Communication: Definitions and Concepts

PAUL COBLEY
London Metropolitan University

The Latin root of “communication” – communicare – means “to share” or “to be in rela-
tion with.” Through Indo-European etymological roots, it further relates to the words
“common,” “commune,” and “community,” suggesting an act of “bringing together”
(→ Communication: History of the Idea).
The notion of communication has been present and debated in the west from pre-
Socratic times. The Hippocratic Corpus, for example, is a list of symptoms and diseases;
it discusses ways of “bringing together” the signs of a disease or ailment with the disease
itself for the purposes of diagnosis and prognosis.

COMMUNICATION AS PROCESS AND COMMUNICATION AS

PRODUCT

In the west, classic works of Greek philosophy set much of the agenda for understand-
ing communication (Peters 1999, 36–50). Emerging from a society in the transition
from oral to literate modes, these works figured communication as a process bringing
together humans to consider a shared reality through the word. Like many societies,
early Greece was characterized by orality: communication by means of the voice, with-
out the technology of writing. Oral communication, because it could not store informa-
tion in the same ways and amounts as writing, evolved mnemonic, often poetic, devices
to pass on traditions and cultural practices. Narrative, for example, developed as a form
of communication in which facts were figured as stories of human action to be retold in
relatively small public gatherings of people. Communication, in this formulation, was
necessarily a locally situated process.
The development of literate societies involved communication resulting in a “pro-
duct” to be stored, distributed, and used as a reference for scientific analysis, critique,
and political organization. Written communication is originally thought to have devel-
oped as a means of keeping a record of economic transactions. In other spheres, it
allowed the storage of large amounts of information and the recording of abstract,
scientific principles. Furthermore, written communication was also to be used for the
reification of cultural and religious traditions. Writing wrought a transformation in the
experience of space and time: in contrast to oral messages, a communication in writ-
ing could be accessed at a later date than its composition; it could also be consumed in
private. In tandem with these transformations, written communication facilitated sci-
entific thought and the growth of technology, providing a means of knowledge storage
that far surpassed, in its capacity for detail and complexity, that of oral memory.

The International Encyclopedia of Communication, First Edition. Edited by Wolfgang Donsbach.

© 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2008 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781405186407.wbiecc071
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SOCIAL USES OF COMMUNICATION

Communication could be understood originally as a repository of tradition. In pre-print

Europe, the protection of religious tradition was partnered by the preservation of writ-
ing, enshrining the “Original Word” for the purposes of instruction. Before Gutenberg’s
invention of the printing press, writing was the preserve of monasteries, the locations in
which scriptures were copied out longhand. Latin writers from Augustine to Aquinas,
through exegesis of such manuscripts, also meditated on the relation between signs and
referents.
Following the introduction of print, communication became a key symbolic
resource for social change. In the centuries after 1450, Europe experienced major
transformations of social life in which communication played a central role. Print
facilitated widespread communication of messages that might be deemed educational
or seditious, ultimately enabling confrontation (as in the Reformation) as well as
specialization (sciences building on the Renaissance). As a result of a series of legal
and constitutional changes across Europe in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries, print experienced a boom. Booksellers grew in number; the growth of maga-
zines, periodicals, newspapers, and other printed materials also aided literacy, whether
in schools or when taken up privately by the self-taught citizen. Print promoted a more
private, individual communication centered on the self. Yet, through its reach to a large
audience, it also allowed public life in Europe to prosper.
In the modern era, communication served as a common denominator of public life.
The activities of public life in Europe developed into what → Habermas(1989) calls the
(bourgeois) → public sphere. This sphere, derived from the meetings of the mercantile
class – burghers and others – for talk and debate, was attendant on the eighteenth-
century growth of coffee houses in Britain and the German-speaking lands and, in
France, of the salons. As Habermas shows, coffee-house talk was driven by the content of
printed periodicals and mainly oriented toward questions of literature and culture, even
above politics. It was divorced from the family and the intimate sphere, and simultane-
ously extraneous to the relations of production, commerce, and business. The discourse
of the public sphere could be considered political in quite a “pure” sense, a “rational”
communication, enabling self-governance and self-reflection, not simply dictated by, or
the epiphenomenon of, the accumulation of capital.
Among the educated classes in eighteenth-century Europe, oral communication
assumed an importance that arguably surpasses that of the present-day western world
of mobile telephony and wireless connection. Just as periodical content fueled oral
communication, the content of conversation was frequently, in turn, reproduced and
disseminated in periodicals. The “public sphere thesis” is important for understanding
communication as a socio-historical phenomenon in that it exemplifies, first, the ways
in which social entities are brought together (in this case, members of a particular
literate class) and, second, the way communication has long been simultaneously
interpersonal in the flesh and technologically mediated.
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TWENTIETH-CENTURY CONCEPTS OF COMMUNICATION IN

