Visakan Jayaswetha Vanagopal

“Everything changes except change itself”. These were the words of Mark Twain. I sometimes wonder how he coined these golden words that really define the present and the future. It must have been easy, if you really think about it. Change is something that I have been encountering from the day I came to the US. In fact, I am sure most of my Indian colleagues will accept with me. Of all the new concepts that I have come across, it is the concept of “Thriving on Chaos” that really intrigued me. Let me explain why.

One of the immediate comparisons that I could figure out when I heard of the concept of “Thriving on Chaos”, was the traffic situation in India. The reason being that it is not only confusion and disorderliness that exist on the roads, it is also what Tom Peters had defined chaos to be “Constant Change”. My father, an experienced doctor, has been driving on these roads for the past 25 years and one of the first lessons that he taught me when I took the wheel was to be defensive driver. What he means is that you have to anticipate what others on the road might do and prepare yourself to react accordingly. This means that we have to always be prepared for change. The change might be unexpected and fast. There are no lane disciplines followed- it is quite normal to see an old person riding his bicycle on a “lane” that is meant for buses and other heavy vehicles. You really don’t have to stop when there is red signal. In most of the lanes the “No Entry” board remains plainly as a board. There is no compulsion to wear your seat belts and people hardly follow speed limits. If you try to be The Samurai on the road and stick to rules, you would end up being the bad guy with everyone cursing you and forcing you to “stick to the rules”. Rules are meant to be broken. This situation exists not just on the road. It’s everywhere- from ticket “queues” to the crowd in buses and trains. Buses which have a capacity of holding just 45 people, ply everyday with over 100 people on board. EVERYDAY. It is acceptable to go to a meeting after the scheduled start time. We never really had to turn in things in time.

Well, the beauty of the whole system is that we Indians learnt to accept and adapt to these chaotic situations, everyday of our lives. We never complained. You might argue that it is this passive nature of the public that forces the situation to remain the same. Trust me, it requires a revolution to change the scenario completely. It is possible, though. The change is happening slowly but steadily. But my point here is that we saw a harmony in the chaos. It was our tremendous ability to keep our heads steady when everything around us was going havoc. We hardly found these situations CHAOTIC. But when we arrived in the US and came into the Center for Information and Communication Sciences, Ball State University, for the first time, it was a total change. Yes, we had to turn in to meetings on time. We had to submit assignments on time. We had to take initiative in doing things rather than wait for orders. The system of credits, GPA, online exams were all new to us. Things were changing everyday. We kept discovering new things and new systems. Constant change is what it is. We found this orderliness and systematization to be chaotic.

But I still remember one of the slides that Dr.Jones had shown us during the first day of class – “NO WHINING”. We never did. We fought our way up the learning curve and we are still fighting. It is even tougher for us, but we are taking up the challenge as we are expected to. We did do mistakes, we did fall down. But we learnt to pull ourselves up and dust ourselves and prepare ourselves for the next blow. We did learn from the mistakes. We had to change from arriving to meetings late to arriving on time and eventually arriving early. There is no easy way out and no shortcuts. I write this blog not to find excuses, I write this to just let people understand the kind of culture and chaos that we come from. I wanted to let people know that what might be chaotic to you might be in order to others. I ought to mention that we are finding it very comfortable working with the Americans and they have been very supportive and tolerant to us.

We know and understand that things are going to get tougher. With a total change in the weather expected (we haven’t lived in temperatures lower that 40 degree Fahrenheit), we are going to find it difficult. But I guess, we “mice” will eventually find our way through the maze and open the right door that gets us to the “cheese”. We will find the harmony in this chaos too and will continue to thrive on it

Well, talking of our reaction to the traffic in the US…..what can I say…… its “chaotic”.

Posted by vjayaswethav at 07:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Communication-The Human Way
Human communication is a very vast subject and it is the human aspect of the subject that makes it very interesting. Communication occurs all the time and it is important to understand the concepts and barriers in order make communication effective. The nuance of emotion is also another important aspect of human communication that needs to be studied. There are many more interesting aspects of human communication that needs to be researched that will help us in understanding the difference between humans and machines. This is just an attempt to elaborate the difference.

Communication is the process by which information is exchanged between two bodies (humans, computers etc.) by various methods 1.Though the process of communication is common for that between machines and that between humans, the characteristics differ. Emotions, use of language, comprehensibility etc. are some of the important aspects of human communication that has generated a lot of research interests in this subject. The fact that every individual is different from others and every one has their own way of communicating and expressing their emotions makes the study of this subject even more interesting.
Human communication is basically divided into two types viz.,
1. Verbal Communication, and
2. Non-Verbal Communication
Verbal communication is the type of communication that deals with the exchange of words as the method of transmitting information. The language used is one of the important factors that determine the effectiveness of the information communicated.
Written communication is also a type of verbal communication. Here, as the name suggests, information is transferred through writing. Letters, emails etc. are some of the mediums used for verbal communication. During speaking, air is the most common medium used.

