It is important to highlight one important thing — for human that acts as a receiver, any signal that it gets is considered as the message. It is just how our brain works — it always tries to find the meaning behind the perceived information. When the sender creates and transmits the signal, it is important to keep this principle in mind.
Let’s review examples of messages:
- Text message. The most obvious example — spoken or written words, sentences, paragraphs always have some message.
- Image as the message. If we send a picture, it also conveys some meaning for sender or receiver. The same applies to the video.
- Spacings and dividers in GUIs or, for example, text publications are also messages — they group or separate other items (i.e. messages) to highlight relations and dependencies between them.
- Emptiness as the message. If there is just nothing in between, it is still the message. For instance, if there are two paragraphs with significant empty area in between that doesn’t look as spacing, it can be considered as a failure in loading some image, or as some advertising that was removed by the AdBlock plugin.