Communication
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Communication allows people to exchange thoughts by one of several methods. There are auditory means, such as speaking or singing, and physical means, such as sign language, touch, or eye contact.
As developed below, communication happens at many levels (even for one single action), in many different ways, and for all beings, and some machines. Many or all, fields of study dedicate some attention to communication, so when speaking about communication it is very important to be sure about what kind of communication are we speaking about, mainly: what type of things are communicated, between what agents, and with what kind of results.
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[edit] Purposes of Communication
Communication is a process by which information is exchanged between or among individuals through a common system of symbols, signs, and behavior. As a process, communication has synonyms such as expressing feelings, conversing, speaking, corresponding, writing, listening and exchanging. People communicate to satisfy needs in both their work and non-work lives. People want to be heard, to be appreciated and to be wanted. They also want to accomplish tasks and to achieve goals. Obviously, then, a major purpose of communication is to help people feel good about themselves and about their friends, groups, and organizations. For true communication, there must be a transmitting of thoughts, ideas and feelings from one mind to another. If love may be called the heart of happy family living, then communication could be called its lifeblood.
[edit] Communication as Information
Communication can be seen as processes of the transmission of information governed by three levels of semiotic rules: Syntactic, pragmatic and semantic. Therefore, communication is a kind of social interaction where at least two interacting agents share a common set of signs and a common set of semiotic rules. In a simplistic model, information is sent from a sender or encoder to a receiver or decoder. In a slightly more complex form feedback links a sender to a receiver. This requires that a symbolic activity, sometimes via a language. Communication development is the development of processes enabling one to understand what others say(or sign, or write) and speak(or sign, or write), translate sounds and symbols into meaning and learn the syntax of the language. Communication is often formed around the principles of respect, promises and the want for social improvement. Specialised fields focus on various aspects of communication and include the following:
- Non-verbal communication, the act of imparting or interchanging thoughts, opinions or information without the use of words;
- Symbolic communication, the exchange of messages that change a priori expectation of events
- Animal communication, the discipline of animal behavior that focuses on the reception and use of signals
Since the beginning of time, the need to communicate emerges from a set of universal questions: Who am I? Who needs to know? Why do they need to know? How will they find out? How do I want them to respond? Individuals, communities, and organizations express their individuality through their identity. On the continuum from the cave paintings at Lascaux to digital messages transmitted via satellite, humanity continues to create an infinite sensory palette of visual and verbal expression.
- Mass communication
- Development communication
- Communication studies
- Interpersonal Communication
- Organizational communication
- Sociolinguistics
- Conversation analysis
- Cognitive linguistics
- Linguistics
- Pragmatics
- Semiotics
- Discourse analysis
- audiology
- speech therapy
- forensics (debate) and courtroom communication
Communication as a named and unified discipline has a history of contestation that goes back to the Socratic dialogues, in many ways making it the first and most contestatory of all early sciences and philosophies. Seeking to define "communication" as a static word or unified discipline may not be as important as understanding communication as a family of resemblances with a plurality of definitions as Ludwig Wittgenstein had put forth. Some definitions are broad, recognizing that animals can communicate with each other as well as human beings, and some are more narrow, only including human beings within the parameters of human symbolic interaction.
Nonetheless, communication is usually described along three major dimensions:
- Content
- Form
- Destination
With the presence of "communication noise" these three components of communication often become skewed and inaccurate. Between parties, communication content include acts that declare knowledge and experiences, give advice and commands, and ask questions. These acts may take many forms, including gestures (nonverbal communication, sign language and body language), writing, and speech. The form depends on the symbol systems used. Together, communication content and form make messages that are sent towards a destination. The target can be oneself, another person (in interpersonal communication), or another entity (such as a corporation or group).
A particular instance of communication is called a speech act. A speech act typically follows a variation of logical means of delivery. The most common of these, and perhaps the best, is the dialogue. The dialogue is a form of communication where both the parties are involved in sending information. There are many other forms of communication but the reason the dialogue is good is because the dialogue lends itself to clearer communication due to feedback. (Feedback being encoded information, either verbal or nonverbal, sent back to the original sender (now the receiver) and then decoded.)
There are many theories of communication, and a commonly held assumption is that communication must be directed towards another person or entity. This essentially ignores intra personal communication (note intra-, not inter-) via diaries or self-talk.
There are many different areas of communication.A few are: nonverbal communication, verbal communication, and symbolic communication. Nonverbal communication deals with facial expressions and body motions. Much of the “emotional meaning” we take from other people is found in the person’s facial expressions and tone of voice, comparatively little is taken from what the person actually says (More Than Talk). Verbal communication is when we communicate our message verbally to whoever is receiving the message. Symbolic communications are the things that we have given meaning to and that represent a certain idea we have in place, for example, the American flag is a symbol that represent freedom for the Americans themselves, or imperialism and evil for some other countries.
