COMMUNICATION

COMMUNICATION, in its general sense, is a chain of events in which the significant link is a message.
It is the production, perception, and understanding of messages that bear mans notion of what is
important, what is right and what is related to something else.
Messages are events that signify other events. How they accomplish this is a subject of philosophical and
psychological controversy, but it is generally agreed that the significance of messages stems from form,
pattern or structure rather than from other causally or naturally determined connections with other events.
Where there is smoke there may be fire; but the smoke is casually determined event and not a message
unless it is a smoke signal coded to convey significance. Similarly, dark clouds may portend, but they are
not messages for rain in the same sense as the word “rain" or pictures of rains are. Messages may
represent events, a pictures do they encode meaning associated with events as smoke signals, words, or
member do, and they may symbolize other things in the way that verbal and visual languages or graphics
patterns do.
Messages are formally coded, symbolic, or representational patters of some significance in culture.
Culture itself may be broadly conceived as any system in which messages cultivates and regulate
relationships. In human culture, and in the conduct of man's life in society, communication plays its most
complex and distinctive part.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF COMMUNICATION

Men's hands, brains, eyes, ears, and mouths are the chief organic means of communication and
intelligence. The question of when and how their teamwork resulted in speech, drawing, and writing, and
why other species with similar organs did not share in this development has long puzzled mankind. The
puzzle, of course, includes man's ability to puzzle, and thus to become so far as we know the only self-
conscious creature in the universe.