What is Communication and how do we define it?

This week's lecture took us on an interesting journey through the history of communication technology. It also kicked off a journey in myself of starting to look at things in a different way. For example, I had always tagged cave paintings as Art and to now see them as a form of communication has put them in a different setting.

I suppose this in itself is showing the dynamic process of communication. We were introduced to Aristotle's theory from his work "Rhetoric" [Speaker-Message-Audience]. So the Lecturer had a message to impart to the students and, in my case, it changed my viewpoint. This is where the "intersubjectivity" comes in as the message was obviously received my unique set of subjective experiences, whereas others may have already thought of cave paintings as communication rather than art. So this had the biggest impact: all the things that can get in the way of the message being received by the receiver i.e. the quality of the message, whether it's clear enough to be heard, the ideas and attitudes of the receiver and their own interpretation. It makes you think about advertising/public relations campaigns and how they try to control a certain message and spending huge amounts of money to do so.

It was also fascinating to learn that writing is the evolution of sound. I had never made that connection before. It brought in the history of a certain form of communication and how, over time, we build upon each layer of knowledge and discovery. From hieroglyphics to Twitter!

(Note: There's a different username with this post as I changed my primary email)