Lecture Week 2

This week in the lecture our topic was “Are we communication?” We discussed the substance of communication and Stephen asked if it was individual or a social thing. He said the individual aspect is when we have thoughts in our heads and then we try and convey that to our audience or listener. But it can be a social thing too. The future role of communication is to combine the planet and its creatures together. That’s our role as communicators. The word communication comes from the Latin words comm which means together and une which means one. Aristotle first wrote “the speaker produces a message for the listener.” Shannon and Weaver elaborated on Aristotle’s definition to say “The speaker sends a message via the transmitter which is degraded by noise then intercepted by the receiver and translated for the listener.” Stephen extended on this model further because it didn’t allow for feedback. He said after the destination, the message can continue on (feedback) through nodes back to the info source in the beginning. So it becomes a cycle. We talked about Communication between animals and humans and even plants, cells and particles. Finally we watched a short film called La Jetee. It was an excellent example of a complex story told in a simple way.