My summary of what follows is:
- nothing of importance in human communication is linear nor
accessible to mechanistic/reductionist approaches
- communication occurs "in the spaces" between participants and
meaning occurs "in the spaces" created within individuals by
ambiguities and their resolution
I'll expand on what I said - "Sending and receiving as a rather
old-fashioned and mechanistic view of communication" by taking
bits from some of the responses to this rich thread.
Rol says:
"In the electronic view of communications, receiving normally includes
decoding, filtering, and much other manipulation of a signal. Ditto on
the sending end. Encoding, filtering, and "other manipulation" [read this
to mean my knowledge is seriously out of date] occur before a signal is
sent. Aside from the lack of consistency in process, how does this differ
from what you are describing? Can you say more about what you are
describing?"
Yes, the original problem still remains in your formulation. That
is, the focus on "receiving end" and "sending end". This is the
reductionist and mechanistic approach that I was countering. (Not
invalidating - there is still technical and technological value in
pursuing these.) My approach is that communication doesn't occur in
separate places (sender/receiver) but is an emergent phenomenon which
could be said to occur "in the space" between the participants as
well as it can be said to occur in the individual events of the
participants.
" I may add a lot of meaning not originally intended, or not add
meaning that was originally intended. However, I do that -- or do not do
it -- within myself, do I not? Aren't I still functioning as a receiver
with all the decoding, filtering and so forth?"
You may choose to call yourself the "receiver" but what is occurring
is not a linear process. For communication to take place at any
scale worth talking about, it will be iterative generation towards a
shared understanding. The understanding of both the originator
("sender"?) and others will alter as the process progresses.
As Bret says: " Both begin to sum the other up based on prior
experience, apperance and other nonverbal cues, and their individual
needs."
All of this and more is operational but I suppose one could create a
more complex mechanistic/reductionist approach to account for it -
namely that it is still a matter of sender and receiver. This begins
to become problematic when the importance of context is added because
that will be much to do with the social conditions in which the
communication is occurring.
"A hundred other things go on in serial fashion"
Talking about "serial fashion" is likely to lead back to a more
complex linearity. In communication there are many simultaneous
phenomena occurring at the same time and something emerges from their
interplay. That emergent something, becomes part of the
communication and the process stops when the participants arrive at a
sufficient common understanding for their purposes or get distracted
by something else.
"what about communications between multiple people working together as
componants in a system (which itself is self referential--that's a
thought to tease the mind)?"
The above model doesn't add much to the problem in my formulation.
Why not? Because it is emergent rather than linear. The number of
participants does not increase the complexity of emergence. It does
increase difficulty if what is wanted is uni-directional. That is,
if you want to get a message to a group, it is more difficult. If
you want to engage in dialogue, learn, arrive at a common
understanding, then the process is pretty much the same, just longer
- but not exponentially nor linearly longer if you are aware of this
distinction.
The linear difficulty is revealed by what Bret says later,
" The attempt was made
years ago to perfect the measure of network analysis. It became so
complicated that the exactly was being mapped had to be refined over and
over again to keep the analysis from getting out of control."
He asks,"Should we, for example, make our units so small that each
manager/facilitator has opportunity to better understand the relations
that form between each unit member (snip) On the other hand,
maybe we should not have concerns over such things and make our work
units/departments very large and just let relationships and meaning
develope between members as part of the social process."
Stuart Kauffman at SFI has developed some very interesting models
based in theories of complex adaptive systems that suggests how to
organise communication based on the difficulty of the problem being
confronted. In simplistic terms, simple problems can be dealt with
by formal systems where large wholes are controlled and difficult
problems can best be dealt with by many small teams with minimal
communication between each.
Robert talks about the added complexity of body language, etc. These
are all communication domains that are non-linear and cannot be made
sense of in a reductionist fashion. That is, you cannot say, "the
body language meant x, the verbal meant y and the tonality meant z".
More, the interpretation of each is non-linear. Worse, the act of
receiving itself is non-linear. As someone else demonstrated by the
"I didn't say she loves me" exercise - meaning is created after some
whole is judged to be received. That means, only the minimal part of
sounds stimulating eardrums and the structure of the lanaguage which
is being interpreted is linear (more or less). None of the rest is.
Michael McMaster : Michael@kbddean.demon.co.uk
book cafe site : http://www.vision-nest.com/BTBookCafe
Intelligence is the underlying organisational principle
of the universe. Heraclitus
--Michael McMaster <Michael@kbddean.demon.co.uk>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>