From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
For other uses see Communication .
Communication is the process to impart information from a sender to a receiver with the use of a medium. Communication requires that all parties have an area of communicative commonality. There are auditory means such as speaking singing and sometimes tone of voice and nonverbal physical means such as body language sign language paralanguage touch eye contact or the use of writing. Communication is defined as a process by which we assign and convey meaning in an attempt to create shared understanding. This process requires a vast repertoire of skills in intrapersonal and interpersonal processing listening observing speaking questioning analyzing and evaluating. Use of these processes is developmental and transfers to all areas of life: home school community work and beyond. It is through communication that collaboration and cooperation occur. 1
Communication is the articulation of sending a message through different media 2 whether it be verbal or nonverbal so long as a being transmits a thought provoking idea gesture action etc. Communication is a learned skill. Most people are born with the physical ability to talk but we must learn to speak well and communicate effectively. Speaking listening and our ability to understand verbal and nonverbal meanings are skills we develop in various ways. We learn basic communication skills by observing other people and modeling our behaviors based on what we see. We also are taught some communication skills directly through education and by practicing those skills and having them evaluated.
Communication as an academic discipline 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 everexpanding understanding of how we all communicate. Communication happens at many levels 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 parameters of human symbolic interaction.
Nonetheless communication is usually described along a few major dimensions: Content source emisor sender or encoder form channel destination receiver target or decoder and the purpose or pragmatic aspect. 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 .
Communication can be seen as processes of information transmission governed by three levels of semiotic rules:
- Syntactic
- pragmatic and
- semantic .
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 rule in some sense ignores autocommunication including intrapersonal communication via diaries or self-talk.
In a simple model information or content is sent in some form from an emisor/ sender/ encoder to a destination/ receiver/ decoder. In a slightly more complex form a sender and a receiver are linked reciprocally. A particular instance of communication is called a speech act. In the presence of " communication noise" on the transmission channel 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 possiblities for the shape and durablility of society . 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 trasnsmission of written orders across space empires and enables the waging of distant military campaigns and colonial adminstration. 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 communciation in their society .
