The Breakdown of Communication

What is communication? There are unlimited ways to answer this question. There are three types of communication, individual, mass, and group.

Individual communication is One person communicating to another person or a small group of people rather than a mass audience. Mass communication is one person talking to a mass audience. There are three qualifications that a way of communication must pass for it to be considered mass communication. First off there can not be any immediate feedback. Secondly, there must be the potential to reach a mass audience. Finally, it must travel through space and time. For example, this blog is a way of mass communication. Since it is online I cannot see my audiences initial reaction. If someone copied and pasted this whole article and put it on a public social media profile anybody could view it giving it the potential to reach a mass audience. This entry is being transferred from my computer to blog spot and can be viewed from any computer at any time until I delete it. Thus traveling across space and over time. The third type of communication is group communication. In group communication a person and a certain audience are communicating back and forth. If I were to stand up in front of an audience and read this to a group of people and the whole first row starts to fall asleep they are communicating to me that to them this entry is boring.

Now there is a whole lot more to communication, in fact there is a whole process. A process that starts with stimulus and internalization. Now lets say I have an idea for a new T.V show. In order for your mind to digest my idea it has to go through encoding, transmission, and decoding for you to be able to internalize it. So i have this idea for a show right? Well during encoding I must write the script, hire the actors, and burn it to a tape. During transmission the audience must have something like Netflix or cable. Then during decoding the audience must turn on the T.V and watch my show.

During the communication process there are filters and impediments. There are three of each, I'll start with filters first. The physical filter says "I cant" and happens during decoding and internalization. The psychological filter says "I wont" and happens in the brain. The informational filter says "I don't know how." Now the impediments. The first is semantic noise which happens in encoding. The second is channel noise which happens during transmission and the third is environmental noise which happens during decoding.

So hopefully through this whole entry you've at the least learned the communication is not such a surface word. It has more depth than most people realize.