In the 21st century, it is common for individuals to communicate in a variety of ways, be it face to face communication or through electronic means. Cell phones have had life changing implications for humanity as they allow us to establish near instant communication with anyone who happens to have the same device. Now cell phones have developed to the extent that you can not only use them for voice calls, but also for texting or written communication, in addition to video calls, which allows you to both hear and see the person as you are talking to them in real time. Social media platforms, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and FourSquare, that serve as interactive contact books consisting of photos, videos and other types of information in regards to the person in question, allow people connect in ways otherwise impossible or not widely available as today, a mere 25 years ago at the turn of the 20th century and into the 21st century. Other than your regular public life or “persona” that one lives, people can now create online personas or profiles, or a fantasy life. Everyone’s ultimate goal in life is to make life itself as satisfactory of an experience as humanly possible. Being able to effectively communicate is a huge stepping stone towards achieving this goal.
Nowadays, when it comes to talent that is specific to the job in question, technical knowledge and experience, and the attendance and graduation in a well known educational institution are not guarantees that a person will move up in their career, nor be able to achieve goals they have set for themselves. Despite laws to reduce nepotism and corruption both in the corporate and public spheres, the vast majority of people tend to find work as a result of their social capital, in other words, their social connections or access to social networks, which equates to the people we know, or the whom, as opposed to our human capital, or what we know. The workplace is the ideal environment for people to be able to establish relationships with each other and form social connections. With the advent of the internet, our ability to search and find information in varying forms can prove tremendously useful, and is nearly instantaneous in speed. Open source intelligence can be gathered by any individual with a computer and access to the internet, so much so as the intelligence services of many countries, such as the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America, be able to also access data in amounts as great as the Library of Congress, which is the world’s largest library with over 17 million books, and be able to communicate and converse with anyone in the world at any time.
A common denominator shared by those who are proficient in ascending both the personal and professional ladders in life is that they are often very skilled in the art of communication, as opposed to the vast majority of the population. A person who has expertise in communicating is able to attain the level of charisma and psychological knowledge needed to finesse another person into accepting an idea that they previously were stubbornly closed to even thinking about in a positive light. Even though it might not be necessarily guaranteed in it’s entirety, people who possess superior communication skills are much more likely to be promoted, land a dream job, have a happy marriage or family live, establish friendships much easier, and to live with the knowledge that their lives are richer and more fulfilling. This is why these series of articles can be profoundly life changing to you. Regardless of your age, sex, marital status or employment history, it is never too late to acquire skills that have the potential to drastically improve your life. Nobody is born with the knowledge of perfect communication. The process of learning communication skills is a continual development throughout a person’s life that never ceases as long as they are alive. These series of articles are meant to provide you with guidance that you can look back to, and use as a reference to come up with new ways of communication, by drawing on this framework and these foundations that we’ve written for you. If you wish to develop your communication skills in such a way that it helps you relate to your schoolmates, colleagues, friends, neighbors and romantic partners, these articles will provide you with the opportunity to do so!
THE CONCEPT OF COMMUNICATION – A SIMPLIFIED ELABORATION
Every single person can be defined as a communicator. We routinely do introspective or intrapersonal communication, which is talking and thinking to ourselves, dyadic, which is communication between two people, small group, which consists of one to a handful of people communicating amongst themselves, public, which tends to consist of one to many individuals, and mass communication, which tends to use technology as a medium to communicate with a large amount of people simultaneously, even those that are very far away from the source. We also use the aid of computers and computerization to communicate with each other. Whenever we send a verbal or nonverbal message to anyone else, the act of communication occurs. Communication can be defined as the intentional or unintentional transfer of meaning between one entity to another. It can also be seen as a procedural construct in which anyone observing or experiencing a behavior and gives meaning to that behavior. As long as what a person does or says, his or her behavior is typically interpreted as a message, and if the behavior of one individual influences that of another, this is perceived as the process of communication taking place. Due to the fact that we spend the majority of our time communicating with each other than doing anything else, our level of communication ability is what helps to form and define our social, professional and personal relationships. Communication is how we connect with other human beings and has several utilities, as the following examples will show you:
Talk and change the world. – A slogan that a number of US senators who are of the female gender persuasion came up with
Communication is the vehicle which allows humans to recall the past, think in the present and plan for the future. – Roy Berko
I once had a boyfriend who was Mr. Text-O-Rama. He never wanted to talk but he always wanted to text. To him, the only way to communicate was via thumb. New media professor Barb Iverson says, “Digital native instinctively emote through their thumbs and don’t consider a relationship ‘official’ until their Facebook or MySpace profile says it is.” – As reported by Natalie Y. Moore on Chicago Public Radio
Which of these assessments seem reasonable to you? Which of these seem relatable to you in the sense that you might have had a similar experience that fits the profile of the message being communicated in these sayings?
