Communication

 Hey everybody! I hope you had an amazing week! This week we will be talking about, in my opinion, one of the most important tools that we have as human beings. That topic is communication. It is happening all around us whether we realize it or not. Communication in its simplest definition is the sharing or exchange of information. When we are communicating with other people, we are trying to share our thoughts and feelings with another person who also has thoughts and feelings. This can become a very complicated matter, especially when peoples thoughts are different from each other. We communicate through a process called encoding and decoding. When we have a thought that we want to convey, we encode it or convert it into a coded form. For example, I might want to better understand how a person was feeling that day because I care about them. So I might ask, “How was your day?” In my mind I asked them how they were feeling that day because that question was in the context of my thought process. After a message is “encoded”, it is put through a media or the means of communication. This includes body language, tone of voice, facial expression etc. After the message is conveyed through that media, it is then decoded or interpreted by the other person. Back to my example, that person might have been feeling like they were having a bad day but they decoded my message as insincere because of my body language. They could just passively say ok and move on leaving me sad that they wouldn’t open up. Now this isn’t a perfect example, but it can show how miscommunication can be a very common thing in our day to day conversations. 

The three major parts of communication are words, tone of voice, and non-verbal communication. Interestingly enough, our words are actually the least reliable part of communication. Studies have said that words make up 14%, tone of voice accounts for 35%, and 51% of our communication is non-verbal. I found this to be a very interesting fact especially under the context of the methods of communication of modern days. I am specifically talking about texting. I have seen time and time again conflict arising because of a text message. So why are we putting so much stock in something that only allows for 14% of communication? When we text we are missing out on 86% of the intended message. That is 86% that we can misinterpret. I have found this to be a major problem among the young adult crowd. They are substituting face to face conversations with texting. Instead of facial expressions they are using emojis which can’t accurately describe how a person is feeling.I am personally a terrible texter. I don’t have my phone on me often. I found it interesting how people view the way I deal with that as detrimental with my relationships. I have found that it is actually a positive in my life. I am able to get more out of the conversations that I have with people. I am not trying to say that texting is a bad thing. It has many useful aspects. It only becomes harmful when we use it as our sole communication method. 

Another problem with our communication within society is the effects of Covid 19. We are losing out on a lot of different aspects of communication. Face to face contact is severely limited and masks can hide facial expressions. People are becoming more afraid to approach others and have conversations. Even during these troubling times however, we can still find ways to effectively communicate. I will take some creativity but we can’t lose out on humankind's greatest tool.