An immediate question you may be asking upon seeing the title of this post is why should you, dear reader, care about communication? Aside from the fact that communication is a skill (and can therefore be practiced, and, to an extent, mastered) and that we all use this skill everyday, it may prove vital in achieving whatever sort of goals you have for yourself (if your goals at all involve interacting with other people. If your goal is to go live in the wilderness and be completely self-sufficient, then I suppose you needn’t worry about communication so much, but otherwise, you stand to profit). That being said, I’ve cracked out some old textbooks, notes, and so forth, to get you the information you need. I’ll be writing several posts on communication over the coming while, but for now, I wanted to give you an overview of topics I intend to cover.
To start out with, allow me to quote the eleventh edition of Human Communication: The Basic Course by Joseph A. DeVito on why you should give a hoot about communication:
You interact with others every day in a variety of contexts. In most contexts, you have a purpose in mind: to learn or to persuade. In job interviews, you need to know what factors the employers are seeking in nonverbal behavior, language use, attitude, level of knowledge, amount of enthusiasm, and personal motivation. In learning situations, you need to know when to ask a question as well as how to frame your question. As a manager of others, you need to know what kinds of messages will motivate your subordinates to perform at their highest levels. Human communication is significant in every aspect of your life from learning at school to obtaining positions in corporations to soliciting a salary increase. Socially, human communication is at the core of what makes relationships work or fail.
DeVito focuses solely on school and work, here, but he does state (and I do agree and would like to draw emphasis upon) the fact that human communication is significant in every aspect of our lives. I would argue that Game is merely a fancy way of beefing up communication within a certain context (the context of male-female communication with various intentions, chiefly to fornicate), but that’s a debate for another day.
Furthermore, DeVito goes on to offer several benefits of improving one’s communication skills (direct quotes):
- Present yourself as a confident, likable, approachable and creditable person.
- Build friendships, enter into love relationships, work with colleagues, and interact with family members.
- Interview to gain information, to successfully present yourself to get the job you want, and to participate effectively in a wide variety of other interview types.
- Participate effectively in relationship and task groups – informative, problem-solving, and brainstorming groups, at home or at work.
- Communicate information to and influence the attitudes and behaviors of small and large audiences.
- Use the media critically and with awareness of the techniques media use to influence you.
I consider myself a fairly competent communicator, and I consider communication an extremely important and fundamental part of human existence. Like any other skill, not everyone can become a communication expert, but I firmly believe that many people sorely underestimate the value of communication and simultaneously overestimate their skill level when it comes to communicating. My belief is supported by anecdotal as well as statistical evidence, but that’s neither here nor there.
Obviously, communication is a broad field of study, potentially overlapping with several other fields, and different authors present the same information in similar and dissimilar ways. I’ll be sticking to what DeVito has going on; if you’ve studied communications yourself and have different terms, let me know about ‘em so we can hash them out.
DeVito goes on to identify several forms of human communication:
- Intrapersonal communication (aka, introspection)
- Interpersonal communication (one to one, or small group; focused on personal/intimate contexts)
- Interviewing
- Small group communication (5 to 10 people, emphasis on task/work related contexts)
- Organizational communication (within and among members of an organization, personal favorite subject of mine)
- Public speaking
- Computer-Mediated Communication (Where’s the “any” key!?)
- Mass Communication (this post is an example of both mass communication and computer-mediated communication; mass communication is from one source to many receivers who may be scattered across the world)
In addition, he establishes five general purposes for communication (emphasis my own):
- TO DISCOVER – “One of the major purposes of communication concerns personal discovery. When you communicate with another person, you learn about yourself as well as about the other person. In fact, your self perceptions result largely from what you’ve learned about yourself from others during communications, especially your interpersonal encounters. Communication also helps you discover the external world – the world of objects, events, and other people. Communication helps you reduce your uncertainty about people and the world, and reducing uncertainty in turn enables you to communicate more effectively.”
- TO RELATE – “You probably spend much of your communication time and energy establishing and maintaining social relationships. You communicate with your close friends in school, at work, on the phone, and over the internet. You talk with your parents, children, and brothers and sisters. You interact with your relational partner. All told, this takes a great deal of your time and attests to the importance of the relational purpose of communication.”
- TO HELP – “You fulfill the helping purpose when you constructively criticize, express empathy, work with a group to solve a problem, or listen attentively and supportively to a public speaker. Not surprisingly, obtaining and giving help are among the major functions of internet communication and among the major reasons people use the internet.” I always do hope I’ve been helpful to you all with any and all of my posts, and that’s not just a line of horse-crap. What’s mine is yours, when it comes to knowledge!
- TO PERSUADE – “In your everyday interpersonal and group encounters, you often try to persuade – to change the attitudes and behaviors of others. You try to get people to vote a particular way, try a new diet, buy a particular item, see a movie, visit a website, take a specific course, believe that something is true or false, value or devalue some idea, and so on. In interviews, you may try to persuade a company to hire you; in public speaking, you may try to persuade your audience that you should be elected to hold a certain office or position. Some researchers, argue all communication is persuasive and that all our communications seek some persuasive goal.” Have I persuaded you that communication is important, yet?
- TO PLAY – “Communication as play involves motives of pleasure, escape, and relaxation. You tell jokes, say clever things, and relate interesting stories largely for the pleasure it gives to you and your listeners. Similarly, you may communicate because it relaxes you, allowing you to get away from pressures and responsibilities.” Communication can be fun, and that’s no joke! (Ba-dum-tish.)
One last thing I want to throw at you in this overview post are the general elements of human communication, in a nifty picture diagram (click for full size). This was shamelessly recreated from the textbook – it appears in its original form as figure 1.2 on page 13 with the caption as quoted. If some of the terms used are scary, fear not, dear reader. We’ll sort them out soon.
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