[edit] Communication media
The following model of communication has been criticized and revised.
The beginning of human communication through artificial channels, i.e. not vocalization or gestures, goes back to ancient cave paintings, drawn maps, and writing.
Our indebtedness to the Ancient Romans in the field of communication does not end with the Latin root "communicare". They devised what might be described as the first real mail or postal system in order to centralize control of the empire from Rome. This allowed for personal letters and for Rome to gather knowledge about events in its many widespread provinces.
In the last century, a revolution in telecommunications has greatly altered communication by providing new media for long distance communication. The first transatlantic two-way radio broadcast occurred on July 25, 1920 and led to common communication via analogue and digital media:
- Analog telecommunications include traditional telephony, radio, and TV broadcasts.
- Digital telecommunications allow for computer-mediated communication, telegraphy, and computer networks.
Communications media impact more than the reach of messages. They impact content and customs; for example, Thomas Edison had to discover that hello was the least ambiguous greeting by voice over a distance; previous greetings such as hail tended to be garbled in the transmission. Similarly, the terseness of e-mail and chat rooms produced the need for the emoticon.
Modern communication media now allow for intense long-distance exchanges between larger numbers of people (many-to-many communication via e-mail, Internet forums). On the other hand, many traditional broadcast media and mass media favor one-to-many communication (television, cinema, radio, newspaper, magazines).
The adoption of a dominant communication medium is important enough that historians have folded civilization into "ages" according to the medium most widely used. A book titled "Five Epochs of Civilization" by William McGaughey (Thistlerose, 2000) divides history into the following stages: Ideographic writing produced the first civilization; alphabetic writing, the second; printing, the third; electronic recording and broadcasting, the fourth; and computer communication, the fifth. The media effects what people think about themselves and how they precive people as well. What we think about self image and what others should look like comes from the media.
While it could be argued that these "Epochs" are just a historian's construction, digital and computer communication shows concrete evidence of changing the way humans organize. The latest trend in communication, termed smartmobbing, involves ad-hoc organization through mobile devices, allowing for effective many-to-many communication and social networking.
[edit] Language
A language is a system of signals, such as voice sounds, intonations or pitch, gestures or written symbols which communicate thoughts or feelings. If a language is about communicating with signals, voice, sounds, gestures, or written symbols, can animal communications be considered as a language? Animals do not have a written form of a language, but use a language to communicate with each other. In that sense, an animal communication can be considered as a separated language.
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. Tell the world, learn a language.
There is no defined line between a language and a dialect, but Max Weinreich is credited as saying that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.
Humans and computer programs have also constructed other languages, including constructed languages such as Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua, Klingon, programming languages, and various mathematical formalisms. These languages are not necessarily restricted to the properties shared by human languages.
[edit] Mass media
Mass media is a term used to denote, as a class, that section of the media specifically conceived and designed to reach a very large audience (typically at least as large as the whole population of a nation state). It was coined in the 1920s with the advent of nationwide radio networks and of mass-circulation newspapers and magazines. The mass-media audience has been viewed by some commentators as forming a mass society with special characteristics, notably atomization or lack of social connections, which render it especially susceptible to the influence of modern mass-media techniques such as advertising and propaganda.
[edit] Metacommunication
The process of communicating about communication, for example, to discuss a past conversation and to determine the meanings behind certain words, phrases, etc. Metacommunication can be used as a tool for sense making, or for better understanding events, placts, people, relationships, etc...
[edit] Animal communication
Animal communication is any behaviour on the part of one animal that has an effect on the current or future behaviour of another animal. 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.
[edit] Plant communication
Plant communication is observed (a) within the plant organism, i.e. within plant cells and between plant cells, (b) between plants of the same or related species and (c) between plants and non-plant organisms, especially in the rootzone. Plant roots communicate in parallel with rhizobia 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. As recent research shows 99% of intraorganismic plant communication processes are neuronal-like. Plants communicate also 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.
[edit] SOLER (Egan, 1986)
SOLER is a technique used by care workers. it helps the service users open up to them SOLER is:
S – sit Squarely in relaxation to the patient
O – Open position
L – Lean slightly towards the patient
E – Eye contact
R – Relax
it helps in effective communication
[edit] References
Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin 117, 497-529.
[edit] See also
- Main list: List of basic communication topics
- Animal communication
- Chief Communications Officer
- Conversation
- Communications satellite
- Communication Studies
- Metacommunication
- Computer network
- Diffusion of innovations
- Ethernet
- Environmental communication
- Global telephone network also known as the Public Switched Telephone Network PSTN
- Health literacy
- History of communication
- Information theory
- Intercultural competence
- Internet
- Journalism
- Linguistics
- Mass media
- Media studies
- Nonverbal communication
- Nonviolent communication
- Sociology
