WHAT IS COMMUNICATION?

I’m going to give my best effort to answer that. Though we have to admit that defining communication
in a way that everybody’s agree is almost impossible. Why? One reason is because the word is so
common.
Frank Dance said that “COMMUNICATION is one of the most overworked terms in the English language.”
He wrote that over a decade ago. But the situation is really the same today. If you asked a hundred
different people what this word mean, you’ll get hundreds of definitions. But we have to try to define it.

The word Communication in Latin comes from “Communicare” which means to share or to make
common. Another meaning of Communication according to Coach Lyon is the process by which people
transmit information, share verbal and nonverbal messages, and create meaning with each other.
So the keywords here are Transmit, Share and Create.

TRANSMIT
Years ago in 1948, Claude Shannon & Warren Weaver developed a foundational model of
communication that you’ll see in most text books. From their view, communication happens when an
INFORMATION SOURCE or SENDER has a MESSAGE and TRANSMITS that message in a form of a SIGNAL
through a CHANNEL and that signal RECEIVE by the RECEIVER in its final DESTINATION. Along the way,
there might be a NOISE in the communication system that could negatively influence the process.
Some people considered this as Container model. Because according to the model, meaning is contained
in the words themselves. When the message has been reached its final destination, communication has
been accomplished because the message has bent sent and received.

SHARE
In 1962, Dean Burland articulated the transactional model of communication and according to Burland,
Communication wasn’t a one-way process. For him it has a different nature. Communication is dynamic,
continuous and circular. Communication between people is on-going, back and forth exchange. We are
senders and receivers at the same time. Meaning are not in the words but in our minds. We supply the
meaning. To Burland, it’s all about the way individuals collaboratively work towards shared meaning
through communication.

CREATE
Robert Craig says Communication constitutes how we create meaning. Communicate doesn’t happened
after those views are already in our head. After culture has taught us norms. After socio economic
factors shaped us. Pre-existing meaning not in the words, doesn’t even meaning in our minds that we
communicate. We create meanings through interactions.

COMMUNICATION PROCESS

SENDER – Encoding occurs when the message sender converts a thought, idea or fact into a message
composed of symbols, pictures, or words.

ENCODED – the message is the encoded information being sent.

CHANNEL – The channel is the medium used to send the message to the receiver, including voice,
writing graphs, videos, intranets, the Internet, television, and body language.
DECODED – When the message receiver sees, reads, or hears the message, it gets decoded.
Decoding is the interpretation and translation of the message back to the receiver. The decoded
information is hopefully the same as the information the sender intended to communicate but that’s not
always the case.

FEEDBACK – is a check on the success of the communication.

The receiver receives a new message to the original sender and the original sender assess it to see if the
receiver understood the original message as intended. Repeating or paraphrasing the original message,
asking for clarification or asking if your conclusions are correct are forms of feedback.

NOISE – is anything that blocks, distorts, or changes in any way the message the sender intended to
communicate.
Examples of noise include environmental noise, physiological-impairment noise, semantic noise,
syntactical noise, organizational noise, cultural noise, and psychological noise.

In other words, in the communication process, the sender translates (encodes) information to words,
symbols, or pictures and passes it to the receiver through some medium (channel). The sender then
receives the message, retranslates (decodes) it into a message that is hopefully the same as what the
sender intended. Noise can enter anywhere in the process, making the message received different from
the one the sender intended. Feedback creates two-way communication that helps check on the success
of the communication and ensure that the received message was accurate.

Now, let’s have the elements of communication.

1. Source - The Source is the person attempting to share information. The source can be a living or
nonliving entity.
2. Message - This is the subject matter of the communication. This may be an opinion, attitude,
feelings, views, orders, or suggestions.
3. Encoding – is the process of assembling the message (information, ideas and thoughts) into a
representative design with the objective of ensuring that the receiver can comprehend it.
4. Channel – An encoded message is conveyed by the source through a channel. There are
numerous channel categories: verbal, non-verbal, personal or non-personal.
5. Decoding – The person who receives the message or symbol from the communicator tries to
convert the same in such a way so that he may extract its meaning to his complete
understanding.
6. Receiver – A good communicator takes the receivers preconceptions and frames of reference
into consideration.
7. Feedback – The source judges its success based on the feedback it receives, so pay close
attention.