Discuss The Importance Of Perception In Face To Face Communication Between Individuals
Discuss The Importance Of Perception In Face To Face
Communication Between Individuals
Perception is one of the most important fragments of the communication process. It allows us all to see an individual experience of the world. The process is simple, the brain actively selects, organises and interprets stimuli, in order to process this experience.
Even before we engage in communication, we perceive things about the receiver. Whether it's the bad things we've heard about them previously - which would build up a feeling of dislike or the good things e.g. support same football team. Both of these perceptions are examples of stereotyping which will affect the expectation of an individual in a different way than it'll affect someone else.
In Face to Face communication, it is possible for an individual to be distracted by motivation. This is a psychological factor that can affect perception. For example: Of a person is tired, they may pay more attention to words in a conversation such as "Warmth", Another psychological factor that will influence, affect perception is Values and Attitudes. This factor could lead to disliking due to a difference of opinion on, For Example smoking. Perception in Face to Face communication is extremely important because there are also physical barriers that will affect an individual's perception. Two examples of this are: Foreign Languages and Physical Disability.
Overall without perception, we would all have the same views and ideas of the world and nobody would have individual experiences. The idea of perception explains how we all see different things when we look at ambiguous pictures like the one below: Without perception, these kinds of pictures would mean the same to everyone
It is in this layering of interdependent social construction that this model picks up its name. Our communication is not produced within any single system, but in the intersection of several interrelated systems, each of which is self-standing necessarily described by dedicated theories, but each of which is both the product of the others and, in its own limited way, an instance of the other. The medium is, as McLuhan famously observed, a message that is inherent to every message that is created in or consumed from a medium. The medium is, to the extent that we can ...
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It is in this layering of interdependent social construction that this model picks up its name. Our communication is not produced within any single system, but in the intersection of several interrelated systems, each of which is self-standing necessarily described by dedicated theories, but each of which is both the product of the others and, in its own limited way, an instance of the other. The medium is, as McLuhan famously observed, a message that is inherent to every message that is created in or consumed from a medium. The medium is, to the extent that we can select among media, also a language such that the message of the medium is not only inherent to a message, but often an element of its composition. In what may be the most extreme view enabled by the processing of messages within media, the medium may also be a person and consumes messages, recreates them, and makes the modified messages available for further consumption. A medium is really none of these things. It is fundamentally a system that enables the construction of messages using a set of languages such that they can be consumed. But a medium is also both all of these things and the product of their interaction. People learn, create, and evolve media as a vehicle for enabling the creation and consumption of messages.
The same might be said of each of the constituents of this model. People can be, and often are, the medium (insofar as they act as messengers), the language (insofar as different people can be selected as messengers), or the message (one's choice of messenger can be profoundly meaningful). Fundamentally a person is none of these things, but they can be used as any of these things and are the product of their experience of all of these things. Our experience of messages, languages, media, and through them, other people, is fundamental in shaping who we become and how we think of ourselves and others. We invent ourselves, and others work diligently to shape that invention, through our consumption of messages, the languages we master, and the media we use.
Language can be, and often are, the message (that is inherent to every message constructed with it), the medium (but only trivially), the person (both at the level of the "language instinct" that is inherent to people and a socialized semiotic overlay on personal experience), and even "the language" (insofar as we have a choice of what language we use in constructing a given message). Fundamentally a language is none of these things, but it can be used as any of these things and is the product of our use of media to construct messages. We use language, within media, to construct messages, such as definitions and dictionaries) that construct language. We invent and evolve language as a product of our communication.
As for messages, they reiterate all of these constituents. Every message is a partial and incomplete précis of the language that it is constructed with, the medium it is created in and consumed from, and the person who created it. Every message we consume allows us to learn a little more about the language that we interpret with, the medium we create and consume messages in, and the person who created the message. Every message we create is an opportunity to change and extend the language we use, evolve the media we use, and influence the perspective that consumers of our messages have of us. Yet fundamentally, a message is simply a message, an attempt to communicate something we imagine such that another person can correctly interpret the message and thus imagine the same thing.
This welter of intersecting McLuhanesque/Burkean metaphors and interdependencies provides a second source of the models name. This model seeks, more than anything, to position language and media as the intermediate building blocks on which communication is built. The position of language as a building block of messages and communication is well understood. Over a century of study in semantics, semiotics, and linguistics have produced systematic theories of message and language production which are well understood and generally accepted. The study of language is routinely incorporated into virtually all programs in the field of communication, including journalism, rhetoric and speech, film, theater, broadcast media, language arts, speech and hearing sciences telecommunications, and other variants, including departments of "language and social interaction". The positioning of the study of media within the field of communication is considerably more tenuous. Many departments, including most of those named in this paragraph, focus almost entirely on only one or two media, effectively assuming the medium such that the focus of study can be constrained to the art of message production and interpretation, with a heavy focus on the languages of the medium and little real introspection about what it means to use that medium in preference to another or the generalized ways in which all media are invented, learned, evolved, socialized, selected or used meaningfully.
Such is, however, the primary subject matter of the newly emerging discipline of media ecology, and this model can be seen as an attempt to position media ecology relative to language and messages as a building block of our communication. This model was created specifically to support theories of media and position them relative to the process of communication. It is hoped that the reader finds value in that positioning.
Weiner's cybernetic model accentuates the interactive structure of communication. Students of interpersonal communication are taught, through the use of the interactive/cybernetic and transactive models that attending to the feedback of their audience is an important part of being an effective communicator. Students of mass communication are taught, through the intermediary/gatekeeper/two-step flow model, that controlled production processes are an important part of being an effective communicator. The difference is a small one and there is no denying that both attention to feedback and attention to detail are critical skills of effective communicators, but mass media programs focus heavily on the minutiae of production, interpersonal programs focus heavily on the munitiae of attention to feedback. Despite the fact that both teach both message production the languages used in message production, and the details of the small range of media that each typically covers, they discuss different media, to some extent different languages, and different approaches to message production. These differences, far more than more obvious differences like audience size or technology, are the divides that separate the study of interpersonal communication from mass communication.