Since we are learning communication here, it only seems reasonable to characterize and categorize between various forms of communication that are commonly used between human beings and groups of human beings.
1. In instances of intrapersonal communication, your thoughts are directed towards yourself, where you talk with, learn about, rationalize with and assess yourself. 2. In instances of interpersonal communication, your interactions are directed towards other people, you acquire knowledge from him or her through your interaction but also knowledge about him or her, and behave using methods that either work to strengthen or deterioriate your relationship. 3. In instances of group communication, your participation goes towards an interaction with several other people, you will collaborate to share information between each other, advance and build on ideas, devise options and come to conclusions, figure out conundrums, give and receive support or just engage in fun activities. 4. In instances of public communication, your role as the communicator is to send a message to an audience devised to educate and convince them to have certain values, attitudes and beliefs so they can come up with thoughts and thought patterns where they not only think but also believe or behave in a certain way. As a receiver of communication, such as being a member of an audience, you will have these ideas communicated to you by a communicator, in which the process of communication slightly changes. 5. In instances of mass communication, the media will present content that is meant to be entertaining, to teach you about certain things and to convince you to see things a certain way. On your end, you have the capacity to influence mass media through your viewing and buying habits. 6. In instances of online, machine assisted communication, you move around the internet as you talk to people, conduct research and swap ideas, and you develop relationships with other people using computers and the internet.
Regardless of what the nature of the communication might be, the character of the communicative act is defined by a reciprocal relationship between various elements.
Some exercises for you in the form of Evaluate, Consider and Act:
Remember:
Make a list of the various types of communication one might come across.
Comprehend:
Provide hypothetical situations in which you partake in each form of communication.
Develop:
As you are familiar with some of the concepts, attempt to adapt these forms of communication to your own personal conceptualization of what you think communication is?
Cultivating Your Abilities:
Try to think of five people who you had a social interaction with for a longer period than just 2 or 3 minutes, throughout the course of the last 7 days. For every person you name, identify what your relationship is to them, whether they are a teacher, parent, employer or romantic partner for example, the context of the social interaction, such as a classroom, office, home or over the internet, the channels that were utilized in the social interaction in order to send and receive messages, and what resulted as your exchange of messages and meaning with them. Ultimately – and this is the most crucial part – assess the effectiveness of your communication by rating it on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 represents extremely ineffective and 5 represents extremely effective, giving an explanation for why you think each rating is so. It should be formatted in this order:
Individual – Context – Channel – Result – Ranking with Explanation
1. After going over these social interactions, if given the chance to do so, would you do the same things during your interaction all over again or would you change some things? How would you carry the interaction out again?
2. If you had the choice, would you rather have more interactions via cyberspace as opposed to face or face or not? Why or why not?
COMMUNICATION ELEMENTS: VISUALIZING THE COMMUNICATION MODEL
Every social interaction and instance of communication has shared elements that together can be used to describe the communication process in and of itself. Comprehending these elements in an efficient way will assist you in progressing your communicative abilities in a positive way. The best way to start is by analyzing the fundamentals of communication, which tend to be elements that are part of every communication event.
PEOPLE
It’s an obvious remark to say that human interaction needs people in order to fit the definition of it’s own existence. Interpersonal, small group and public communication instances occur amongst a wide array of senders and receivers of messages and meaning, who themselves encode and decode these messages automatically. Despite the fact that it might be easy for us to visualize an instance of communication between a sender and a receiver, it is vital for us to comprehend the concept that throughout the communication instance the role of the sender does not only belong to one person and the role of receiver to another. Rather, the processes of receiving and sending messages happen at the same time. A further elaboration on this phenomenon can be found in linguist Deborah Tannen’s book, “That’s Not What I Meant!”, where she writes, “Communication is a continous stream in which everything is simultaneously a reaction and an instigation, an instigation and a reaction.” Therefore, when we engage in communication with one or more individuals, we tend to send and receive information at the same time.
MESSAGES
In every instance of communication that we have, we are simultaneously sending and receiving messages that are both verbal and nonverbal in nature. The topic of your discussion, the words you use to construct sentences that describe your thoughts and emotions, the sounds that you make, how you sit and gesture towards your conversational partner, the facial expressions that you make, as well as even your touch and smell communicate information to the other party. A message therefore acts as the content of a communicative event. Certain messages we send are meant to have a more private nature, such as a kiss accompanied by the verbalization of the words “I love you.”, while other messages carry with them a more public connotation and might be intended for hundreds or even thousands of people. Some messages that we send are intentional, an example being “I want you to get this through your head”, and others by accident, such as “I had no idea you were watching”. All the things imaginable a sender or receiver can do can send a message, as long as there is someone to interpret the information.