This is probably most important part of this mini-course. Let’s uncover the process of communication from sender to receiver, and initially we will not make difference if they are humans or machines (computer devices) and skip more advanced communication loop (bi-directional communication or simply interaction). Basic things first!
It makes sense that communication process is something like transaction. Any single act of communication contains multiple steps, and if one of them is skipped, the whole act becomes impossible.
Here are the typical steps that we can identify:
- Trigger to start communication
- Message is defined according to trigger. While it is not explicit part of communication, it is proactively affected by means of communication, our knowledge about sender and so on.
- Encoding message for the used means of communication to signal(s).
- Signals are transmitted through some communication environment.
- The receiver starts receiving the signals
- Once the signals are considered as received, the receiver decodes them back to the message. Quite often encoding starts almost simultaneously with the process of receiving, when there are enough signals to decode them (for instance, the first sentence during oral communication)
- After decoding, the receiver reacts to the message.