- What is communication?

We're going to give our best effort to answer that. Now, we have to admit that defining
communication in a way that everybody agrees with is almost impossible. Why? Well, one
reason is because the word is so common.

In 1970, in the Journal of communication, Frank Dance, said that communication is one
of the most overworked terms in the English language. And he wrote that decades ago, but the
situation is really the same today. It's a word like culture or community. If you asked 100
different people, what those words mean, you'd get 100 different definitions, but we have to try
to define it. I'm no quitter. So here's what we're going to do. This video has three parts. First, I'm
going to give you a basic definition. Next we'll look at three popular models of communication
over time. And finally, I'll touch on how different researchers study communication from
different angles. Taken together, that will give you a well rounded answer to this question. The
word communication in Latin comes from communicare, which means to share, to make
something common and I love that, my plain language basic working definition of
communication from all I've read is the process by which people transmit information, share
verbal and nonverbal messages, and create meaning with each other. So let's look at three
popular communication models that align with those three key words, transmit, share, and create.
First, some people think communication is about how we transmit information. years ago in
1948, Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver developed a foundational model of communication
that you'll see in most textbooks. From their view, communication happens when an information
source, a sender has a message and transmits that message in the form of a signal through a
channel. Let's say that little box in the middle represents the channel,then that signal is received
by the receiver at its final destination. Along the way, there might be some noise in the
communication system that could negatively influence the process. Some people call this the
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 been sent and received. Now I'd like to point out that the
concept of feedback is not part of Shannon and Weaver's original model, even though some
textbooks add that. The word feedback does not appear in the diagram and nowhere in the text of
the original article. That concept came later. Shannon and Weaver were diagramming and were
interested in communication systems like the telegraph, the telephone, and radio. And their
model reflects that 1948 way of looking at communication. So it's a linear, one way model that
describes how information is transmitted. Their model is very limited and not designed to
explain face to face communication. And that's why most textbooks call this the information
transfer model. So that's our first key word, transmit. To some people, the answer the
question, what is communication, is that it is simply the transmitting of information. Our next
key word is share, some people think communication is about sharing meaning. Fast Forward
several decades and a couple of models to 1962, Dean Barnlund articulated the transactional
model of communication. To Barnlund, communication wasn't a one way process, to him It had
a different nature. Communication was dynamic, continuous and circular. In other words,
communication between people is an ongoing, back and forth simultaneous exchange. We are
senders and receivers at the same time. And the point is, we exchanged messages because we
want to share meaning with other people. Barnlund's model includes both verbal and nonverbal
cues and feedback, and importantly to Barnlund, meaning existed within the person, not the
words. So, like Shannon and Weaver's 1948 model, the sender has a meaning that he or she
wants to communicate and encodes it in specific words, and then sends it. At that point,
according to Shannon and Weaver's model, meaning exists in the words, but for Barnlund, that
wasn't quite right. His transactional model says that the receiver interprets or decodes what those
words mean for him or herself. Then that really highlights that meaning is not in the words, but
meaning is in us, it's in our minds, we supply the meaning, we are super imposing our
understanding, our interpretation on to the process. And that's why two people can hear the same
exact message but interpret it differently. So to Barnlund, he looked so closely at the way
communication happens face to face, and he looked at some of these subtle processes that were
happening to explain this process more thoroughly. So while Shannon and Weaver's model is
about transmitting messages, the transactional model describes the complex and layered process
we follow to pursue and achieve shared meaning with each other. To Barnlund, it's all about the
way individuals collaboratively work toward shared meaning through communication. So
Barnlund's answer to the question about what is communication, is it's the process through which
we achieve shared meaning. Our next key word is create. So let's leap forward a couple of
more decades and talk about how communication is the generative process that creates our social
world. And to me, this is where it gets really interesting. According to this approach, the word
communication describes the way we create meaning in the first place. Robert Craig says
communication constitutes our social reality. Constitute means create, he said in his 1999 article,
communication is not a secondary phenomenon. Communication doesn't happen after those
views are already in our head, after culture has taught us norms, after socio economic factors
have shaped us. Craig says that communication is the primary constitutive social process that
explains all these other factors. So I'll put that in my own words, compared to the previous
mentioned models, pre-existing meaning is not in the words. Meaning is not even in our minds
that we then communicate. We're not simply sharing already existing ideas. When we
communicate with each other, according to this view in our conversations, we are generating
those ideas together, we create meaning through our interactions with others over time, we create
our social world together that we could have not created on our own. The creation of shared
meaning is a collective accomplishment. Our whole social reality is the product, the outcome
of communication. So communication is that driving, creative force at the center of our sense of
self,our relationships, our families, our culture, through interactions we make or break
agreements, we create or dissolve relationships, we form the tone or nature of those
relationships. We establish societal norms or violate them through the process of communication.
So it might seem on the surface that meaning exists in words or even in our heads, but to Robert
Craig and others who follow this constitutive approach, we have to remember that we are not
dealing with already existing meanings provided by nature. That meaning was first and foremost
generated and is still being generated through our communication processes. So the answer to the
question, what is communication, from this point of view, is that it's a creative process, a
meaning generating process. Man, we've already covered a lot of ground by looking at these
three models. But let's finally touch on some major areas that show how people look at
communication, that will help us to make it even more concrete. The most historic area is
rhetoric. If you've ever taken a public speaking class, then you have an idea about what this is.
It all began when Aristotle wrote a book, about 2000 years ago and even really before that, and
he taught us that when we spoke, we had these available approaches and choices and techniques
that we could use to persuade our listeners. The classic view of rhetoric is all about how a
speaker can create and share messages artfully with an audience for maximum persuasiveness.
Aristotle showed us that there are dozens or maybe even hundreds of small choices that we make
along the way that can make us more or less persuasive given the circumstances. Today, the area
of rhetoric studies things like political speeches, argumentation, the freedom of expression in
society, and lots of other topics like that. Another popular area is called interpersonal
communication. This area looks at one on one conversations and relationships and normally
focuses on face to face interaction, like friendships, romantic relationships and family dynamics.
At a basic level you might study things like active listening skills, conflict resolution, the stages
of relationship development. The area of interpersonal communication is a big area of study, that
looks at both nonverbal and verbal dynamics and how small changes in the way we talk to each
other can shape our relationships in big ways. Another popular area is organizational
communication. And this is another broad area. Here you'd learn about communication that
happens in and around the workplace. You might study for example, different leadership styles
and how you see those at work or workplace culture and how it shapes our lives as employees
and how communication is likely to happen through both formal and informal networks.
Organization communication is a huge area and we even see sub fields within it taking shape on
their own, like crisis communication, training and development and whole classes in professional
communication skills. More recently, we see a lot of interest in the area of health
communication. And here you'd learned about how communication in healthcare settings is
really important because it can directly impact issues like how quickly patients recover, how we
communicate risk, and how patients and families talk about illness in either helpful or harmful
ways. It's all about the way the quality of communication influences our health and well being.
And I'm just scratching the surface, communication is a huge field. And there's lots of other
interesting areas of study and it seems like the boundaries continue to expand every day. And
like I said, from the beginning, finding one agreed upon definition of communication is not
really the goal, but we have to at least explore a basic definition. Look at these three common
models and mention some of the major areas of study to help us answer the question. Hopefully
this will paint a well rounded picture that answers the question what is communication.