Recently I was thinking about communication, and what gets called “communication.”\u00a0 It seems to me that “communication” (the word) stands for the transmission of signals.\u00a0 Something emits a signal, and something else reads the signal.\u00a0 The signal has implications, and those implications are what is “read.”<\/p>\n
Traditional communication goes like this: I write the following sentence in my blog:<\/p>\n
‘<\/span><\/div>I like to act.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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.\u00a0 So what I do is, I write it (I write this signal)\u00a0in my blog.<\/p>\n
Presuming you speak English, you\u00a0detect that signal.\u00a0 You do what we call “reading” of it.\u00a0 “Reading” simply means that you have the ability to draw appropriate implications from the signal.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 If you “read” that signal appropriately, we call that “communication.”\u00a0 I’ve “communicated” with you.<\/p>\n
Of course, if you read “I like to act” and conclude that I like to drive, or fight, or eat, then you’ve\u00a0drawn an inappropriate<\/em> implication from my signal, and we haven’t “communicated.”<\/p>\n
Not all communication is verbal.\u00a0 Of course you know that.\u00a0 There are all sorts of body language that signal and imply.\u00a0 The expression on my face, if you know how to read faces, implies my mood.\u00a0 The yellow color of my skin implies, if you are medically inclined, jaundice.\u00a0 My foul breath implies, yes, that I didn’t take care of my mouth recently.\u00a0 Or it implies I don’t floss.\u00a0 Or it implies–who knows–the point is that it signals, and hence can imply.<\/p>\n
Here is where the differentiation between intentional and unintentional signals, and thence intentional and unintentional communication, come into play.\u00a0 We signal intentionally, and when we do, we are aiming to communicate a specific implication.\u00a0 When we signal unintentionally, we still communicate implications, but maybe we don’t want to do this.\u00a0 Play poker?\u00a0 In poker, we call them “tells.”\u00a0 They give away information we don’t want others to know.\u00a0 I just watched Fargo<\/em>, and Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) offers a lot of intentional and perhaps more telling unintentional<\/em> signals, which have definite implications.<\/p>\n
So from the above perspective, the key terminology in communication is “signal,” “implication,” “transmission,” and “reading.”\u00a0 We can also add in there the differentiators “intentional” and “unintentional.”<\/p>\n
And those are my notes on reading intentional and unintentional signals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Recently I was thinking about communication, and what gets called “communication.”\u00a0 It seems to me that “communication” (the word) stands for the transmission of signals.\u00a0 Something emits a signal, and something else reads the signal.\u00a0 The signal has implications, and those implications are what is “read.” Traditional communication goes like this: I write the following […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[312,213,313,277,224,311,309,310],"class_list":["post-1181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-semantics","tag-body-language","tag-communication","tag-fargo","tag-implication","tag-intention","tag-reading","tag-signal","tag-transmission"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1181"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1181\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1187,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1181\/revisions\/1187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}