1.3 What Is Communication?

The story of Justin and Kaya is an example of communication in a business environment. They’re work colleagues, assigned to the same projects, and they see each other frequently. They’ve been working a lot and are both sending emails on Saturdays while expecting fast responses. Other things in their lives are forcing them to add the weekend work on top of everything else, which isn’t always easy.

So Justin and Kaya are communicating—or at least trying to. But what is communication, exactly? Let’s look at a few ways to understand it.

One way is that communication is language. Language is a set of symbols used to share meanings. Some symbols are sounds, like when we say words, while others are written, like when we write a message. Languages are also governed by sets of rules. The rules tell us lots of things, like how to form the symbols (“i before e except after c”), how to connect symbols to each other (sentences always have verbs), and how to receive symbols (the word “compress” means one thing if someone emphasizes the first syllable, and another thing if they emphasize the second).

Different languages have different sets of rules, and rules can differ even within a language. English is very different from Chinese, but American English is different even from British English, and English of the West Virginia backcountry isn’t the same as the English of the California coast. Different communities make their own rules.

So there’s no doubt we use language to communicate. Justin and Kaya do it a lot in their story—they used written language in their emails and spoken language in their meeting. But communication must go far beyond spoken and written languages. Think of everything Justin communicates to Kaya with his apology, and everything she communicates back to him by refusing to apologize herself. None of that content is in the words they say or write, but it’s there all the same, and it has a massive impact on how they experience their interaction.

A second way to understand communication, then, is as the sending and receiving of information. In human interactions, information is any meaning sent or received by someone. We sometimes call a bit of information a message. During their meeting, Justin and Kaya both send and receive a great deal of information—they share their meanings with each other in what they say but also in things like where they sit and how fast they speak. Even Kaya’s locked door sends a message, communicating a particular piece of information to anyone who wants to enter.

One of the most important things we’ll learn in this course is that we are all constantly sending messages—everything we do communicates something to the people around us, even when we don’t intend to be communicating. In other words, Kaya’s locked door sends a message to her coworkers, even if she locks it just because it makes her feel comfortable. She has a reason for her action, but the action still communicates information, and that information may not have the meaning Kaya hopes.

We should also pay attention to how people receive our meaning. In fact, instead of “receive,” it might be better to say that we “interpret” messages. Receiving something can be a passive action, requiring no thought or effort on our part. But interpreting is an active process—we, as receivers of information, help to construct the meaning. When someone communicates with us, we use our background knowledge, our relationships, and our goals to understand what they mean. Communication is never just a one-way street—it’s always an exchange in which two people create meaning together. We’ll talk about this point a lot, including when we learn about giving effective business presentations.

We’re still not quite finished with defining communication, though. It’s the sending and interpreting of information, but since everyone does that all the time, we need to restrict our definition a bit more. In this course, therefore, we’ll define communication as sending and interpreting information in a particular context. The context is the circumstances in which people communicate. A context might include a place, like Kaya’s office—but it always includes the purposes and goals people have in communicating, the rules governing their social interactions, the relationships they have, and everything else that might affect how they send and interpret information.

A context gives us many of the rules we use to interpret messages. For example, in Justin and Kaya’s story, Kaya works in an office while Justin has a cubicle. We don’t know for sure, but from those facts it seems that Kaya outranks Justin or has some managerial role over him. That part of their relationship is essential to the context, and may help explain why Justin kept his frustration to himself during their meeting.

Communication—the sending and interpreting of information in a particular context—is everywhere. It seems simple at first, but things get complicated fast when we realize just how many factors influence the messages we send and what we mean.

For some people, many of those factors come from their workplace and professional environments, and that’s why we can study business communication in the first place. We’ll focus on those aspects of communication next.