This ratio is famous and typically is considered as very technical concept, associated with electronics, radiocommunications or analog signals, but in wide sense it is also a very important concept, that is applicable to any type of communication and significantly affects the effectiveness of communication.
Let’s first define what is signal and what is noise. We already covered the first term, but let’s make a bit different focus:
- Signal may be considered not just as technical means of communication, but also as anything received by the receiver, that has useful information for the receiver.
- Noise is anything else, that doesn’t have meaning or value for the receiver.
So the whole idea of signal-to-noise ratio in these terms reflects the quality of communication — we need to reduce the amount of noise compared to the amount of useful signals. But what does it mean?
First of all, it means that the sender has to consider what is useful for the receiver. Not all information that the sender considers as valuable is actually valuable to the receiver. And it is not always possible to have a proper understanding of what is valuable — because our knowledge is always limited.
This leads us to the second conclusion. Any signal can turn out to be noise for someone, and the more signals we add to our transmission, the higher chances are that we increase the noise. So, to make effective communication, we must try to be as brief as possible. But not too brief — because we can lose useful signals if we make it too straightforward. Minimalism is okay, but not always.