Recently I was thinking about communication, and what gets called “communication.” It seems to me that “communication” (the word) stands for the transmission of signals. Something emits a signal, and something else reads the signal. The signal has implications, and those implications are what is “read.”
Traditional communication goes like this: I write the following sentence in my blog:
‘I like to act.
It’s hard to count how many signals are given here, but for simplicity’s sake, let’s just say one signal–that I like to act. So what I do is, I write it (I write this signal) in my blog.
Presuming you speak English, you detect that signal. You do what we call “reading” of it. “Reading” simply means that you have the ability to draw appropriate implications from the signal. In this case, you draw that I like to act–that is, what is implied by the signal “I like to act” is that I like to act. If you “read” that signal appropriately, we call that “communication.” I’ve “communicated” with you.
Of course, if you read “I like to act” and conclude that I like to drive, or fight, or eat, then you’ve drawn an inappropriate implication from my signal, and we haven’t “communicated.”
Not all communication is verbal. Of course you know that. There are all sorts of body language that signal and imply. The expression on my face, if you know how to read faces, implies my mood. The yellow color of my skin implies, if you are medically inclined, jaundice. My foul breath implies, yes, that I didn’t take care of my mouth recently. Or it implies I don’t floss. Or it implies–who knows–the point is that it signals, and hence can imply.
Here is where the differentiation between intentional and unintentional signals, and thence intentional and unintentional communication, come into play. We signal intentionally, and when we do, we are aiming to communicate a specific implication. When we signal unintentionally, we still communicate implications, but maybe we don’t want to do this. Play poker? In poker, we call them “tells.” They give away information we don’t want others to know. I just watched Fargo, and Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) offers a lot of intentional and perhaps more telling unintentional signals, which have definite implications.
So from the above perspective, the key terminology in communication is “signal,” “implication,” “transmission,” and “reading.” We can also add in there the differentiators “intentional” and “unintentional.”
And those are my notes on reading intentional and unintentional signals.
See also: body-language, communication, fargo, implication, intention, reading, signal, transmission
August 20th, 2011
by Janos Abel
Dear Ben Hauck
I have been searching in cyberspace for general semanticists who are also activist on behalf of general semantics. All in vain.
That is how I got to your blog. And I am still frustrated. Not one of the sample statements on your home page refers to collective insanity in general let alone to the collective insanity of of world leaders.
Why is that? 80 years of general semantics and we still have “‘lunatics’ in charge of the asylum”.
Knowledge is responsibility and in my assessment the the community of general semanticists have not lived by that responsibility in the sense that it failed to expose ” ‘insanity’ in high places”.
Teaching, learning,knowledge, etc., is not enough if it does not lead to application.
Korzybski thought that the First World War would shock humanity into growing up. Then, following in the ‘footsteps’ of Manhood of Humanity, Stuart Chase laid out, in two books (The Tyranny of Words and The Economy of Abundance), the territory where GS should have been deployed and sanity restored.
What have GS ‘experts’ and teachers done about applying the expertise gained? It seems to me that they used GS as career opportunities.
Forgive me for being so blunt here… I am a retired working class person with a minima of formal education plus a two year apprenticeship in skilled engineering and, at age 74, I am in despair about the state humanity.
When will the ‘thinking layer’ of our species—especially the GS community—become a fighting force?
August 20th, 2011
by Ben Hauck
The Author
Janos, you say a lot in your post. First off, I’m curious what you mean by the term “collective insanity,” especially as it refers to world leaders. What behavior of which world leaders exemplifies for you “collective insanity”?