What Is Communication?

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Nobody said a word on the bus

Imagine this: half past seven in the morning, a bus packed to the doors. The person in the next seat has earphones in and eyes fixed on the window. You are looking at your phone; they pull their bag a little closer. Nobody has said a word. (This scene is hypothetical, but you have probably lived something like it.)

And yet an agreement was reached. You said “I won’t bother you”, they said “don’t talk to me”. Maybe you both misread the other; but you read.

That is the first surprising question of this lesson: is silence communication? Paul Watzlawick and two colleagues answered it in one sentence in their 1967 book: “One cannot not communicate”. Between two people who are aware of each other, any behaviour can be read by the other as a message.

Sounds a bit too bold, doesn’t it? It is: the claim met serious objections and we will hear them too. But first we have to answer a more basic question. What exactly does the word “communication”, which we use a hundred times a day, mean?

This lesson will not hand you the answer ready-made; we will build it together. Along the way we will also shake a few beliefs you are fond of.

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126 definitions, one word

If you ask a communication researcher “what is your definition?”, order yourself another coffee; it will take a while.

I am not exaggerating. In an appendix to their 1976 book, Frank Dance and Carl Larson listed 126 published definitions of communication. As early as 1970 Dance had sifted the elements the definitions have in common: 15 main themes emerged, and on three of them the definitions diverged sharply.

Those three splits are:

• Scope: is the definition broad (any process that links parts of the living world) or narrow (the telephone and telegraph system of a navy)?
• Intent: does it count only messages sent consciously, or does it include unintended behaviour too?
• Value judgment: is a criterion such as “successful” or “correctly understood” built into the definition?

Dance’s conclusion was that we ask the concept of “communication” to do more work than it can carry, so instead of a single definition he suggests a family of concepts.

So definitions differ not because some are wrong but because they do different jobs. Choosing a definition means choosing a tool.

Dance and Larson’s list also reminds us of one more thing: it is worth asking whom a definition serves. An engineer thinks of a telephone line, a psychologist of a conversation in a family, a journalist of the readers; what each of them calls “communication” looks different (this example is ours).

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The root of the word: making common

The root of a word often preserves the first idea of the concept. Both the English communication and the Turkish komünikasyon come from the Latin verb communicare. The verb means “to share, to impart, to convey”; its literal sense is “to make common”. Its root is communis, that is “common, belonging to all”.

An interesting detail: relying on John Durham Peters, Nastasia and Rakow report that in Rome communicatio did not mean, as it does today, a general human connection built through symbols; it mostly pointed to tangible things and to particular devices used by orators. So the sense of “I am conveying my feelings to you” is not the word’s first form.

Today, in ordinary speech, the word often evokes something else: sending something from one place to another. Phrases like “did the message arrive?” or “I’ll be in touch” are all the language of sending (this observation is ours).

The two ideas are not alike. In one, something becomes common; in the other, something changes place. This is exactly the first big distinction of this lesson: you can look at the same event through two different eyes.

A note: the root of a word does not define it; it only shows its first associations. Knowing the root is no substitute for learning the definition, but it helps you see why definitions drift apart.

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A road map: this lesson is a doorway

This lesson is only the first step. The road ahead looks roughly like this:

• Foundations: the history of the media and the first communication models (A History of Mass Media, The Lasswell and Shannon–Weaver Models, Process Models: Schramm, Berlo, Westley–MacLean, Newcomb).
• Powerful effects and propaganda: the early period when the media were thought to be very powerful, and the hypodermic-needle model (The Hypodermic Needle and Magic Bullet Model).
• Limited effects: the voting studies, The Two-Step Flow and Opinion Leaders and Gatekeeping.
• Mid-range effects: Agenda-Setting, Cultivation Theory, The Spiral of Silence.
• Audience and technology: Uses and Gratifications and McLuhan: The Medium Is the Message.
• Critical approaches and culture: The Frankfurt School I: Horkheimer, Adorno and the Culture Industry, The Ritual View of Communication: Carey, Encoding and Decoding: Stuart Hall.
• Normative theories and media systems: Four Theories of the Press, Media in Turkey: History and System.
• The digital age: Filter Bubbles and Echo Chambers, Algorithmic Media.