Non-verbal communication is defined as the type of communication where there are no words exchanged between the communicators but there is a message that is transmitted between them. Body language, paralanguage, gestures, signals, use of symbols, etc. are some types of communications that are non-verbal. Symbolic communication is the type of communication that uses symbols to communicate. For example, when a car has the indicator lights flickering, it communicates to us that the driver intends to steer the car to the right (or left), which means that we have to give way or slow down. There are no words exchanged, but the message is transmitted. The use of symbols, though, is very important in making communication effective. Non-symbolic communication 2 is the type where there are no explicit symbols used, but there lies a message that has to be transmitted. For instance, an abstract art or music does not explicitly use symbols to transmit message, but the receiver comprehends the art or music and derives a message from it. Like the old adage goes: “a picture is worth a thousand words”. Also, when a person does not respond to a message and maintains silence, it is amazing to know that there is a message that is being transmitted even in the silence.
Non-verbal communication is that aspect that helps us to even extend the communication process from human-human and animal-animal to human-animal. It is very fascinating to know that in Central Washington University, there exists an institute called Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute (CHCI) 3 which is researching currently on developing communication skills in chimpanzees which can enable them to communicate with each other using the American Sign Language (ASL), which even helps humans to understand them. Also, the use of sign language has also helped the hearing and speech impaired people to communicate to others and within themselves and has opened the boundaries of their lives. Sign language is used even now as a means of teaching in schools for the deaf and the dumb.
Emotions, as I had mentioned earlier, is a very interesting aspect of human communication where the type of emotions used vary from person to person. This holds good especially when there exists oral communication. The stress on words, the intonations, tones etc. play an important role in this. For instance, “I would like to see you”, can be told as “I would like to see you.” where the stress is on the word “I”. This implies that the person who wants to see (sender) the other person (receiver) wants to stress that he wants to see the person for more important reasons than others. If the sentence is told as “I would like to see you”, it implies that the person wants to stress on the fact that the physical presence of the other person is a more important aspect here.
Tears, laughter, a smile, frown, hand movements, raising eyebrows, etc. are some of the types of emotions that humans use during communication. Emotions can also be shown in writing. The types of words used, the type of language used, exclamation and question marks etc. are some of the type of emotions used in writing.

Process of Communication:
The process of communication is a very simple concept. The sender and the receiver are needed to be identified first. Then,
1. The message needs to be encoded.
2. Medium chosen and transmission done.
3. The receiver needs to decode the message
4. The reply needs to be sent by the same process.

Though the concept is simple, not all communications are successful. There exists a communication gap in every communication and the wideness of the gap determines the ineffectiveness of the communication. More the gap, more ineffective the communication is and vice versa. So, some extensive research needs to be done in understanding the process of communication, in order to make it effective.

Shannon-Weaver model of Communication:
Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver developed a model for communication. As per their model, a message first originates from the information source and is transmitted through a transmitter and then eventually reaches the receiver. According to them, the message also gets disturbed by external factors called noise which alters the message and eventually can result in ineffective communication.
This is a very helpful model in understanding the difficulties in communication and the reasons for the communication gap.

Information Source ========> Message Sent Transmitter ========> Signal Sent Sources of Noise ========> Signal Received Receiver ========> Message Received Destination

Fig.1 Shannon – Weaver Model of Communication 4

For effective communication to exist between the two there are a lot of factors that must be given attention to. The various factors are language, medium, and relevance of the message and the ability of the receiver to comprehend the message.
For communication to be effective, it is necessary that the language used is understood by the receiver. This is the first step for effective communication. Language doesn’t necessarily mean the verbal language.
The medium used also plays an important role in effective communication. For example, when the sender encodes the message through text (typing) and chooses the medium as e-mail or fax, the receiver should also be having the same facility so that he is able to decode the message and more importantly he must be able to reply through the same medium. If the medium used is not appropriate for the message, then communication becomes ineffective.
The emotions used while delivering the message is very important especially during verbal communication. It is even more important when the two bodies are talking to each other in person.
It is very important that the receiver is able to understand the context and the relevance of the message that sender is exchanging. For example, it is inappropriate for the sender to speak about history in a class of telecommunication unless the receiver is able to understand the context. This aspect lays primarily in the hands of the sender to see to it that the relevance and the context of the message is properly understood for effective communication.

Ability of the receiver to understand the message is also another important factor. A very simple example is that we can talk about the concept of Integral calculus to an 8 year old kid. This concept can extend to higher levels depending of the complexity of the message and the ability of the receiver.

Conclusion:
It will not be possible to cover all the areas of human communication in one paper. As mentioned earlier, this is just an attempt to help us understand the prominence of communication everywhere and the factors that make it effective. Understanding and applying these concepts will definitely make communication more effective.

References:
1. Wikipedia , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication
2. http://stevefournier01.tripod.com/hist/hist-6.html
3. Central Washington University - http://www.cwu.edu/~cwuchci/
4. http://home.earthlink.net/~leemarrs/emd/symb2.html

Posted by vjayaswethav at 02:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)