Communication

Shannon's information theory, media richness, and agenda-setting theory

What is communication (as a field of study)?

Communication studies how information, ideas, and meaning are shared between people — through speech, writing, media, and nonverbal signals — and how that process succeeds or breaks down, distinct from linguistics, which focuses more narrowly on language structure itself.

The basic communication process

Communication is generally described as a process involving a sender, who encodes a message; a channel, through which the message travels (speech, text, an image, and so on); and a receiver, who decodes and interprets that message. This process can be disrupted at any stage by "noise" — anything that distorts or interferes with the message, whether literal background noise, ambiguous wording, or a receiver's own assumptions coloring their interpretation.

Verbal and nonverbal communication

Communication happens through both verbal channels (spoken or written words) and nonverbal channels (tone of voice, facial expression, posture, and gesture). Nonverbal signals often carry substantial meaning alongside or even instead of the literal words used, and mismatches between verbal and nonverbal signals (saying one thing while nonverbal cues suggest another) are a well-studied source of communication confusion or mistrust.

Mass communication and media

Mass communication studies how messages are transmitted to large audiences through media — newspapers, television, radio, and increasingly digital and social media — and how the specific characteristics of each medium shape how a message is received and interpreted differently than the same message delivered in a one-on-one conversation.

Why communication as a field matters

Studying communication systematically improves skills in public speaking, writing, and interpersonal interaction, informs effective organizational and media practices, and helps explain why messages are sometimes misunderstood despite a sender's clear intentions — insight valuable across virtually every professional and personal context.