Communication, Revisited

What is communication?

This is the basis of civilization, and the foundation for all human interactions. Life exists as it does today because of the effectiveness of our developed abilities to share ideas, perceptions, and emotions between people. Think about it, how can you build a house without communicating? How can ideas spread, and what education without language? Everything that involves more than one person involves communication, but yet it can still be so obscure.

While we have learned to convey the vast majority of messages amongst individuals, there are still areas in which there lies great room for improvement, and that would involve just about every communication that involves people who have emotions. Last I checked, that didn't leave anyone out of this issue. The thing is, as I mentioned before, communication crosses through filters that modify the original content into a message for the listener. This is not always good. Oftentimes it is beneficial, because it converts information coming from one person into a form that the second person can hear, but in the instances where those two messages differ, there lies the potential for conflict.

Interpretations are frequent roots of quarrels, as they relate information present with assumptions that may or may not be valid. Interpretations are not always bad, for example if I say “Meet me at two at the train station”, it would be fairly safe to assume that I mean two in the afternoon, not in the morning, unless there are other indications in the conversation that indicate otherwise. Such an assumption could save a lot of hassle, so you don’t end up wasting a few hours of the night waiting for a non-existent train to arrive.

Many times, though, this is not the case, and assumptions can get you in trouble. Many times, though, they tend to reflect the receiver more than they do the communicator. This is because it is entirely up to the receiver to make sense of the messages he or she received, and this may require supplemental information that the speaker failed to provide. So, as a result, someone may take meaning from glances, gestures, and inflictions that are simply done without any meaning or thought. And many times, a failure to act in a certain way is also received as a communication, not one that was not intended.

The key to this mess lies in distinguishing information that arrived via assumptions versus that which arrived via direct intentional language. Being able to discern the two can help someone know when to trust what they know, or when to acknowledge a certain room for error in their understanding. If it were easier to think of one’s self as being wrong, many disagreements would be avoided.

But since when is that easy?