What is Communication?
(Based on the lecture from Wednesday November 6th
2013)
Catherine Buttner
Communication can be between two people or you can
communicate with your own self.
Communication is the transmission and reception of information. I. E. Richards, a 21st century
philosopher provides another angle of what communication is. It is the generation of meeting according to
him. Generation is about transmission
and reception- they both have the idea of movement and action. Generation is a kind of movement. Movement doesn’t necessarily mean that a
thing moves from point A to point B.
Movement can also involve growth.
So when an acorn is in the ground and it becomes a tree, it is not so much
that it is moving upward into space, but there is movement as it becomes transformed
from a seed into a tree. Meaning and
information have some overlap as well.
Sometimes we don’t think of information in terms of meaning. Something is not information if it doesn’t
mean anything. For example, meaningless
sound is often called noise because it communicates nothing. L. Griffin says that communication is the
management of messages for the purposes of creating meaning. All of these definitions involve movement and
action. They all involve a piece of
information or a message (a thing that carries meaning). The context of meaning is always
personal. The meaning is not included in
the transmission. Transmission is only
referring to the movement of the information (i.e. the sending of meaning). The
latin word formare means “to form”. To
transform is to carry this form to one area to another. The meaning changes both ends of the
communication (the person who sends the information and the recipient of
it). The consciousness is the meaning.
You are not just a mind, and it’s not a mind-body dualism type of thing. Your consciousness is also a part of your
bodily experience.
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