COMMUNICATION -AN INTRODUCTION

Definitions of communication
The word communication is derived from the Latin word ‘Communus’, which means ‘common’. It is a process of exchange of facts, ideas, and opinions. It is a means by whuch individuals or organizations share meaning and understanding with another. In other words it is the transmission and interaction of facts, ideas, opinions, feelings and attitudes. Thus the exact meaning of the word communication is ‘to share’ or ‘to participate’. The dictionaries say that communication is the transmission of a message or information by speaking or writing. Another dictionary declares that communication is giving or exchanging information, signals, messages by talk or gestures or writing
• According to G.G. Brown Communication is defined as transfer of information from one person to another, whether or not it elicits confidence. But the information transferred must be understandable to the receiver.
• According to Fred G. Meyer “Communication is the exchange of ideas, opinions by words, letters or messages”-.
Thus holistically communication is defined as “giving, receiving or exchanging ideas, information, signals or messages through appropriate media, enabling individuals or groups to persuade, to seek information, to give information or to express emotions”
1 “Communication is the verbal interchange of thought or idea” (Hoben, 1954).
2 “Communication is the process by which we understand others and in turn endeavor to be understood by them. It is dynamic, constantly changing and shifting in response to the total situation” (Anderson, 1959).
3 “Interaction, even on the biological level, is a kind of communication; otherwise common acts could not occur” (Mead, reprinted 1963).
4 “Communication arises out of the need to reduce uncertainty, to act effectively, to defend or strengthen the ego” (Barnlund, 1964).
5 “Communication: the transmission of information, idea, emotion, skills, etc., by the use of symbols-words, pictures, figures, graphs, etc. It is the act or process of transmission that is usually called communication” (Berelson and Steiner, 1964).
6 “The connecting thread appears to be the idea of something’s being transferred from one thing, or person, to another. We use the word ‘communication’ sometimes to refer to what is so transferred, sometimes to the means by which it is transferred, sometimes to the whole process. In many cases, what is transferred in this way continues to be shared; if I convey information to another person, it does not leave my own possession through coming into his. Accordingly, the word ‘communication’ acquires also the sense of participation. It is in this sense, for example, that religious worshipers are said to communicate” (Ayer, 1955).
7 “Communication is the process that links discontinuous parts of the living world to one another” (Ruesch, 1957).
8 “It (communication) is a process that makes common to two or several what was the monopoly of one or some” (Gode, 1959).
9 “The means of sending military messages, orders, etc., as by telephone, telegraph, radio, couriers” (American College Dictionary).
10 “Communication is the process of conducting the attention of another person for the purpose of replicating memories” (Carrier and Harwood, 1953).
11 “Communication is the discriminatory response of an organism to a stimulus” (Stevens, 1950).
12 “Every communication act is viewed as a transmission of information, consisting of a discriminative stimuli, from a source to a recipient” (Newcomb, reprinted 1966).
13 “In the main, communication has as its central interest those behavioral situations in which a source transmits a message to a receiver(s) with conscious intent to affect the latter’s behaviors” (Miller, 1966).
14 “The communication process is one of transition from one structured situation-as-a-whole to another, in preferred design” (Sondel, 1956).
15 “Communication is the mechanism by which power is exerted” (Schacter, 1951).
Communication Misconceptions:
Before considering definitions of communication, we should consider the misconceptions that those definitions will have to address.
Communication is Information Transfer:
The first myth is that communication is simply the transfer of information, just like a computer. This is part of what Theodore Roszak in 1986 called The Cult of Information, where we assume that human beings behave just like computers as data processing machines. The fact is, we’re not machines. Our communicative behavior is much more complex. Part of that complexity is the fact that we do not respond equally to the each message, even to the same message sent at different times in a different context. If we assume, therefore, that once we have sent a message, it will obviously be correctly received, we set ourselves up for communication failures.
Communication is not about giving information. It is about exerting influence. Far from being guided by logic, it is guided by psycho-logic, to coin a phrase. The goal of communication is not simply telling, but acting, changing another person’s behavior through what we say to them.
Communication failures can be solved by restoring the connection:
If we assume that communication is simply the transfer of information, then all we need to do to solve it if repair the open circuit, plug back into to the network, tune the signal. Mortensen: “The notion of gaps and breakdowns automatically portrays communicative activity as a directional and linear sequence of events-much like electronic impulses traveling from beginning to end in a telephone system or digital computer. Once this linear, one-way analogy is accepted, it is almost impossible not to think of communicative difficulties as a result of some malfunctioning that occurs along the line. To correct a breakdown, one is tempted to search for the part or element that needs repair, much as a telephone repairman looks for a break in circuits along a row of telephone lines (Smith, 1970). Even worse, communication tends to be defined in all-or-nothing terms: Either the system works or it does not; the signals arrive at their destination, or they are blocked somewhere along the line.”
Communication is either on or off:
Again, if communication is information transfer, when it fails, it must fail completely. No signals can sneak through a broken network connection. However, human communication can’t be turned off so easily. Some messages, perhaps unintentional, still exert some influence. In a sense we can never have a communication failure—some message is communicated even if it is not the one the speaker intended. Mortensen: “Running through the previous quotations about communication breakdown is an implicit and mistaken notion that “no” communication occurred. Supposedly, whenever people fail to arrive at an identical point of view, we can merely assume that they have-almost by definition-“failed to communicate.” . . . . Communication does not necessarily stop simply because people stop talking or listening.
