Everything about Communication totally explained
Communication is the process of transferring information from a sender to a receiver with the use of a medium in which the communicated information is understood by both sender and receiver. It is a process that allows organisms to exchange information by several methods. Communication requires that all parties understand a common
language that's exchanged. 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.
Communication is the articulation of sending a message, through different media whether it be verbal or nonverbal, so long as a being
transmits a thought provoking idea,
gesture, action, etc.
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's 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 (what type of things are communicated), source, emisor, sender or
encoder (by whom), form (in which form), channel (through which medium), destination, receiver, target or
decoder (to whom), 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 (such as a corporation or group of beings).
Communication can be seen as processes of
information transmission governed by three levels of
semiotic rules:
- Syntactic (formal properties of signs and symbols),
- pragmatic (concerned with the relations between signs/expressions and their users) and
- 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 rule in some sense ignores
autocommunication, including
intrapersonal communication via
diaries or self-talk.
In a simple model, information or content (for example a message in natural language) is sent in some form (as spoken language) from an emisor/ sender/
encoder to a destination/ receiver/
decoder. In a slightly more complex form a sender and a receiver are linked . A particular instance of communication is called a
speech act. 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.
Theories of
coregulation describe communication as a creative and dynamic continuous process, rather than a discrete exchange of information.
Types of communication
Language
A
language is a
syntactically organized 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 don't have a written form of a language, but use a language to communicate with each another. 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 (s) 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.
Dialogue
A dialogue is a
reciprocal conversation between two or more entities. The
etymological origins of the word (in
Greek διά(diá,through) + λόγος(logos,word,speech) concepts like flowing-through meaning) don't necessarily convey the way in which people have come to use the word, with some confusion between the prefix διά-(diá-,through) and the prefix δι-(di-, two) leading to the assumption that a dialogue is necessarily between only two parties.
Nonverbal communication
Nonverbal communication is the process of communication 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. 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 used to convey emotional content in written or message form
Non-human living organisms
Communication in many of its facets isn't limited to
humans, or even to
primates. Every
information exchange between living organisms — for example transmission of
signals involving a living sender and
receiver — can be considered a form of communication. Thus, there's the broad field of
animal communication, which encompasses most of the issues in
ethology. On a more basic level, there's
cell signaling, Cellular communication (biology)|cellular communication, and chemical communication between primitive organisms like
bacteria, and within the
plant and
fungal kingdoms. All of these communication processes are sign-mediated interactions with a great variety of distinct coordinations.
Animals
Animal communication is any
behaviour 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, for example 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 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 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.
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”, for example, similar molecules without biotic content.
Bacteria
There are communication processes between different species of bacteria and between bacteria and non bacterial life such as
eukaryotic hosts. Beneath the semiochemicals necessary for developmental processes of bacterial communities such as division,
sporulation, and
synthesis of secondary
metabolites there are physical contact-mediated behavioral patterns being important in
biofilm organisation. There are three classes of signalling molecules for different purposes, for example signalling within the organism to coordinate gene expressions to generate adequate response behavior, signalling between same or related and different species. The most popular communicative behavior is „
quorum sensing“. Quorum sensing is the term for description of sign-mediated interactions in which chemical molecules are produced and secreted by bacteria. They are recognized of the bacterial community dependent on a critical concentration and in a special ratio to the population density. These molecules trigger the expression of a great variety of gene transcriptions.
The semiochemicals used by bacteria are of great variety, especially because some signalling molecules are multiple re-usable components. Today three kinds of communicative goals are distinguished: (A) reciprocal communication, active sign-mediated interactions which is beneficial for both interacting parts; (B) messages which are produced as response on a triggering event which may be an indicator for a receiver which wasn't specially targeted by the producer. A coincidental event which is neutral – except of the energy costs of production – to the producer but beneficial for the receiver; (C) signalling to manipulate the receiver, for example to cause a response behavior which is onesided beneficial to the producer and harms the receivers often in that they behave against their normal goals. The three classes of bacteria communication enable bacteria to generate and coordinate different behavioral patterns: self and non-self identification, for example identification of other colonies and measurement of their size, pheromone based courtship for mating, alteration of colony structure in formatting of fruiting bodies, initiation of developmental and growth processes for example sporulation.
Sources
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.
Severin, Werner J., Tankard, James W., Jr., (1979). Communication Theories: Origins, Methods, Uses. New York: Hastings House, ISBN 0801317037Further Information
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