Human Communication
After some consideration, I believe I have formed my basic definition of human communication at this point. No outside resources were consulted while forming this definition, as I wished to investigate my own understanding of human communication at the beginning of the course. This will provide me a foundation on which to build, as well as a reference point for knowledge evaluation at the end of the course – thereby providing me the means to appropriately gauge my growth in my understanding of human communication. Accordingly, I divided human communication into three aspects: send/receive, response/no response, and verbal/non-verbal.
First, the most obvious aspect of human communication is the process of sending and receiving signals. The sender must initiate the communication by sending a signal of some form or another. It does not matter what form the signal takes, as long as it reaches its destination. Thus, because I am defining human communication, the destination must always be another human being. At the other end of the communication process is the receiver. The receiver obviously receives the message from the sender, decodes the message, and responds accordingly. This begins the cycle of human communication. By responding to the sender’s message, the receiver now becomes the sender. Consequently, the sender becomes the receiver, but only for a short duration – the time it takes to receive, decode, and respond to the most recent signal sent by the previous sender, who has just become the current receiver.
Secondly, after considering the necessity of a response by the receiver of any communication, including human communication, I deduced that response/no response should be included in my definition of human communication. Thus, while I had never considered the importance of response in communication, it quickly became apparent to me that, without response, the cycle of signal sending, and, consequently, communication, is often terminated. Notice, though, I did not argue that a lack of response implies a lack of communication. I can think of many times when I have been ignored – received no response whatsoever – after sending a communication signal. However, I most certainly considered the lack of response to be a form of communication. While I might consider it a form of signal sending, I believe I would more accurately label it a derivative of a typical signal. Unlike most signals, this signal – the lack of a response to a previously sent signal – quite often can be inferred as an effort to terminate the communication cycle.
Thirdly, I believe verbal and non-verbal communication cover a fairly broad spectrum of communication forms. In fact, if there are any other forms of communication, I am unaware of them at this time. Effectively, all actions taken by the sender, creating and deploying signals, are either verbal or non-verbal. However, the receiver does not communicate verbally or non-verbally, because, after decoding the signal, the receiver becomes the sender in order to offer a response, either verbally or non-verbally, thereby making the previous sender the new receiver, at least for the time being. This cycle of communication continues until it is terminated by one of the parties involved in the sending and receiving of signals – communication.