Every lesson looks for the answer to a question: do the media affect people, how, under what conditions, in whose interest, in which system? The job of this lesson is to prepare the dictionaries before those questions: what do we call communication, and of what kind is mass communication a special case?

So as you go on, you will keep recalling three things from here: that the definition of communication is contested, that the transmission and ritual views see different things, and that the criteria of mass communication are blurring today.

The lesson titles and their order are taken from the course plan; details may change as the course develops.

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Who and when: the stops of this lesson

The list of people who have thought about communication is long; let us gather in time order the steps you will meet in this lesson:

• 1948: Claude Shannon publishes his article treating the engineering side of communication mathematically; Warren Weaver interprets it in 1949 and stretches it towards questions of meaning.
• 1963: Gerhard Maletzke defines and models mass communication in Psychologie der Massenkommunikation.
• 1967: Paul Watzlawick, Janet Beavin and Don D. Jackson present the five axioms in Pragmatics of Human Communication.
• 1970 and 1976: Frank Dance compares definitions; Dance and Larson list 126 of them.
• 1989: James W. Carey contrasts the transmission and ritual views in Communication as Culture.
• 2007: Manuel Castells discusses “mass self-communication” in the network society.
• 2018: Patrick O’Sullivan and Caleb Carr present the “masspersonal communication” model.

A warning: this is not the history of “the invention of communication”, only the stops of this lesson. Thinking about communication goes back much further; we will follow that in A History of Mass Media and later lessons.

The timeline also shows a trend: engineering in the 1940s, psychology and human relationships in the 1960s, culture in the late 1980s, and networks and the digital environment in the 2000s (this generalization is ours).

Lab

Carrying or sharing?

James W. Carey says that communication can be looked at through two different eyes, and calls them the “transmission” and the “ritual” view.

In the transmission view, communication is the sending of messages over distance; the aim is to carry signals and messages from one place to another for purposes of control. A source, a channel, a receiver; the job is for the message to arrive. → transmission view

In the ritual view, communication is sharing, participation, fellowship and the possession of shared beliefs; the focus is not on imparting information but on representing shared beliefs. → ritual view

Carey’s best-loved example is reading a newspaper. In the ritual view, reading a newspaper is less like learning something new and more like attending a mass: nothing new is learned, but a particular view of the world is portrayed and confirmed.

A small experiment (hypothetical). Ask yourself: when did you last read or watch, from start to finish, a piece of news you already knew? What for? For information, or for the feeling that “the world is still in its place”? If the second is even slightly there, you have met a small crumb of the ritual view.

The two views do not replace each other; they light up different things in the same event. The details are in the lesson The Ritual View of Communication: Carey.

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Our working definition for this course

We are not going to settle on a single definition; but we need a working one, or we will not know where to stop. Here is ours (not taken from a book; a deliberate choice):

Communication is a context-bound process in which people try to build or share meaning through symbols.

Every word is a choice:

• Symbols: words, gestures, images, tone of voice; not only language.
• Meaning: what travels is not the message but the meaning that gets interpreted.
• Try: success is not guaranteed; misunderstanding is inside communication, not outside it.
• Process: not a one-off event but a mutual, continuing flow.
• Context: the same sentence says something else elsewhere.

In terms of Dance’s three splits, our position is: a medium scope; a stance that does not demand intent but does not exclude intentional messages either; and an approach that does not build success into the definition. This definition also takes in institutional and mediated communication such as mass communication.

There is one place we deliberately leave open: intent. Watzlawick’s claim (one cannot not communicate) will be discussed through that door. If you read communication as “behaviour that another can interpret”, the claim is true; if you read it as “an intentional message”, it is contestable.

Step by step

Five levels: from talking to yourself to the screen

Communication is divided into levels according to who is talking to whom. A frequently used list in Turkish sources runs from small to large:

1. Intrapersonal (internal) communication: with yourself, in your mind. Telling yourself “I can do it” before an exam.
2. Interpersonal communication: between two people. Texting a friend one to one.
3. Group communication: within a small group. A project team’s meeting.
4. Organizational communication: the communication an institution carries on inside itself and with the outside. A company’s announcement to its employees.
5. Mass communication: through mass media to a large, dispersed audience. The evening news bulletin.

Lists differ from book to book. In one open textbook’s list of five, organizational communication is absent; instead “public communication”, one person speaking to a group, counts as a separate level. So “five” is not a law of nature, only a classification choice.

