What is Communication?

Communication is the dissemination of information and ideologies that take place between senders and receivers. Communication is important for keeping the world informed of current events and news. Even though communication may imply only one sender and one receiver, in a scale as large as worldly communication, such a small scope rarely exists.
In fact, the most prominent form of large scale communication is mass communication, which "desires to dominate individuals (or societies) through persuasion and manipulation"[1]. If the purpose of communication is to dominate, societies and cultures must be very careful about what information is spread. This implies that communication only benefits the senders of information. In present times, this means that only corporations or developed nations are the beneficiaries, not the people who receive (and sometimes unknowingly) the information.
Within a nation, mass communication is the most efficient way to get information across from sender to receiver. It must be kept in mind, however, that mass communication is never without a purpose or vested interest - often times these interests are hidden. For example, the "spread of American mass communication has turned into a permanent process of reinforcing the Americanization of cultures" [2]. The goal of persuasion very well exists in mass communication.
This predicament poses many obstacles and is not easy to fix. Since "good communication was the key to 'the most challenging social problem of our time - the modernizing of most of the world'" [3], and it would seem that only polluted, privatized information is being transmitted, the dangers that mass communication present will negatively impact modernization and globalization.



[1] Hardt, Hanno. Myths for the Masses: An Essay on Mass Communication. United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishing, 2004, p. 7
[2] Hardt, Hanno. Myths for the Masses: An Essay on Mass Communication. United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishing, 2004, p. 54
[3] Curran, James and Myung-Jin Park. De-Westernizing Media Studies. London: Routledge, 2000, p. 4