THE WEST

A full-fledged “communication theory” emerged in the twentieth century (→ Communication

and Media Studies, History to 1968) and was, not coincidentally, intimately linked
to investigations of “togetherness” in a number of different fields. Among these
investigations were those of American sociology (the Chicago School) and the written
accounts of Anglophone anthropology (especially, Malinowski, Boas, and Sapir),
which, along with assessments of the idea of “community” (for example, Tönnies),
attempted to present a comprehensive vision of how communication is constituted.
After these early milestones in the development of the human and social sciences,
progress was accelerated in the 1920s by a series of studies into specific aspects of
modern communication and communication as a general phenomenon (Peters 1999).
New technologies of communication during the period stimulated the broadening of
the understanding of communication. Photography, in various forms, had proliferated
since 1839; film, from the mid-1890s, had become an important new medium of
information and entertainment (→ Photography; Film as Popular Culture); and
→ radio, above all, became the defining medium in which communication by one to
many – broadcasting, or mass communication – could take place without listeners
having to even leave their homes.
Radio was an intensely public medium of communication and stimulated worries
about its potential uses in bringing people together through propaganda. The period
from the 1920s to the late 1940s, a period dominated by the use of radio for propa-
gandizing purposes by the Nazis and the fascists in Europe, featured a renewal and
expansion of the understanding of communication by intellectuals. Political scientists
and theorists of the “public” (for example, → Lippmann, Bernays, Schmitt, → Lasswell)
were aligned with “administrative researchers” (for example, → Lazarsfeld, Berelson)
who carried out industry-funded studies of (usually) media audiences, who were being
redefined as key players in public communication.
The understanding of communication in this period generally proceeded from the
flow of Sender = = > Message = = > Receiver
The message requires encoding and decoding, indicating that it is not a perfect, trans-
parent vehicle for → “meaning”: it mediates meaning as a result of being in a channel,
even if the concept of mediation is given a variety of definitions across the human,
social, and technical sciences (→ Media). Lasswell (1948) presupposed that commu-
nication has “effects” on the receiver in the formula “Who, says what, in which channel,
to whom, with what effect,” an assumption shared by the early Payne Fund studies of
movies in 1930s America. The work of Lasswell and others represented a “scientific,”
de-personalized understanding of communication, which was taken further in an “ob-
jective” account of communication by researchers in cybernetics from the late 1940s.
Producing → models of communication, their work exemplifies the concept of com-
munication as both product and process.
For Shannon and Weaver (1949), on the one hand, an information source in the
model, with a message, uses a transmitter to produce a signal, which is received, by a
receiver, which delivers a concomitant message to a destination. At the interface of the
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sent signal and the received signal is likely to be “noise.” Such “noise” might corrupt
the implicit integrity of the message as a product during the process of transmission,
the prime example being several conflicting signals in the same channel at once. On
the other hand, → Gerbner’s1956 model and the 1957 model of Westley and MacLean
attempted to unravel the process of communication to determine how elements and
their combination might be susceptible to misunderstanding.
In the second half of the twentieth century, further advances in the technology of
communication invited a specific focus on media to explicate what communication
is. All communication is mediated by virtue of the fact that telepathy for humans and
direct messages for other organisms have not been achieved. Radio was supplemented,
especially after the 1950s, by television, a powerful medium of mass communication,
allowing the flow not only of aural messages, but of images, as well, into the domestic
environment. “Medium theorists,” observing such developments, stressed that media
are, in the phrase made famous by the Canadian communication theorist → Marshall
McLuhan, “extensions” of humans. Like tools, media extend the capabilities of humans
to reach out into a broader world of communication and interaction. However, as a
corollary of this, the media transform humans’ apprehension of the world and produce
a consciousness that is tied to particular modes of communication, for example, orality
and literacy. For medium theorists → Innis, McLuhan, Havelock, Ong, Meyrowitz, Post-
man, Levinson, et al., all the major media of communication have entailed “paradigm
shift[s] in cultural evolution” (Danesi 2002, 15).
Medium theory assumed a much different “effect” of communication in audiences
than Lasswell and other early social-scientific communication theorists (→ Medium
Theory). Also, later social-scientific theories of communication that have been skeptical
about direct effects, such as → uses-and-gratifications approaches since the 1940s, have
found that audiences utilize communications media in ways that do not result in linear
effects. In a parallel development, Lazarsfeld and colleagues put forward the idea of a
→ two-step flow of communication. This replaced the image of the audience as a set
of unconnected individuals with, instead, a theory of → opinion leaders who, having
been exposed to media, will circulate messages from the media and, hence, disseminate
influence on a local basis (Katz 1957). This idea replayed the concept of communication
as a symbolic resource. In a summary assessment of contemporary audience research,
sociologist Joseph Klapper (1960) stressed the minimal effects of mass communication,
conceptualizing communication instead, in a weak sense, as a common denominator
of public life. Klapper’s review suggested that exposure to the large amounts of mass
communication that have been characteristic of modernity was more likely to reinforce
existing attitudes than to make receivers adopt new ones.
By the early 1980s, televisual communication, having established itself in western
homes, was supplemented by video cassette recorders, which potentially offered greater
autonomy to viewers through the capacity to “timeshift.” Research demonstrated that
television viewers were not necessarily behaving as expected; indeed, television sets that
had been turned on in homes were sometimes found to be totally ignored. Timeshift
allowed viewers to receive more televisual communication, repeatedly if chosen, and at
times different to those of the original broadcast, by being active media users. Research
 CO M M U N I C AT I O N : DE F I N I T I O N S AND CO N C E P T S 5

