My expectations for when I finished reading the first chapter of the WikiBook were that I would gain much more insight on what communication is really about, and I would finally understand the deeper meaning of it I was probably not grasping. After reading the chapter, however, I realized that the study of communication may not be as complicated as it seems. If I am being honest, I feel like the type of people that were being described in the beginning of the chapter; comparing communications with journalism and public speaking. Reading about all of the elements that go into the study of communications like sender, receiver, channel, and message reminded me of journalism class in middle school and learning about who the audience for certain articles were (receivers), who was writing it (sender), what message they were trying to convey (message), and what they send those messages through like an article or video (channels, verbal and nonverbal communication). Going back to what I have learned in my journalism class has helped me understand the concepts talked about in the chapter a bit more.
I think that we all see these concepts on a regular basis. We wave to friends, receive emails from professors, yell at players online who mess up during a game of call of duty whether they can hear you or not, and talking with a friend about a problem you are having at home face to face. We communicate every day, whether it is verbal or nonverbal, or if we are just talking to a television (in which we act as senders and receivers) or to a friend.
While I felt that the material was somewhat familiar, I did come to a conclusion after reading the chapter. Communication is extremely complex in terms of how many ways there are to communicate, and not even my experience in journalism class could help me understand this. There are so many ways you can send a message: through dance, song, writing, facial expressions, hand gestures, noises, behaviors, etc. I cannot imagine how many ways there are to communicate something, even simple things like saying hello. Communication is indeed “limitless’ as the chapter describes. There is an endless amount of ways to communicate something, and its remarkable how people can actually understand the message regardless of how you do it based on their experiences with the way they or their community communicates. That is something I would like to learn more about in this class, how we can infer what messages are being conveyed through different types of communication because of our past experiences with people.
