About the Communication Cycle

Written on November 25, 2011 – 11:34 pm | by admin |

The communication cycle is fairly easy to understand.
Within any noisy universe, a sender encodes a verbal or nonverbal message, sends it through any message channel to a receiver, who decodes the message. The receiver then encodes a reply, which is returned through a feedback channel to the sender, who decodes it, deals with it somehow, and perhaps sends another message. Without a full loop, communication is incomplete.

Our individual acts of communication are how each of us makes sense of reality. Our “sense-making” communication habits form all our relations.

The way individuals interact in families is reproduced within the formal and informal organizations in their lives. These groups construct the institutions comprising the communities composing the diverse cultures and societies constituting our nations and our world. As the dominant species on earth, our habitual ways of interacting are imprinted on the planetary systems, reflecting our choices. Witness global warming amid global whining.

Communication spins the web of life. All life is interactive.

How we communicate with ourselves and with others produces the nature of the society and environment where we live and breath and have our being. “Senders” and “receivers” interacting (like yin and yang) generate life itself. Our interactions create our realities,

Conflicts can stem from encoding and decoding errors or assumptions. A filtering system has evolved to help us humans deal with sensory overload. Every outgoing and incoming message gets filtered through the cultural and genetic biases implanted in our minds for pattern recognition. Unconscious barriers to intrapersonal and interpersonal communication tend to fragment our awareness. We filter out data incongruent with our mindset. Divisions persist between our perceptions and reality (if “reality” may be known).

We tend to evolve what I call split perceptions to hide from ourselves the truths about reality that we wish to avoid. Our split perceptions enable us to believe that we live separate and apart from others in our world, that we can get away with any outrage to ourselves or to others. We suffer from the delusion that we may escape the consequences of global interactivity. We see what we want to see and hear what we want to hear. We pretend we are not pretending. We are blind by choice. Ignorance is bondage.

Understanding interactivity is the key to healthy communication. We can transform our selves and our world by changing the way we communicate with others and ourselves. Every thought, word and deed sends out ripples altering life for everyone. That’s the nature of communication. That’s the nature of life in an interactive universe. Why not accept it? A global sense of our deep interactivity inspires responsible and mindful self rule