Communications

Communications

Communication (from Latin: communicare, meaning "to share" or "to be in relation with") is "an apparent answer to the painful divisions between self and other, private and public, and inner thought and outer world."As this definition indicates, communication is difficult to define in a consistent manner,because in common use it refers to a very wide range of different behaviours involved in the propagation of information. John Peters argues the difficulty of defining communication emerges from the fact that communication is both a universal phenomenon (because everyone communicates) and a specific discipline of institutional academic study.

In Claude Shannon's and Warren Weaver's influential model, human communication was imagined to function like a telephone or telegraph. Accordingly, they conceptualized communication as involving discrete steps:

• The formation of communicative motivation or reason.
• Message composition (further internal or technical elaboration on what exactly to express).
• Message encoding (for example, into digital data, written text, speech, pictures, gestures and so on).
• Transmission of the encoded message as a sequence of signals using a specific channel or medium.
• Noise sources such as natural forces and in some cases human activity (both intentional and accidental) begin influencing the quality of signals propagating from the sender to one or more receivers.
• Reception of signals and reassembling of the encoded message from a sequence of received signals.
• Decoding of the reassembled encoded message.
• Interpretation and making sense of the presumed original message.