The levels do not exclude one another either. In a meeting, group communication (the team is talking), interpersonal communication (you whisper to your neighbour) and intrapersonal communication (“when is lunch?”) all run at the same time. The inner talk in a listener’s head is a kind of noise that interferes with the speaker’s efforts to hold attention (this interpretation is ours).

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The parts of a communication event

If you want to break a communication event into parts, the list common in Turkish sources is this:

• Source: the person or institution that sends the message.
• Message: the thing that is sent.
• Target (receiver, target audience): the party that receives the message.
• Channel: sound wave, paper, screen, radio wave.
• Code: the symbols and rules that carry the message; the source encodes, the receiver decodes.
• Feedback: the receiver’s reaction returning to the source.
• Noise: anything that distorts the message.
• Frame of reference: the outlook made up of the parties’ experience, knowledge and culture.

Mind the word “noise”. In Shannon’s engineering diagram noise is the physical interference that corrupts the line. Weaver considers adding a “semantic noise” box to the scheme: distortions of meaning that the source did not intend but that inescapably affect the destination. So “the line is crackly” and “you said ‘fine’, but what did you mean?” are different kinds of noise.

This list is a map, not the territory: the boxes and arrows do not fully capture the fluidity of people communicating with one another. But it is a useful vocabulary for talking about where things got stuck.

An exercise: try placing a text exchange you had yesterday into these eight boxes. You will notice which box you left empty; most often it is the frame of reference.

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Everything other than words

Verbal communication runs on words, nonverbal communication on everything else: facial expression, arm and hand movements, posture, gaze, tone of voice, even how close two people stand to each other. The study of body movement is called kinesics; the term was coined in 1952 by the anthropologist Ray Birdwhistell. → nonverbal communication

In 1969 Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen divided nonverbal behaviour into five groups:

• Affect displays: appear mainly on the face and reflect feelings spontaneously.
• Regulators: manage the flow of conversation; a nod for approval, for instance.
• Adaptors: help to cope with tension; twirling a pen, biting nails.
• Illustrators: support speech visually; showing the size of something with your hands.
• Emblems: movements with a direct verbal translation; the “OK” sign.

A detail: some behaviours, such as adaptors, are not performed in order to send a message; but remember the first axiom, the other person can read them anyway. Someone who keeps twirling a pen before an exam did not mean to say “I’m nervous”, but everyone reads it.

And a warning: nonverbal communication is important, but the saying “93 per cent of communication is body language” is a dangerous thing. We will take it apart in the evidence section.

Step by step

What makes mass communication “mass”?

“I reached millions of people” does not by itself make you a mass communicator. Gerhard Maletzke’s often-cited definition lists five conditions. → mass communication

1. Public: the recipients are not limited or individually defined.
2. By technical means: dissemination media such as the press, radio, television.
3. Indirect: there is spatial or temporal distance between communicator and recipient.
4. One-sided: communicator and recipient do not swap roles.
5. A dispersed audience: the recipients are spread out in space.

Two more things can be attached to these. The first is the institution: according to Maletzke, mass communication passes through an institutionalized, professional intermediary structure; what enters the news is selected there, and this is called gatekeeping. The second is feedback: the recipient’s reaction does not return to the communicator directly; Maletzke’s example of poor feedback is letters from readers. (Indirect and delayed returns such as sales figures or audience ratings belong to the same family; that example is ours.)

None of these criteria is flawless; some of them blur in the age of social media. We will see that on the “today” card.

Think of the criteria as a spectrum rather than a checklist: some cases meet all five conditions, others only a few.

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Watzlawick’s first two axioms

The five axioms of Watzlawick, Beavin and Jackson can be read as basic assumptions about communication between people. (Below we summarize the axioms in our own sentences; the page numbers given are the places where Lutterer quotes the book.)

1. One cannot not communicate (p. 51). Every behaviour within an interaction has message value; there is no such thing as “not behaving”. Someone who is silent has said something too.

2. Every communication has a content and a relationship aspect; the relationship aspect classifies the content and is therefore a metacommunication (p. 54). “I want the report today” carries the same content; but who says it, to whom and how decides whether it is a request or an order. → metacommunication

Imagine: A friend texts you only “Okay.” One day it means “I agree”, another day “I don’t want to talk any more”. The content is the same; the relationship message differs. A written message has neither tone of voice nor a face; people use punctuation, emoji and the delay of the reply as cues (this reading is ours).