during this period (→ Communication and Media Studies, History since 1968) empha-
sized other aspects of “the active audience” as well, recapitulating lessons from the
uses-and-gratifications approaches, although often in a more critical perspective (for
example, Morley 1980; Hobson 1982) (→ Critical Theory; Cultural Studies). The audi-
ence was found to be the locus of attitudes, values, experiences – ideological baggage
that is brought to the act of decoding. As a result, audience members could be seen
to actively and immediately reshape the communications they received, thoroughly
transforming them in a manner that tended to invalidate the idea of an encoded mes-
sage that is decoded by a receiver. Audiences do not simply decode, but “make” or,
at least, “remake” communication. In this perspective, communication as “bringing
together” implies not just that communities are built through communication, but also
that communication is accomplished in and through the “interpretive communities” of
communicators.
Twentieth-century technologies re-fashioned the way in which communication
was carried out and, accordingly, prompted revisions of the way in which it was to
be theorized. Computers entailed a “digitlizing” of communication (→ Digitization
and Media Convergence), despite the persistence of naturalized, analog graphic user
interfaces remediating previous media forms (→ Remediation). The use of computers
for Internet access, along with the implementation of hypertext links, created the
potential for non-linear as well as many-to-many communication, summed up as
interactivity (→ Interactivity, Concept of). Some traditional aspects of face-to-face
communication were revamped through the “time-space compression,” which allowed
global communication to take place instantaneously (email, video conferencing,
mobile telephony, and so forth). The proliferation of digital and converged commu-
nication technologies seems to suggest that there is more opportunity for humans to
communicate with growing numbers of humans than ever before. Yet the profusion
of technologies that enables global communication evinces a fundamental imbalance
between those who can afford converged technologies and those who cannot. This
presents political issues of who may not be “brought together” in communication;
it also raises theoretical issues of how communication may be conceptualized with
due consideration to the cultural specificity of the concepts of communication and
cognition.

COMMUNICATION BEYOND INDIVIDUAL COGNITION

As Kim (2002) argued, much western communication theory is underpinned by notions

of an individualistic self, despite the fact that 70 percent of the world’s population is
characterized by cultures of “collectivism” or “interdependence.” Not only have western
concepts of communication been grounded in the self rather than “selves”; they have
also assumed that communication is the preserve of sapient, cognizing participants.
A non-individualistic conceptualization of communication has been offered by
→ semiotics. Based on pre-Socratic principles, semiotics has been taken up in the
study of animal communication as well as in media studies. Semiotics sheds light
on communication because of its focus on signs as signs, whether they are part of
6 CO M M U N I C AT I O N : DE F I N I T I O N S AND CO N C E P T S

communication in films or novels, the expressions of animals, or the messages that

pass between organisms or cells. The nonverbal signs that are exchanged between
animals can be said to actually communicate, as do the verbal and nonverbal signs
passed between humans. The nonverbal signs that occur in components of organisms
or plants also communicate. The concept of intrahuman and interspecies – as well as
interhuman – message transfer amounts to a major reorientation of the understand-
ing of communication, one in which human affairs constitute only a small part of
communication in general.

