Chapter 1 The Elements of Interpersonal Communication

receiver

(receives and understands messages). The linked term source-receiver emphasizes that each person is both source and receiver.

Messages

For interpersonal communication to occur, messages that express your thoughts and feelings must be sent and received. Interpersonal communication may be verbal or nonverbal, but it's usually a combination of both. Everything about you has the potential to send interpersonal messages, and every message has an effect, or outcome. In face-to-face communication, your messages are both verbal and nonverbal; you supplement your words with facial expressions, body movements, and variations in vocal volume and rate. communicate through a keyboard, your message is communicated with words as well as with photos and videos,

signal-to-noise ratio.

In this phrase, the term signal refers to information that you'd find useful; noise refers to information that is useless (to you). mailing lists or blogs that contain lots of useful information would be high on signal and low on noise, and those that contain lots of useless information would be high on noise and low on signal.

Feedback

Is a special type of message that conveys information about the messages you send. When you send a spoken or written message to another person or post on a social media site, you get feedback from your own message: You also get feedback from others. The person with whom you're communicating is constantly sending you messages that indicate how he or she is receiving and responding to your messages. smiles, puzzled looks, paraphrasing, and questions asking for clarification are all examples of feedback.

Feedforward Messages

Much as feedback contains information about messages already sent, feedforward conveys information about messages before you send them. For example, you might use feedforward to express your desire to chat a bit, saying something like, "Hey, I haven't seen you all week; what's been going on?" Or you might give a brief preview of your main message and say something like, "You'd better sit down for this; you're going to be shocked." Or you might send someone a complimentary note before asking them to be your "friend." feedforward. These messages tell the listener something about the messages to come

Channel

The communication channel is the medium through which message signals pass. The channel works like a bridge connecting source and receiver. in face-to-face speech interactions, you speak and listen, using the vocal-auditory channel. You also, however, make gestures and receive these signals visually, using the visual channel. Similarly, you emit odours and smell those of others (using the chemical channel).

Context part 4 Cultural dimension.

The cultural dimension consists of the rules, norms, beliefs, and attitudes of the people communicating that are passed from one generation to another. For example, in some cultures, it's considered polite to talk to strangers; in others, that's something to be avoided.

Context 1 Physical dimension

The room, workplace, or outdoor space in which communication takes place—the tangible or concrete environment—is the physical dimension. When you communicate with someone face to face, you're both in essentially the same physical environment. In computer-mediated communication, you may be in drastically different environments; one of you may be on a beach in San Juan and the other may be in a Bay Street office.

Context part 3 Temporal or time dimension.

This dimension has to do with where a particular message fits into a sequence of communication events. For example, if you tell a joke about sickness immediately after your friend tells you she's sick, the joke will be perceived differently from the same joke told as one of a series of similar jokes to your friends in the locker room of the gym.

Context part 2 Social-psychological dimension.

This includes, for example, the status relationships among the participants: distinctions such as employer versus employee or salesperson versus store owner. The formality or informality, the friendliness or hostility, and the cooperativeness or competitiveness of the interaction are also part of the social- psychological dimension.

metamessage

This type of message refers to other messages; it's a message about a message. Both verbal and nonverbal messages can be metacommunicational. Verbally, you can convey metamessages such as "Do you understand what I'm saying? interpersonal effectiveness will often hinge on your competence in metacommunication. For example, in conflict situations, it's often helpful to talk about the way you argue or what your raised voice means. romantic relationships, it may be helpful to talk about what each of you means by "exclusive" or "love."

source

formulates and sends messages)

Technostress

is a term that denotes the anxiety and stress resulting from a feeling of being controlled by the overwhelming amount of information and from the inability to manage that information in the time available.

Noise

is anything that interferes with receiving a message. Just as messages may be auditory or visual, noise, too, comes in both auditory and visual forms. Four types of noise are especially relevant

Physiological noise

is created by barriers within the sender or receiver and includes impairments such as loss of vision, hearing loss, articulation problems, and memory loss.

Semantic noise

is interference created when the speaker and listener have different meaning systems; types of semantic noise include linguistic or dialectical differences, the use of jargon or overly complex terms, and ambiguous or overly abstract terms whose meanings can be easily misinterpreted.

Physical noise

is interference that is external to both the speaker and listener; it hampers the physical transmission of the signal or message and includes impediments such as the noise of passing cars, the hum of a computer, extraneous messages, illegible handwriting, blurred type or fonts that are too small or difficult to read, misspellings and poor grammar, and pop-up ads.

Psychological noise

is mental interference in the speaker or listener and includes preconceived ideas, wandering thoughts, biases and prejudices, closed-mindedness, and extreme emotionalism.

encoders

those who put their meanings into a code. And we can call listeners (or, more generally, receivers)

decoders:

those who take meanings out of a code. Since encoding and decoding activities are combined in each person, the term encoding-decoding is used to emphasize this inevitable dual function. Usually you encode an idea into a code that the other person understands; for example, you use words and gestures for which both you and the other person have similar meanings. At times, however, you may want to exclude others; so, for example, you might speak in a language that only one of your listeners knows or use jargon to prevent others from understanding.

information overload

which occurs when you have to deal with an excessive amount of information and when much of that information is ambiguous or complex.