Why “axiom”? The name suggests that the five propositions are presented as starting points that need no proof; Lutterer questions whether the name is apt and recalls that in mathematics axioms are independent of one another. We will return to this debate in the critique section.

Step by step

Three more axioms: punctuation, two languages, two kinds of relationship

3. Punctuation (p. 59). The nature of a relationship depends on how the parties “punctuate” the sequence of communication, that is, where they place the beginning of the chain of events. A hypothetical example: one says “You are always late, that is why I nag”; the other says “You nag all the time, that is why I’m late”. They cut the same cycle at different points. Lutterer summarizes the book’s example like this: who started the quarrel? Always the other side.

4. Digital and analogic communication (pp. 66–67). People communicate both digitally and analogically. Digital language (mostly words) has a powerful logical syntax but lacks adequate meaning in the field of relationship; analogic language (gesture, tone of voice, face) carries meaning but lacks a syntax that could define the relationship unambiguously. → nonverbal communication

5. Symmetrical and complementary (p. 70). Every communicational exchange is based on equality or on difference. A symmetrical relationship rests on equality (like two rivals mirroring each other); a complementary one rests on difference (like one who directs and one who follows).

Think of them all together: in a relationship the content of what is said, the way it is said, where the cycle is cut and whether the parties are placed as equals or as different all work together. That is why reading an argument as “how does the cycle work?” rather than “who is right?” is often more productive (the interpretation is ours).

Step by step

The journey of a message

Let us follow a simple communication cycle step by step. This is the skeleton of the scheme in most textbooks; its origin is largely Shannon’s engineering drawing: an information source, a transmitter, a channel, a receiver, a destination and a noise source.

1. Something is in the source’s mind: an idea, a feeling, a wish.
2. Encoding: the source turns it into symbols: words, tone of voice, emoji.
3. Passage through the channel: the symbols travel through air, screen or paper.
4. Noise: something in the channel or in the interpretation can distort the message.
5. Decoding: the receiver interprets the symbols with their own experience and frame of reference.
6. Feedback: the receiver says or does something; it returns to the source and the roles may swap.

The strength of the scheme is that it shows where communication can go wrong. Its weakness is that it makes meaning look like an object carried inside a package. We will unpack that trap in the critique section.

A small exercise (hypothetical): you texted a friend “What are we doing tonight?” and got no reply. You are the source, the phone is the channel; but is the problem in decoding (the message was not read), in noise (the notification got lost), or in feedback (they chose not to answer)? The scheme lets you ask three separate questions; it does not tell you which one is right.

Lab

The same sentence, two scenes

A thought experiment (hypothetical): you hear the sentence “It will rain tomorrow” first from a friend at the next table, then from the mouth of a weather presenter. The same sentence, two completely different kinds of communication.

According to Maletzke’s comparison, face-to-face communication is direct, personal, mutual, symmetrical and private; mass communication is indirect, technologically mediated, asymmetrical, public and aimed at an audience dispersed in space and time.

Try it yourself and compare the two scenes with these questions:

• Who can talk back? You can say “how do you know?” to your friend. The presenter cannot hear you.
• How long does the answer take? From your friend, immediately. From the presenter, never; there are only indirect reactions, such as switching channels, that are measured afterwards.
• Who chose the message? Your friend chose it on the spot. The presenter’s sentence was prepared in advance inside an institution.
• Who is listening? Your friend knows you. The presenter speaks to a crowd whose identity they do not know.

The first two items on this list are the everyday version of one of the best-known features of mass communication, the delay of feedback. In some mass media feedback is almost absent altogether; Maletzke’s example of readers’ letters shows how narrow this path is.

Myth check

The myth that “93 per cent of communication is body language”

What people assume: 7 per cent of a message is words, 38 per cent tone of voice, 55 per cent facial expression; so when we speak, words are almost unimportant.

What the evidence says: These figures derive from two small studies by Albert Mehrabian in 1967. According to David Lapakko’s examination, the figures were extracted from two separate studies and neither compared words, voice and face at the same time. The participants of the Mehrabian and Ferris study were 37 female psychology students and the language element consisted of a single word, “maybe”; the role of language was largely irrelevant by the design of the experiment.

