instruction. Washington. http://www.k12.wa.us/CurriculumInstruct/Communications/default.aspx. Retrieved March 14, 2008. 
  2. ↑ Montana, Patrick J. & Charnov, Bruce H. 2008. Management. 4th ed. New York. Barron's Educational Series, Inc. Pg 333.
  3. ↑ Warwick, K, Gasson, M, Hutt, B, Goodhew, I, Kyberd, P, Schulzrinne, H and Wu, X: "Thought Communication and Control: A First Step using Radiotelegraphy", IEE Proceedings on Communications, 151(3), pp.185-189, 2004
  4. ↑ Wrench, J. S., McCroskey, J. C., & Richmond, V. P. (2008). Human communication in everyday life: Explanations and applications. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.
  5. ↑ Mehrabian, Albert (1971). Silent Messages (1st ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. 
  6. ↑ Debunking the 55%, 38%, 7% Rule, by Judith E. Pearson
  7. ↑ Shannon, C. E., & Weaver, W. (1949). The mathematical theory of communication. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press
  8. ↑ Berlo, D. K. (1960). The process of communication. New York, New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston.
  9. ↑ Schramm, W. (1954). How communication works. In W. Schramm (Ed.), The process and effects of communication (pp. 3-26). Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press.
  10. ↑ Barnlund, D. C. (2008). A transactional model of communication. In. C. D. Mortensen (Eds.), Communication theory (2nd ed., pp47-57). New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction.
  11. ↑ Roy M. Berko, et al., Communicating. 11th ed. (Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc., 2010) 9-12
  12. ↑ Witzany G. (2010) Biocommunication and Natural Genome Editing. Springer Verlag
  13. ↑ Witzany G, Madl P. (2009). Biocommunication of corals. International Journal of Integrative Biology 5(3): 152-163.
  14. ↑ Witzany G (2008). Bio-Communication of Bacteria and their Evolutionary Roots in Natural Genome Editing Competences of Viruses. Open Evolution Journal 2: 44-54.
  15. ↑ Baluska, F.; Marcuso, Stefano; Volkmann, Dieter (2006). Communication in plants: neuronal aspects of plant life. Taylor & Francis US. p. 19. ISBN 3540284758. http://books.google.com/books?id=IH9N4SKWTokC&pg=PA19&dq=plant+communication+processes+are+neuronal-like#v=onepage&q=plant%20communication%20processes%20are%20neuron-like&f=false. "...the emergence of plant neurobiology as the most recent area of plant sciences." 
  16. ↑ Witzany, G. (2006). Plant Communication from Biosemiotic Perspective. Plant Signaling and Behavior 1(4): 169-178.
  17. ↑ Witzany, G. (2007). Applied Biosemiotics: Fungal Communication. In: Witzany, G. (Ed). Biosemiotics in Transdisciplinary Contexts. Helsinki, Umweb, pp. 295-301.
  18. ↑ Communicology.org

References