Communication is the "transmission, sharing, or making common" of information from one person to another. These messages can be from one to one as indicated in the basic communication model, or from one to many as is the main objective of media and mass forms of communication. Fostered through visual, audio, or even intangible transmission such as the conveyance of a feeling like compassion, anger, or love humans are wired with the ability to communicate. While the hardware is in place, Professor A. Winbow of International Maritime Organization, argues effective communication is a learned skill. Peers, parents, schools, and seminars teach people from the time they are born and throughout the rest of their lives how to both convey and receive the intended message.
Communication, beyond the initial expression of compiled sender material, is also a correlational understanding of language, tone, subject-matter, and intention of the part of the receiver. Communication is a very particular and difficult skill to master because of the precision required for originally intended messages to properly enter the domain of understanding of the message acceptor. Messages can be “lost in translation” when, for example, an English colloquialism is expressed in a foreign language. Additionally, portrayed through the childhood game, “telephone,” a message conveyed through too many transmitters will end with many revisions from its original content.
Although these mistakes are well-known and all-too-often made, communication is an evolutionary concept which has taken many revisions throughout the years. People of our ancestry once relied on oral communication to preserve their histories. The “story-teller” among the Native American people was of the most renowned members of the tribe. Later, when paper became more available, histories were written; records were kept in the form of birth and death certificates, marriage licenses, and contracts among many more. Morse code became popular during war time as well as alternate alphabets and other code languages to portray information for only particular ears. Later, as detailed by Hanno Hardt, mass communication became an altering mechanism of society.
Through the adoption of printing presses, typewriters, radio, television, and the internet no longer are their distance gaps in world knowledge. Held among the web and broadcasted on radio and TV. is a database of knowledge detailing world and local happenings, developing a “public viewpoint” on things, and bringing foreign knowledge at the touch of a button. Because of these changes communication is a developing process. As technology becomes more advanced, freedom and reach of communication has both suffered and benefitted. Again, as Hardt so fervently argues the media cannot be separated from political and economic ties. Yet at the heart of its original meaning, communication is simply the transmission of a message in audio, visual, or intangible form which becomes common from the originator to its one or many receivers.
Association for Communication Administration. Summer Conference on Defining the Field of
Communication. Annandale, VA. 2000.
Department of Education. Classification of Instructional Programs. Washington, DC. 2000.
Hardt, Hanno. Myths for the Masses. An Essay on Mass Communication. Oxford, England. Blackwell
Publishing. 2004.
Winbow, A. The Importance of Effective Communication. Istanbul, Turkey. International Seminar of
Maritime English. 2002. http://www.imo.org/includes/blastDataOnly.asp/data_id%3D18000/InternationalSeminar.pdf. 9 September 2010.
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