The warning on Mehrabian’s own page is also clear: these equations are applicable only if someone is talking about their feelings or attitudes. According to Lapakko, Mehrabian wrote to him in a correspondence that it would be absurd to claim that the verbal part of a sentence describing where an eraser is in a drawer is only 7 per cent.

Bottom line: Body language matters; but “93 per cent” is the narrow finding of one experiment turned into false precision in popular culture. If you see this figure somewhere, let your first question be: for what kind of message, in which experiment?

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Guessing songs from finger taps

Picture an experiment: two people sit facing each other at a table. One taps out the rhythm of a well-known song on the table with a finger; the other tries to work out which song it is. According to Chip and Dan Heath, this experiment was carried out by Elizabeth Newton, who completed a doctorate in psychology at a US university in 1990. The tappers were given a list of 25 well-known songs; in the course of the experiment 120 songs were tapped in total.

The tappers predicted that the listeners would guess half of the songs. In reality the listeners identified only three of the 120, that is 2.5 per cent. So the tappers thought their message got through one time in two; in fact it got through one time in forty.

Why? In the tapper’s head a song is playing: melody, words, tempo. The listener hears irregular knocks. The meaning did not pass through the channel; it stayed at the source. This shows that communication is more than “sending”: the receiver has to be able to rebuild the thing from the symbols that arrive.

An honest note: these numbers come from a doctoral study through a popular book’s account; we have not opened the thesis itself. So read it not as an exact law but as a striking example.

Myth check

The trap in “I put my idea into words”

What people assume: Ideas are put into words, sent through a channel and extracted at the other end. Words are a box, meaning is the object inside.

The linguist Michael Reddy’s observation (1979): English speakers systematically fall back on this pattern when they talk about communication; it is called the “conduit metaphor”. Examples: “it is very difficult to put this concept into words”, “Harry always fills his paragraphs with meaning”, “I have to struggle to get any meaning at all out of the sentence”. Reddy’s real worry was this: the view puts too much responsibility on the speaker or writer, too little on the listener or reader, and leads to a dangerous passivity in the exchange of ideas.

Turkish is not free of it either (this is our own observation): “I couldn’t convey what was on my mind”, “I can’t explain what I mean”, “nothing came out of that sentence”.

There is a parallel with Carey’s critique: critics of the transmission view say that it diminishes the mutual building of meaning (intersubjectivity). But there is no need to throw the model away: it works perfectly well for measuring how accurately a telephone line carries information. The problem is applying it to every communication event.

A small exercise: this week, count which verbs you use when you talk about communication: convey, pass on, put into words, get out of… How many of them evoke carrying an object?

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Is it really true that “one cannot not communicate”?

The first axiom is so striking that it could not pass without objection. In 1990 Michael Motley argued that each of four traditional postulates, that communication is interactive, involves encoding, is an exchange of symbols and has a fidelity dimension, contradicts the axiom “one cannot not communicate”. In the same year Janet Beavin Bavelas, one of the authors of the axioms, wrote a reply in the same journal; Peter Andersen also took issue with Motley in 1991. So the debate is real, and it went on among the authors’ own circle too.

The core of the objection is this: if communication means “sending an intentional message”, someone who turns their face away may have had no intent; so they have not communicated. But if communication means “behaviour that another can interpret”, the axiom is true.

Here recall Dance’s split on intent: the two sides may in fact be speaking from two different definitions. (This reading is ours, not a summary of the articles. We did not open the content of Bavelas’s reply; we only know that it exists.)

Practical upshot: read the axiom not as a law of nature but as a warning that “people’s behaviour is read by others”. This warning is very useful in daily life: a message you do not answer also has a meaning (whatever your intent).

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A video on your phone: mass or personal?

Maletzke’s definition was drawn in 1963 for newspapers, radio and television. Today a video on your phone can reach millions of people without an intermediary broadcasting institution.

In 2007 Manuel Castells called this situation “mass self-communication”. In his account the communication system of industrial society was built on the mass distribution of one-way messages from one to many, while the foundation of the network society is horizontal networks of communication from many to many, synchronous or asynchronous. Mass self-communication is “mass” because it potentially reaches a global audience; it is “self” because its content is self-generated, its emission self-directed and its reception self-selected.