Communication is passive: If communication is information transfer, it doesn’t take much active effort. We have come to regard communication as passive. We simply send our messages and let them take their course, never bothering to reinforce them or check to see if they were received. When we begin to see communication as exerting influence, we can see it is hardly a passive matter. We have to actively attend to the messages we send. We have to be conscious of the unintentional messages we give out that may betray our unguarded intent. We begin to manage our communication strategically, making sure we make the most of the messages we send. We must overcome what George Orwell called “the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.”
Communication Postulates The fundamental aspects or conditions can best be surveyed within the framework of a single broadly conceived postulate: Communication occurs whenever persons attribute significance to message-related behavior. The following are the basic dimensions or postulates of communication:
Communication Is Dynamic, not Static
Instead of a mechanistic picture of linear cause and effect, communication is the more complex notion of dynamic change, one in which an indefinitely large number of particulars interact in a reciprocal and continuous manner. Each successively smaller level of activity is itself a composite of interacting elements. “Communication simply is not analogous to a process where something changes as it is “passed” or “transferred” from one person or setting to another. It is less misleading to think of communication as an occurrence, a happening, rather than something that exists in and of itself.”
Communication Is Irreversible
Human experience flows in words as a stream, in a “single direction leaving behind it a permanent record of man’s communicative experience”. Hence no statement, however repetitious, can be regarded as pure redundancy. Somehow, repetition of even the same signal alters the larger significance of the exchange. Once the transaction begins, there can be no retreat, no fresh start, and no way to begin all over again.”
Communication Is Proactive, not Passive
Communication is more than “an exercise in translation” or an “action that ensures agreement between what is said and what is understood”. Communication is more than a passive reaction to a stimulus. But too much sensational imagery, reading and hearing is offered to our senses by the media. For example, advertising continually insinuates dissatisfaction with the products we have at hand. Television hypnotizes us in our own living rooms. We feel trapped in a web of technical communications with their confusing and conflicting persuasions and we cannot escape. Glued to the TV screen, people become passive and apathetic and compulsively want to react to the overabundance of communications, popularly called as communication overload. But human beings have got a tremendous capacity of to select, amplify, and manipulate the signals that assault their senses. It ignores the fact that people engaged in communication are proactive because they enter the transaction totally. Among living creatures man is the most spectacular example of an agent who amplifies his every activity, first in the way he perceives it, and then in the way he modifies his environment.”
Communication Is Interactive: Communication “cannot be properly understood apart from the constant succession of interacting forces that influence us, both internally and externally”: A person can be a witness to a tremendous parade of episodes, and yet, if he fails to keep making something out of them, or if he waits until they have occurred before he attempts to reconstruct them, he gains little in the way of experience from having been around when they happened. It is not what happens around him that makes a man experienced; it is the successive constructing and reconstructing of what happens, as it happens, that enriches the experience of his life. The term interaction suggests a reciprocal influence.
Communication Is Contextual
“Communication never takes place in a vacuum; it is not a “pure” process, devoid of background or situational overtones; it always requires at least one’s minimal sensitivity to immediate physical surroundings, an awareness of setting or place that in turn influences the ebb and flow of what is regarded as personally significant. To be sure, the context of communication comprises physical characteristics—seating arrangement, color and light, physical space, and the like—but it is much more than the sense of these physical things. It includes the less tangible matter of atmosphere and ambiance, of socio-cultural background.”
Communication is grounded in perspective
It is not events themselves, but how men construct events, that determines what they will see, how they will feel, what they will think, and how they will respond” These differences in perspective account for wide variations in context and culture as well as for many communication failure
Scope
It is essential for the sender to understand the scope, and for the recipient to understand the purpose of the communication. If these understandings do not exist, then there is little chance of the communication being effective. Additionally, although the recipient who must understand the purpose, it is the responsibility of the communicator to ensure that the purpose is clearly identified. Scope, in this context, refers effectively to the sphere of operation of the communication. There are two aspects to this: 'audience scope' and 'subject scope'.
• Audience scope: It is very essential for the communicator to clearly identify the target audience of the communication. It will also allow the communicator to tailor the communication, especially the language used to the particular needs of the audience. Most communications are not aimed at specific people, but at groups of people, or more likely, at job functions or users of particular products. It may also be the case that the communication is aimed at 'the general public'. In each case, the communicator must ensure that the target audience is clearly identified.
• Subject scope: In order to allow readers to further ascertain whether a communication contains information that they need to know, or that they may be looking for, a communication should always clearly identify the subject scope of the communication. The subject scope is a specification of the information covered by the communication.
Purpose of Communication:
A communication will always have a purpose. A good technical communication will always have a purpose for the reader. For most communications, the purpose of the communication must be clear to the recipient of the communication. The following list highlights a number of different purposes for a communication, and describes the way in which the communication might need to differ based on this purpose. i.e. To inform, To convey, To persuade, To request, To warn, To reassure etc.
General Objectives of Communication
1. We communicate to persuade: It means that we want someone to do something and this desire of ours is communicated. The mother patting the child to stop crying, the advertiser displaying a model in a new T-Shirt and the politician haranguing (urging) his audience to vote for him are all having the same objective of persuading, while communicating it differently.
2. We communicate in order to give or provide information: The science teacher demonstrating an experiment, the bank announcing a reduction in interest rates and the finance minister, presenting the budget are all communicating to provide information.
3. We communicate seeking information: A passer by asking you the way to the post-office, the student asking the teacher for some clarification or the investigating policeman making discreet enquiries are all seeking information by using this communication skill.
4. We communicate to express our emotions like courage or fear, joy or sorrow, satisfaction or disappointment with appropriate gestures and words. Some people have unlimited skill to emote, (i.e., to display excessive emotion) to suit the occasion. Our politicians are capable of emoting well, which by itself is a communication skill