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communication NOUN: 1. The act of communicating; transmission. 2a. The exchange of thoughts, messages, or information, as by speech, signals, writing, or behavior. b. Interpersonal rapport. 7. Biology The transfer of information from one molecule, cell, or organism to another, as by chemical or electrical signals or by behaviors. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. http://www.bartleby.com/61/79/C0517900.html When information moves from its source to a destination where it can be acknowledged, it engaged in communication -- activity that moves information toward a destination in time, space, or both. When a person describes how a particular representation (or area of information) travels and is transformed, she describes a communication. An active information system is called a communication system. All communication systems can be differentiated into basic parts -- information source, transmitter, encoder, signal, noise, message, decoder, and receiver. Each part is labelled according to its function in the system. Generally, information is described in relation to the communication system that contains in terms of how the information behaves over time, and moves in space within the communication system. The actual, physical substance of a communication system may be quite complex. Each component may perform different functions or have different states of existence over a period of time, or in many dimensions. Each part of a communication system may have different features and a different position in the system's organization. Thus, a communication system is defined by what it's made of, by how this matter and energy is arranged within the system, and by how these parts behave, independently or interactively. |