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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{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
psilocybin mushroom are good for anxiety in social settings. Take a small amount of a liberty cap and you’ll do fine.
Communication is probably one of the most important and at the same time underrated aspects of life in general and for humans in particular. I have the impression that at this moment, communication is generally described in terms of an ‘objective’, observable phenomenon. In line with the current paradigm of science as producing knowledge by adhering to the general rules of logic as for instance described by Karl Popper in his book The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Concentrating on the ‘outside’, on what can be observed as the result of communication has the attractiveness that you can use the current rules of scientific exploration. At the same time, communication might be viewed as ‘that what drives the change or the creation of a form’. The form might be, in my view, almost anything – with the emphasis on thing-, but it has the characteristics of –at least relative- stability as a form over time. This allows us to explore the form and use it as a basis to falsify our understanding. And in this view, the ‘hard’ question is how we can explore that which creates or changes a form without using the result, the form, as the object of our inquiry. Or, in other words, how do we know what communication is when all that we can observe is the outcome. This might be even more important in human communication which concentrates on a certain outcome, for instance behaviour, under the assumption that some form of communication is taking place, with all of it’s implied morality. And the assumption is very often derived from the observation of the outcome. Sometimes it has all the ‘magic’ qualities of quantum mechanics. It’s maddening at times. The observation drives the questions. This looks even worse than the more simple lock-in, although these are already kind of complicated.
My guess is that communication will become a central issue, and maybe the central issue of our quest in the next centuries to understand what we are and why and how it works. One of the implications might be that we will view the current scientific paradigm as not suitable to understand communication. We probably need a new paradigm and cooperation of all the scientific disciplines that exist today will be one of the prerequisites to arrive at this new paradigm.
Thank you for the post Devil Dog.
Every day I don’t have some idiot lawyer standing in my office doorway asking me why they can’t get moved to the front of the line because it’s not their fault that the person they asked to take the request form to me failed to do so and now they’re flipping out because they needed to have it handled by then – is a good one.
That’s why there’s a rule that says “ALL REQUEST FORMS MUST BE DELIVERED TO THIS OFFICE BY THE PERSON MAKING THE REQUEST” after all. What I want to know is how they got through law school if they can’t read.
Oh, and what that has to do with communication is that no matter how clearly a concept or rule is stated, people only get the message if they feel like reading/listening. Unfortunately, that doesn’t get them a pass from their bosses if it happens more than twice, thank god.
Oh yes, communication is essential. I’m exceedingly grateful that I took the step to join Toastmasters three years ago; it has helped me break further out of my shell, gain confidence in social and work situations, express myself more clearly verbally, and develop my leadership skills.
Has anyone ever read the book God’s Debris by Scott Adams? He has an interesting take on the importance of communication.
Thanks for the link to Gods Debris.
Some parts were very good with a serious undertone, like a Laurel & Hardy slapstick with a lot of verbal WEC moments where you know that something will go wrong the next moment and indeed it happens, in this case in the creative logic about abstracts which, sometimes by framing the questions, explains the meaning of a word and then proceeds in demonstrating that this cannot be the meaning of the word if we follow the rules of some logic.
The one about probability being the guiding force was especially interesting in this context. We will never know but my guess is that Bohr’s probability resulted in Einstein having extra sleepless nights. Until, after a couple of years, they both agreed to use the term probability as a stand-in for ‘We’ve got no clue’. Which probably has never been a satisfying answer for Einstein.
And the fun thing is, of course, that if you take his reasoning to the next level and apply the rules of the logic that are used throughout the book in another perspective, the outcome would be different.
Free will is the result of our communication where we tell each other that we all have a free will. And after having established this as a fact, we have a lot to communicate about why there is no such thing as a free will.
Good info in this post. That means it will get 20 responses.
Firepower -
Haha, Too true. I appreciate the backhanded-compliment all the same; perhaps moreso because they’re quite rare from your corner.
TFA simply glosses over some basic principles, and loses much appeal because of it.
“communication” can mean many things, in data terms it can mean transmission, or receive, or both, and even when it means both it can mean symmetric or asymmetric, etc etc.
In general terms communication means “transmission to achieve a specific goal” for example talking to convince someone else to take you to dinner and pick up the tab.
In specific terms communication always loses significant data bits because the transmitter and the receiver do not use identical protocols… at its simplest “pussy” means different things either side of the Atlantic, at its more complex “love” means different things either side of the gender divide.
Speaking as one who was falsely accused of rape, I eventually realised that the false accuser had a lifelong affliction with one of the Cluster B personality disorders.
As a (psychology ignorant) layman I was quite simply not qualified to detect this in advance, and so I just assumed that *meaningful* communication was “difficult”, whereas in fact I now realise that *meaningful* communication is in fact impossible…
It is not just a language or experience barrier that needs to be overcome, but a fundamental perception gap that cannot be crossed unless one of us is transformed at a basic level.
Just on this site alone, where ostensibly the readership is self-selecting to be quite alike in many ways, *meaningful* communication is routinely broken.
I (and others) state basic unadorned truths, and they are simply rejected out of hand, not because the message is too complex, but because the message does not “fit” in with the recipients self image and beliefs.
The logical conclusions are quite simple.
When you want / need something desperately from me that only I can give you, you will seek to communicate your willingness to Rx from me.
When you want / need something from me that can be obtained elsewhere, you will seek to coerce me to signal my willingness to Rx from you.
Symmetric Tx/Rx basically does not exist anywhere outside of fiction.
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