Ten Communication Basics

based on Hanneman, Gerhard J. Communication and Behavior. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1975.

1.     One cannot not communicate.

That is, one cannot not communicate.

2.     Behavior has significance, it is symbolic.

a.      When we interact with others, anything we do communicates:

b.     Silence may indicate “No, I don’t want to recognize you”;

c.      Walking away is also interpretable—that is, it is symbolic (has meaning).

d.     If all our behavior with people communicates—that is, has significance—is symbolic—then communication is the organizing element among humans as a species.

3.     Symbolic behavior (the use of a common language) sets man off from animals.

a.      Through communication we reduce uncertainty about our environment.

b.     Hanneman: “The organization of any way of life depends upon our ability to predict the behaviors of others in our environment. The less we are able to anticipate what will occur, the less our behavior is controlled: uncertainty exists about the event. Because an individual cannot communicate with everyone in a society, a certain amount of unpredictability always exists. For this reason, parties are fun: in such settings we can interact with persons whose behavior is not entirely predictable. Additionally, many of the cultural constraints on our behavior are often ignored in party settings, another reason for the heightened sense of unpredictability.”

c.      Although uncertainty about behavior can be tolerated in defined settings, such as a party, disorganization in society is not very functional. Typically, we communicate so that our expectations are not violated.

4.     When we reduce uncertainty, we impose control over our environment; thus communication behavior becomes predictable.

a.      In one sense of the word, then, communication is synonymous with control: control of our relationships, control of our environment.

b.     We communicate to resolve our uncertainty about the other person, the topics of communication, or our environment. We also communicate in order to resolve uncertainty about the other person’s perceptions about ourselves.

c.      The derivation of this statement is a premise popularly held: Information is power.

d.     This means that the more we know about a phenomenon (you), the better it can be predicted and our behavior planned accordingly.

e.      For these reasons communication and behavior are inseparable. Behavior is communication and communication is behavior. To think of one without the other is naive.

5.     Culture is one shared constraint that permits predictability of a set of behaviors for those who share that culture.

Think of the culture in which you participate. You understand some of its character, internalize certain of its values, and constrain your social behavior accordingly. Note that the shared culture you and a friend possess already organizes or controls what behavior is tolerable. One can predict your behavior from a knowledge of what culture you are a part of. Such a social unit of behavior is the reason that foreign visitors to a new culture stand out: They are at a loss to predict the consequences of their behavior; they find it difficult to control their interactions. As a result, people in new cultures often overcompensate, and may express their values ostentatiously.

6.     Meanings are in people, according to Hanneman and others.

a.      They are relative and are based on experiences.

b.     If we are raised in a common culture, we will have at least some common experiences and thus can probably agree on the definition of many words.

c.      Cross-cultural communication is a more severe problem because participants don’t share the homogeneous background that we (for example) as media-saturated Americans share.

7.     Communication is symbolic.

a.      It could be said that intent is always present inasmuch as communication participants share a common code or use a common language to construct messages. When we do not share a common code, we do not have similar referents—that is, meanings for the words we use—and cannot communicate in the literal sense, although we may be participating in a communication act. However, in order for communication to take place, there must be some common interpretation of the words being spoken. For this reason, we can define communication as message transaction among participants. This way we get away from the notion of one person communicating to another. When we’re talking about the concept of process, we mean an ongoing interaction with one person being a source at one moment and a receiver of the other person’s responses at another moment.

b.     The symbols that we use, those utterances that we hear, do not have meanings in themselves. However, this meaning that we attach to that symbol is based upon our ability to recognize the pattern. As we shall see, the notion of pattern is a concept that pervades the entire field of communication research.

8.     Our perception of the world affects our language, but our language also affects our perception of the world.

“The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” Wittgenstein—if we don’t have a label we can’t pattern what we experience.

9.     Communication is a process

A process is the continuous interaction of a large number of variables with a continuous change in the values taken by those variables. A process approach to an area of behavior---such as communication---rejects static outlooks and stipulates that events can’t be looked at as having a specific “beginning” or “end.” It takes the viewpoint that everything is interactive.

10.  If communication is a process, meanings are relative, according to Hanneman.

a.      There are no “correct” meanings.

b.     Then what do we accept as a true indicator of a person’s attitude?

a.      From a scientific point of view, we need an indicator of attitude that is unequivocal to all and that can be reproduced by other researchers who might want to repeat our investigation.

b.     Thus social scientists agree that the fundamental “truth” accepted is that which is called “operationalization.”

c.      We must specify our measurement procedures.

d.     Thus, we take some observable behavior—for instance, a person’s mark on a piece of paper—as being the true meaning of his or her attitude. In other words, we operate on those marks as if they were the attitudes themselves.