Patrick O’Sullivan and Caleb Carr (2018) go another way: digital tools blur the line between mass communication and interpersonal communication; they propose a channel-independent “masspersonal communication” model built on two dimensions, the perceived accessibility of a message and its personalization.

An exercise: test Maletzke’s criteria one by one. Public? Mostly yes. Technical means? Yes. Is an institutional intermediary structure required? Not always. One-way? No longer: the audience writes comments and sees replies. (This assessment is ours.)

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Five words for the same thing

Turkish has no single word for “communication”; the dictionary has a cluster. The dictionary of the Turkish Language Association (TDK) gives two senses under “iletişim”: (1) feelings, thoughts or information being conveyed to others by any conceivable means; (2) the exchange of information carried on through media such as the telephone, telegraph, television or radio. As synonyms it lists bildirişim, haberleşme, komünikasyon and, for the second sense, muhabere. “Komünikasyon” is of French origin (communication); the dictionary sends this entry straight to “iletişim”.

The TÜBİTAK Social Sciences Encyclopedia, in turn, defines communication as conveying or sharing information through speech, writing, gesture, facial expression and every other means, and lists the same alternative names.

An interesting observation (our own interpretation): the first sense in the dictionary says “conveyed”, so even the everyday dictionary leans on the transmission view. The encyclopedia’s “sharing”, on the other hand, opens the door to the ritual view. One word, two definitions.

In the dictionary the entry “bildirişim” is likewise sent straight to “iletişim”; so this cluster in the dictionary is a set of alternative names gathered around one word.

If you see “haberleşme” or “komünikasyon” in a text, you are most often meeting the same concept; but “haberleşme” tends to evoke the exchange of information carried on through media (again our own interpretation). Look at the context.

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This is how exams ask it

Frequent patterns

• “Which of the following is not one of the levels of communication?” → intrapersonal, interpersonal, group, organizational, mass. Depending on the sources, “public” may enter the list too.
• “The characteristics of mass communication”: public, indirect, one-way, dispersed audience, institutional intermediary structure.
• “Watzlawick’s axioms”: one cannot not communicate; content and relationship aspect; punctuation; digital and analogic; symmetrical and complementary.
• “The transmission and ritual views” → Carey.

Tempting mistakes

• “93 per cent of communication is body language” → a false generalization of Mehrabian’s narrow finding.
• “Mass communication means reaching many people” → not enough on its own; indirectness, one-sidedness and institutionality count too.
• “Communication is the correct understanding of the message” → building success into the definition is only one of the options Dance distinguished.
• Years: Shannon’s article 1948, the book with Weaver’s contribution 1949; Watzlawick and colleagues 1967; Maletzke 1963; Carey 1989.

Alternative names in Turkish

• İletişim; haberleşme; komünikasyon; bildirişim; muhabere.
• İç iletişim instead of kişi içi iletişim; bireyler arası iletişim instead of kişilerarası.
• İleti (message); hedef (receiver, target audience); geri bildirim (feedback).

Tip: if you are torn between two terms in an exam, ask which split (scope, intent, value judgment) the definition rests on; that question often helps you eliminate the wrong option.

Summary

Summary card

• Definition: communication has no single definition. Dance and Larson listed 126; definitions differ in scope, intent and value judgment.
• Origin: Latin communicare means “to make common”; modern usage often slides towards “to send”.
• Two views: for Carey, the transmission view looks at sending messages over distance, the ritual view at sharing and shared beliefs.
• Levels: intrapersonal, interpersonal, group, organizational, mass communication; the lists vary from book to book.
• Parts: source, message, target, channel, code, feedback, noise, frame of reference.
• Verbal and nonverbal: “93 per cent” is a false generalization of Mehrabian’s narrow finding.
• Five axioms: one cannot not communicate; content and relationship; punctuation; digital and analogic; symmetrical and complementary. The first axiom is contested because of intent.
• Mass communication (Maletzke): public, by technical means, indirect, one-way, dispersed audience; an institutional intermediary structure.
• Today: Castells’s mass self-communication and O’Sullivan and Carr’s masspersonal communication blur these criteria.
• Exams: the 93 per cent trap; not equating mass communication with “reaching many people”; the years 1948, 1963, 1967, 1989.