On Defining Communication

I'll bet you haven't thought about this topic in a long time, if at all. In most communication textbooks the definition is in the first chapter, it's a standard one with a typical graphic, and there's little connection between the definition of communication and what one might actually do in the real world based on some conceptualization.

We all have definitions of communication, whether we've ever written them down or not, and it's likely that we have more than one of them that we use in different situations. These definitions (really visions or conceptualizations) determine what we see or don't see, do or don't do, practice or don't practice. Not consciously considering those definitions that we carry around means that we are able to see and do some things without thinking much about the things we don't see or consider.

Julian Jaynes in his book The Emergence of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind uses the following example which has become one of my favorites over the years.

Imagine that you are in a room that is pitch black. You hold out your hand and you can't even see it. You see nothing. You have a small flashlight that casts a small beam of light. It illuminates a very small part of the room, the rest remains in darkness and out of range of your perceptions. While you can move the flashlight around, it's difficult to get a picture of the entire room in your head as most of it remains beyond your senses.

And yet, as the famous social psychologist and management theorist Herbert Simon noted, individuals will none-the-less make assumptions about what the room is really like. He notes that people put together images and ideas that satifice. These are concepts that work well enough and help people to get by.

But here's another problem. The conceptualizations that we develop make us dependent. We tend to want to see everything from the perspective of this conceptualization that satisfices and which we make work. In fact, Simons (see link above) argues that his life (ours too) is a series of satisficing decisions. But so often our dependence makes us unwilling to go beyond what we think we know to build a broader perspective.

Another story that I am fond of involves the Mullah Nasrudin, an Islamic Imam. One night the Imam's disciples found him in the street under and lampost intently studying the ground. One of the disciples worked up some courage and asked the Mullah why he was studying the ground near the lampost.

The mullah responded with a great deal of irritation saying, "I lost my ring in the basement of my house and I'm trying to find it."

Perplexed the disciple asked, "Well, Mullah, if you lost your ring in the basement, why are you looking out here in the street?"

By now the mullah is genuinely irritated and responds, "How do you expect me to find my ring in the basement, it's dark down there?"

How often is it the case that we look for answers in the convenient places rather than moving beyond to find more detailed, useful, and satisfying answers. This is the case with the definition of communication. I'll bet that if I asked you to define communication you would stand under the lamp post and conjure up some rendition of a definition you heard in one of your classes or read in a textbook. You might even Google the term to come up with something.

Let's try to do better. Could you, please, post a comment to this absolutely brilliant and profound blog post in which you advance your definition(s) of communication without repeating what you have heard somewhere else? Could you also explain your thinking in enough detail that your fellow graduate students and I can make sense of your position?