What Is Communication?
Communication is a process whereby information is enclosed in a package 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.
Communicating with others involves three primary steps:
Thought: first, information exists in the mind of the sender. This can be a concept, idea, information, or feelings.
Encoding: next, a message is sent to a receiver in words or other symbols.
Decoding: lastly, the receiver translates the words or symbols into a concept or information that a person can understand.
There are a variety of verbal and non-verbal forms of communication. These include verbal means, such as speech, song, and tone of voice, and nonverbal means, such as body language, sign language, paralanguage, touch, eye contact, through media, i.e. pictures, graphics and sound, and writing. Feedback is a critical component of effective communication.
Information communication revolutions
Over time, technology has progressed and has created new forms of and ideas about communication. 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.
In the 3rd Information Communication Revolution, information can now be transferred via controlled waves and electronic signals.
Communication is thus a process by which information is conveyed in an attempt to create shared understanding. This process requires a variety of skills in interpersonal processing: listening, observing, speaking, questioning, analyzing, gestures and evaluating. It is through communication that collaboration and cooperation occur.
Verbal 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. 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. Constructed languages such as Esperanto, programming languages, and various mathematical formalisms are not necessarily restricted to the properties shared by human languages. Communication is the flow or exchange of information within people or a group of people.(https://www.daowen.com)
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.
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 without body language, voice tonality or words.
Effective communication
Effective communication occurs when a desired effect is the result of intentional or unintentional information sharing, which is interpreted between multiple entities and acted on in a desired way. This effect also ensures that the messages are not distorted during the communication process. Effective communication should generate the desired effect and maintain the effect, with the potential to increase the effect of the message. Therefore, effective communication serves the purpose for which it was planned or designed. Possible purposes might be to elicit change, generate action, create understanding, inform or communicate a certain idea or point of view. When the desired effect is not achieved, factors such as barriers to communication are explored, with the intention being to discover how the communication has been ineffective.
Barriers to effective communication
Barriers to effective communication can retard or distort the message and intention of the message being conveyed which may result in failure of the communication process or an effect that is undesirable. These include filtering, selective perception, information overload, emotions, language, silence, communication apprehension, gender differences and political correctness.
This also includes a lack of expressing “knowledge-appropriate” communication, which occurs when a person uses ambiguous or complex legal words, medical jargon, or descriptions of a situation or environment that is not understood by the recipient.
Communication noise
In any communication, noise is interference with the decoding of messages sent over a channel by an encoder. There are many examples of noise: environmental noise, physiological-impairment noise, semantic noise, syntactical noise, organizational noise, cultural noise and psychological noise.
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 that involve a living sender and receiver can be considered a form of communication; and even primitive creatures such as corals are competent to communicate. Nonhuman communication also includes animal communication, cell signaling, cellular communication, and chemical transmissions between primitive organisms like bacteria and within the plant and fungal kingdoms.
Communication as academic discipline
Communication as an academic discipline, sometimes called “communicology,” 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.
Words & Expressions
paralanguage：副语言
pictograph：象形文字
papyrus：莎草纸
esperanto：世界语
infographic：信息图表
prosodic：韵律的
primate：灵长类