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Say It Like You (Actually) Mean It
The Vague Nature of Communication & The Importance of Direct in an Indirect World
Part One — The Default Details of Communicating
A couple ground rules from two main communication principles to get us started:
- Communication is constant — therefore, everything you do says something.
- Communication is irreversible — therefore, once something has been communicated, no matter how trivial, it has permanently created a reality. As Abraham Joshua Heschel says in commenting on the Jewish creation narrative, “Words create worlds.”
But the communication process gets even trickier — because how do you know what something means?
Communication is the act of encoding a message that gets sent to a receiver who then decodes the message. While in an ideal world, this could be very simple, we must face the reality that words don’t have inherent meaning. There is not a single, absolute definition to any word or piece of communication. The only way to decode an encoded message, then, is to develop a shared meaning between the sender and receiver. The evolution of language has been a constant pursuit of creating shared meaning for certain symbols, words, sounds, and gestures. Which implies language is a tool, or even a technology, that we construct to help make this process easier.
When two parties agree in a specific situational context on the meaning of a word, then you have shared meaning.
Slight problem, no two people completely share the same context. Therefore, an intended meaning that a sender encodes will never completely be what the receiver interprets.
Back to our ground rules, we then have the added complexity that we are constantly communicating beyond the words themselves — and these communicative acts also have no inherent meaning and must also be interpreted. To make this even more overwhelming, no matter how ambiguous the communication, whatever is communicated will be permanently present however it is interpreted, forever.