COMMUNICATION AND NONCOMMUNICATION

Definitions of communication often assume successful contact and interaction. Yet

the importance of noncommunication (or miscommunication) in understanding
what communication is should not be underestimated. This includes ambigu-
ity, misunderstanding, lying, cheating, deception, and unconscious and willful
self-deception.
The famous case of “Clever Hans,” involving a horse whose abilities “proved” that
animals could think and speak, but which in fact was responding to a number of nonver-
bal cues emitted by its “interlocutor,” illustrates well the vicissitudes of communication
(Sebeok and Rosenthal 1981). Similarly, the overvaluing of verbal communication has
tended to encourage neglect of nonverbal communication, a fact well understood by
magicians and others practiced in deception. Lying is also central to communication,
particularly as lies are often necessary to the project of human interaction (Ekman
2001). Nor is this exclusively a matter of human communication. In the animal world,
too, lying is widespread (Sebeok 1986). Indeed, the reliance of communication on signs
to substitute for something else that “does not necessarily have to exist or to actually
be somewhere at the moment that a sign stands in for it” (Eco 1976, 7) suggests the
fraternity of communication with lying.

SEE ALSO: → Communication: History of the Idea → Communication and

Media Studies, History since 1968 → Communication and Media Studies, History
to 1968 → Critical Theory → Cultural Studies → Digitization and Media
Convergence → Film as Popular Culture → Gerbner, George → Haber-
mas, Jürgen → Innis, Harold → Interactivity, Concept of → Lasswell,
Harold D. → Lazarsfeld, Paul F. → Lippmann, Walter → McLuhan, Marshall
→ Meaning → Media → Medium Theory → Models of Communication
→ Opinion Leader → Photography → Public Sphere → Radio →
Remediation → semiotics → Two-Step Flow of Communication → Uses
and Gratifications

References and Suggested Readings

Cherry, C. (1966). On human communication: A review, a survey and a criticism, 2nd edn. Cam-
bridge, MA, and London: MIT Press.
 CO M M U N I C AT I O N : DE F I N I T I O N S AND CO N C E P T S 7

Cobley, P. (2006). Communication theories, 4 vols. London: Routledge.

Danesi, M. (2002). Understanding media semiotics. London: Arnold.
Eco, U. (1976). A theory of semiotics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Ekman, P. (2001). Telling lies: Clues to deceit in the marketplace, politics and marriage, 3rd edn.
New York: Norton.
Gerbner, G. (1956). Toward a general model of communication. Audio-Visual Communication
Review, 4, 171–199.
Habermas, J. (1989). Structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of
bourgeois society (trans. T. Burger & F. Lawrence). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hobson, D. (1982). Crossroads: The drama of a soap opera. London: Methuen.
Hoffmeyer, J. (1996). Signs of meaning in the universe. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Katz, E. (1957). The two-step flow of communication. Public Opinion Quarterly (Spring), 61–78.
Kim, M.-S. (2002). Non-western perspectives on communication: Implications for theory and prac-
tice. London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Klapper, J. T. (1960). The effects of mass communication. New York: Free Press.
Lasswell, H. (1948). The structure and function of communication in society. In L. Bryson (ed.),
The communication of ideas. New York: Institute for Religious and Social Studies, pp. 37–51.
Morley, D. (1980). The “Nationwide” audience. London: British Film Institute.
Peters, J. D. (1999). Speaking into the air: A history of the idea of communication. Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press.
Sebeok, T. A. (1986). Can animals lie? In I think I am a verb: More contributions to the doctrine
of signs. New York and London: Plenum Press, pp. 126–130.
Sebeok, T. A., & Rosenthal, R. (eds.) (1981). The Clever Hans phenomenon: Communication with
horses, whales, apes, and people. New York: New York Academy of Sciences.
Shannon, C. E., & Weaver, W. (1949). The mathematical theory of communication. Urbana, IL:
University of Illinois Press.
Westley, B., & MacLean, M. (1957). A conceptual model for communication research. Journalism
Quarterly, 34, 31–38.