What is communication?

Communication is getting a message across to a person or a group. It can be as simple as “mom, make me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich!” to something as serious as “the rate of unemployed workers in the U.S. keeps increasing” Looking at this closer, it can be seen that we use sounds that form into words to get our point across. In other words, language is important when trying to communicate.

Besides using language to converse with others, Robert Krauss (2002) believes that verbal communication also uses signals and symbols. He defines that signals are signs that are happening in a conversation such as the expression of his/her face when talking to another person. He believes words are symbols because when you hear the word “dog”, your brain will instantly categorize it as a furry and four-legged creature in your mind. There are also other theories on how a message is sent from one side to another. In a psychological perspective, Scott Hall (1973) sees communication as an Encoding/Decoding system where the four main steps are production, circulation, consumption, and reproduction. Hall uses these four stages to show that “the coding of the message can control the reception but not transparently – each stage has its own determining limits and possibilities…” His model shows that on the sending side, the person will need to “encode” the message in way so it is correctly received on the other side. Then the other side will need to “decode” the received message to understand what the other person was trying to convey. In a broader sense, it is similar to the note card activity that we did in class because it also has a sender, transmission, and a receiver.

Nowadays, there is not much direct verbal communication as most people rely on the internet or texting to talk to others. People think it is a more convenient way to communicate with others but what these “conversations” are missing are the signals that Krauss previously mentioned. It seems that there is no direct face-to-face talk anymore as it causes a problem because you cannot read the other person’s expression when talking to them. The lack of face-to-face in a conversation will further the distance between people.

Work Cited:

Krauss, R. (2002). The Psychology of Verbal Communication. International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. 2-13.

Hall. S. (1973). Encoding and Decoding in Television Discourse. Location: Centre for Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham