We explain what the communication process is, who performs it, what are the elements of communication and various examples.
Although they do not have language, animals carry out communicative processes.What is the communication process?
The communication process, the communicative process or the communicative act, is the effective transmission of a message through a communication channel from a sender to a receiver. That is, it is the complete circuit of the effective communication, in any area in which it can occur.
Communication is a process of information exchange that is typical of the living creatures. One of the ways it is done is through a language, as we do exclusively the Humans.
However, it can also be produced in other ways, such as through chemical signals, as do the microscopic organisms, or through the sounds inarticulate, as birds do with their song. Therefore, we must not confuse the ability to communicate with the ability to do so in a certain way.
Thus, in any of the scenarios that we have mentioned, a communicative act is carried out. In other words, it is transferred information from one living being to another, through a specific method and under specific conditions that facilitate or hinder it. They have to do with both the individuals involved and the environment.
These instances that intervene in this process are known as comunication elements. Depending on them, we can speak of unidirectional communication processes (information runs in one direction only) or bidirectional (information comes and goes).
Comunication elements
Communication is carried out according to a specific circuit, in which almost always the same elements intervene, depending on the way in which it occurs and the type of communication. communication that we talk about. Therefore, by analyzing the elements of communication, we can also evaluate how it occurs.
These elements are:
- Transmitter. That individual who initiates the communication process, and therefore encodes the message according to his abilities and desires, depending on the case. This is always the starting point of the circuit, although it is possible that the sender and receiver change their roles continuously, feeding back each other as we do in a conversation. We can think of the issuer as the person that begins to speak, like a lecturer in front of a crowd or a radio host, but also a dog that growls at another, or a bird that sings to attract a female.
- Receiver. The person to whom the sender's message is addressed, that is, who receives it and therefore decodes it, interprets it, deduces in some way what they want to say. This position is not passive, but requires the attention of the recipient and their will. It can often be exchanged with the sender, so that there is reciprocity in communication. Examples of recipients are those who listen to another speak, the audience at a conference, who turns on their radio to hear the speaker, or the dog at which another dog growls, or a female bird attracted by the song of a male.
- Channel. The channel is the physical medium through which communication is established, and which in turn can present elements that facilitate or hinder it, known as noise or as obstacles or communication barriers. The medium does not have to do with the sender and the receiver, but with the physical vehicle of the message, such as sound waves in the air when we speak or when a dog barks or a bird sings, but also the hertzian waves that our radio receives so that we can listen to the announcer, or the printed pages of a newspaper, for example.
- Code. The code is the set of rules that allows the receiver to grasp the message of the sender and understand it, either through the use of a language, as we do when speaking, or through that somewhat mysterious understanding of the messages. animals. Each language we speak is codes, which allow us to encode and decode the messages we emit and receive, but also the binary code of the computers what do we use to send us e-mails, or the modulated frequencies that our radio device receives and that allows us to tune in to the station we want and not another.
- Message. Finally, the message is the piece of information that the sender sends to the receiver, whatever it may be. An instruction, a lecture, a warning, an invitation to reproduce, a story of something that happened, all can be messages, as long as a sender encodes and transmits them, and a receiver receives and decodes them.
Examples of communication processes
Examples of communicative processes are the most everyday possible situations:
- When we call a friend by phone, we exchange with him the turn to send and receive messages, through telephone impulses on a private line.
- When we send an e-mail to a business sending them our CV, we count on a recipient within it to obtain and decode our document, to apply for a job.
- When we read a book written by a foreign author, we are recipients of the message that he wrote and that others recoded for us (the translators). This type of communication is one-way.
- When our cat meows at us in the kitchen, we understand that it is asking us for food, which shows that communication does not only occur between beings capable of articulating a language.
- When it detects the drop of jam that we drop into the I usually, the ant immediately transmits to its sisters a chemical message that they are capable of perceiving and that they replicate from one to another until they alert the colony and be able to go and rescue the loot found by the first.