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Default Journalism/comunication

This is the chapter #1 of Journalism. It is perhaps the most toughest of my works. I had to break different chapters of different books and compile them in way that they can be understood altogather. I am leaving few things out, as they are bit complicated. Will take time, perhaps a day or two but I'll post them InshaAllah. Meanwhile have fun with this.
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CHAPTER#1
COMMUNICATION
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CONTENTS



1.1 SHORT INTRODUCTION


1.2 DEFINITIONS AND MEANINGS OF COMMUNICATION


1.3 THREE ELEMENTS REQUIRED BY COMMUNICATION


1.4 PROCEDURE OF COMMUNICATION


1.5 EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION


1.6 TYPES OF COMMUNICATION


1.7 LIMITATION & PROBLEMS IN COMMUNICATION


1.8 TWO-STEP FLOW OF COMMUNICATION & ROLE OF OPINION LEADER


1.9 SUMMRY





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1.1 SHORT INTRODUCTION AND DEFINITIONS & MEANINGS OF COMMUNICATION
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SHORT INTRODUCTION


The word ‘communication’ from the Latin word “Communis” meaning ‘Common.’ When we communicate we are trying to establish“Commonness” with someone. That is we are trying to share information, an idea or an attitude.

The essence of communication makes the receiver and the sender “tuned” together for particular message.

DEFINITIONS AND MEANINGS OF COMMUNICATION


• Sending, giving or exchanging of information, ideas etc.

• Process by which information is exchanged between individuals through a common system of symbols, signs or behaviors.

• Technique for expressing ideas effectively in a speech.

• Giving or exchanging of information, signals or messages by talk, gestures, writing etc.

• System of sending or receiving messages, by means like telephone, telegraph, radio etc.

• An intercourse by words, letters or messages and inter-change of ideas or opinions.

• “The imparting, conveying, or exchanging of ideas, knowledge, etc – whether by Speech, writing or sings” --- Oxford English Dictionary.

• Transfer of thoughts and messages.

• The mechanism through which human relation exists and develops.

COMMUNICATION: Today we might define communication simply by saying that it is the sharing of an orientation toward a set of informational signs.

Or

COMMUNICATION is the transmitting information, ideas and attitude from one person to another.


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THREE ELEMENTS REQUIRED BY COMMUNICATION
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Communication always requires at least three elements, which are:

1. The Source:

A source may be an individual (speaking, writing, drawing, gesturing) or a communication organization (like a newspaper, publishing house, television station/channel, or motion picture studio).

2. The Message:

Any thing real or imagined capable of eliciting one or more responses directly or indirectly from a human, sub-human or non human receiver in a time free context is called message.

A message may be inform of ink on a paper, sound waves in the air, impulses in an electric current, a wave of the hand, a flag in the air, or any other signal capable of being interpreted meaningfully.

3. The Destination

The destination may be an individual listening, watching, or reading, or a member of a group, such as a discussion group, a lecture audience, a cricket crowd, a mob, or a mass audience.

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PROCEDURE OF COMMUNICATION
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First the source encodes his message. That is he takes the information or feeling he wants to share and puts it into a form that can be transmitted – the pictures in our heads can be transmitted unless they are coded. When they are coded into spoken words, they can be transmitted easily and effectively, but they can’t travel very far unless a secondary source like radio carries them. If they are coded in written words, they can go far but more slowly than the spoken words. Once coded and sent, a message is quite free of its sender, and what it does is beyond the power of the sender to change. For in order to complete the act of communication the message must be decoded.

If the source does not have adequate or clear information, if the message is not encoded fully, accurately, effectively in transmittable signs, if messages are not transmitted fast and accurately enough to the desired receiver, and specially if the message is not decoded in a patter that corresponds to the encoding, and finally, if the destination is unable to handle the decoded message so as to produce the desired response – than obviously, the system is working at less than top efficiency.

A system like this, to have a maximum capacity for handling information, will depend on the separate capacities of each unit on the chain. For example;

• The capacity of a channel = How fast one can talk?

• The capacity of encoder = can your student understand some thing explain quickly enough?

If the coding is good –e.g. No unnecessary words – the capacity of the channel can be approached, but it can never be exceeded.

An important element during the communication process is redundancy. There are two types of redundancy in communication, which are as followed:

1. Language Redundancy, meaning the percentage of the message which is not open to free choice.

2. Communicator’s Redundancy, which is an important aspect of constructing a message. If we think audience or destination or receiver may have hard time understanding the message, we can deliberately introduce more redundancy. We can do this by repeating (just as radio operator on ship may send “SOS” or a Pilot may send “May Day, May Day” over and over again to make sure it is herd and decoded) or we can give “examples” and “analogies.” In other words, we always have to choose between transmitting more information in a given time, or transmitting less and repeating more in the hope of being better understood.

It is often difficult choice to adopt redundancy as it slows down rate of communication. Too slow a rate will bore an audience, whereas too fast a rate may confuse the audience.

The most important thing in the process of communication is the fact that RECEIVER and SENDER must be in tune. This is somewhat complicated when it means that human receiver must be able to understand a human sender.

The source can encode, and the destination can decode only in terms of the experience each has had. E.g. If you come across some one from a remote village who has never seen an airplane and you tell him what airplane is, he will only decode the sight of a plane in terms of what ever experience he has had. The air plane in his mind might appear as a bird.

If there has been no common experience, then communication is impossible. If the experiences of the source and destination have been strikingly unlike than it is going to be very difficult to get an intended meaning across from one to the other.

To avoid these difficulties, the source than tries to encode in such a way as to make it easy for the destination to tune in the message or relate the message to its parts of his experience which are much like to those of the source.

Messages are made up of SIGNS. A sign is a signal that stands for some thing in experience. The word “dog” is a sign that stands for our generalized experience with dogs. The word would be meaningless for someone who comes from a dog less place or for some one who has never seen or herd of a dog. But most of us are well acquainted with the word and the animal “Dog”. If someone called out “Dog”, we would recall the appearance of dogs, their sound, their feel, their smells and other experiences we might have had with dogs. But there is an important difference between a SIGN and an OBJECT. --- Sign always represents the object at reduced level of cues, by this mean that sings will not call forth all the responses that the object it self will call forth. A sign may not call forth in us the wariness or attention a strange dog might attract if it wandered into our presence. This is the price we pay for the portability in language. We have sign system that can use in place of the less portable originals e.g. a writer can write an article on dropping of atomic-bomb, while an artist can draw a picture to make the writers were vivid. But our sign system is merely a short hand. The coder has to be able to write the short hand and decoder should be able to read it.

It is obvious that each person in the communication process is both an encoder and decoder. He receives and transmits. He must be able to write readable shorthand.


WHAT HAPPENS WHEN SIGNAL COMES TO US?


Remember that signal comes in form of a sign. If we have learned the sign, we have learned certain responses with it. We can call these responses mediatory responses, because the mediate what happens to the message in your nervous system. These responses hold meanings of the communication signs for us. They are learned from experience but are also affected by the state of our organism at the moment. E.g. a picture of steak will not arouse exactly the same response in us when we are overfed as it would when we are hungry.

The mediatory response is connected to various sets of other responses. Considering the various affects, the mediatory response will than determine which set of response is suitable for a certain signal. Meaning; on receiving a particular SIGN will start certain a process in our nerves and muscles. For example; let’s take “Fire” as a SIGN, this will trigger certain activity in us considering the scenario we have come across the fire. Considering that “Fire” represents danger, it will start a process in our nerves and muscles (nervous system) which will make us call/yell for “HELP.”


COMMUNICATION IS CONTINIOUS PROCESS


It is very important to note that communication is a continuous process in which we are constantly engaged. We are constantly decoding signs from our environment, interpreting these signs and encoding something as a result. It is misleading to think of the communication process has a starting or ending point somewhere. It passes through various sources, but changed by the interpretation, habits, abilities and capabilities of each source. However, the input is always reflected in the output.

CHANNELS OF COMMUNICATION


The final element of the communication process is “Channel.” In any sort of communication we rarely send out message through single channel. When we speak to each other, the sound waves from our voice are the primary channel. But there are others: the expression of our face, our gestures, relation of given message to past message, our attitude etc. Even the primary channel, in this case our voice, has various sub-channels. E.g. it gives words to decode, gives emphasis to certain words over others. The presentation, pattern of intonation and timing contribute to the total meaning to information we are conveying and thus they too are sub-channels to primary channel, which is our voice. The quality of our voice, e.g. deep, high, shrill, rasping, rich, thin, loud, soft etc, it self carries about us and what we are saying, thus they are also important sub-channels of primary channel.

In the case of print media, where the channels are most restricted, there still exist multiple channel situations. Meaning is not only conveyed by words in news but also by the size of headline, the position on the page and the page in the paper; the association with pictures, the use of boldface and other typographical devices.

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EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATIONS
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(HOW COMMUNICATION HAS AN EFFECT?)

The chief reason we study the process of communication is to learn its effects and how are they achieved. Our objective is to know what a given kind of communication does to people. We want to be able to predict what kind of effects a given message will have upon its receiver. Nevertheless it is possible that our predictions can go wrong, in such case our communication has been a failure. The major reason for the failure off our communication can be improper implementation of the “conditions of successful communication.”

Conditions of successful communication – by this we mean the conditions which must be fulfilled if the message is to arouse its intended responses (the message which arouses intended response is an effective communication). These conditions are:

1. The message must be designed and delivered as to gain the attention of the intended destination.

2. The message must employee signs which refer to experience common to source and destination, so as to “get the meaning across.”

3. The message must arouse personality needs in the destination and suggest some ways to meet those needs.

4. The message must suggest a way to meet those needs which the destination finds him self at the time when he is moved to make the desired responses.


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TYPES OF COMMUNICATION
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1. INTERA-PERSONAL COMMUNICATION:

Intra-personal communication takes place within an individual. It is the basis of all other forms of human communication. Without an effective intra-personal communication, an organism is unable to function in its environment. Ideally this communication system allows a person to make a decision based on information received through the senses ---For example: When we are watching a program on TV, our eyes and ears receive information and communicate it to our brain. If what we see and hear holds interest to us, our intra-personal communication will indicate our interest to our brain and we will attend and pay more attention to that program. If we don not like the program, the intra-personal communication system will send signals to brain which in return will messages to our muscles which will result in us changing the channel or turning off the TV.

NOTE: In inter personal communication; our “eyes and ears” become the SENDERS or TRANSMITTERS of message through a medium of communication, which in this case is our central nervous system. Our “brain” becomes the receiver, which in turn transmits addition responses or impulses in form of a “FEEDBACK” which results in some sort of physical activity e.g. changing the TV Channel.


2. INTER-PERSONAL COMMUNICATION:

Inter-personal communication is face-to-face communication. Let us suppose we are talking to a friend across the room, in such case ‘we’ are the “Sender”, our ‘speech’ is the “medium”, our words are the “message” to a friend who is “Receiver” and the reply by our friend with an approval is the “Feedback.” While we are speaking and our friend is reacting or replying, inter-personal communication is taking place.

To understand inter-personal communication, it is important to recognize that each of us possesses a field of experience. When we communicate inter-personally, our fields of experience overlap. The further a relationship between two people advances, the more the field of experience will overlap. This overlapping of fields of experience is called homophily. The greater the homophily, the greater are the chances of effective meaningful Inter-personal communication taking place.

3. EXTRA-PERSONAL COMMUNICATION:

Another form of communication is extra-personal communication. In this form of communication we share our impressions from our environment with other life forms, i.e. Animals and Plants.

• FEEDBACK:

We now need to add another element to our description of the communication process. There is always a return response to our message. This return process is called Feedback. It plays a very important part in communication as it tells us how our message in being interpreted by the receiver. The nodding of the head in agreement, the puzzled expression on the forehead, the looking away in lack of interest etc. --- all these responses by the receiver are form of a FEEDBACK and tells us how our message is being received.

It is not only the receiver who gives the feedback. In many cases the sender is also a receiver and also the one who is giving the feedback. This means we get feedback from our own messages. That is when we replay our message, that we are about to send, we hear our own voices and can correct mispronunciations if any. If we have written something we, we can re-read it and make corrections and changes if required. The kind of FEEDBACK information we get from our own message help us guide our information further and repair damages, if any.

Since feedback is a part of communication and takes place in all kinds of communications, it is subjected to be contaminated; by this we mean that feedback can be disrupted, disturbed or interfered by a NOISE.


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LIMITATION & PROBLEMS IN COMMUNICATION
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• NOISE:

The problem during any type of communication is NOISE. Noise is an activity that disrupts the process of communication or it is any thing that interferes with the message. Noise is usually external, in form of a sound from any object. We also experience internal noise in form of headache. The noise can temporarily distort the process of communication, distract us from the communication topic and even add new factors to our decision making task.

There are two known types of noise:

1. CHANNEL NOISE:

It interferes in the physical transmission of the message produces distraction between the Source and the Receiver. It interferes with the signal as it passes between human communicators.

The professional communicators try to overcome such effects by paying more attention or by the principle of redundancy.

Example of Channel Noise: When we are reading a newspaper and an ambulance with siren passing through distracts us, or when a fast moving car splashes mud on the news paper, the distraction that occurs than is Channel Noise.

NOTE: The Channel noise usually occurs during “intra-personal communication.”


2. SEMANTIC NOISE:


This occurs when a message is misunderstood even though it is received exactly as it was transmitted. E.g. the communicator may use difficult words which audience are unable to understand or a name that is unknown to the reader or a word understood by the audience but in some other sense.

The semantic noise can be reduced if the communicator defines terms and adjust vocabulary to the interests and needs of the audience.

NOTE: The Semantic Noise usually occurs during “inter-personal communication.”


• DELAYED FEEDBACK:

Another problem that can occur in communication is delayed feedback. This occurs when responses between two people are accounted for by the time delay. Delayed feedback usually occurs because of noise, misunderstanding of the message, which in return will require us to prepare a new message and re-convey it. And all this will take time.

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TWO-STEP FLOW OF COMMUNICATION & ROLE OF AN OPINION LEADER
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coming soon .....
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[COLOR="DarkRed"][B]17th amendment is mockery of our constitution !. May those who have implemented it burn in hell ![/B][/COLOR]

Last edited by Andrew Dufresne; Friday, February 05, 2010 at 09:14 AM. Reason: Kindly avoid using red color
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