On Communication

I've been thinking lately what constitutes communication. How does it so happen that so many people manage to transfer ideas from one to another, transfer states of minds, even transfer feelings with nothing more than just sounds? This can easily become physiological question, but as a laymen I'll stick to trying to understand the nature of what is communication rather than how it actually happens on the physical level.


Forms of communication can be broken into 3 different categories. The top-down communication, the down-up communication and the across-the-levels communication. Wow. This is actually trivializing it a great deal.

The subject that actually got me thinking about this in the first place is the nature of abstraction. I define abstraction as communicating a certain point of view on an idea in such a way that all the details that are not pertinent to this point of view are stripped away. This naturally helps me to say what I mean by the "top-down" communication. It is the process of finding of all the abstractions that fit the situation under the discussion. People who communication in this manner usually end up sounding like they are constantly summarizing their opinions and not justifying them by any facts. Why would they? Facts are not pertinent in this form of communication. Only the most central, the most essential part of the idea is what matters. Occasionally, they will give an example and sometimes out of desperation to be understood they'll start enumerating the details that they skipped over. This is the "down" part of the "top-down" communication.

The "down-up" form communication, as is probably easy to guess from the previous paragraph, is the form of communication in which facts are simply enumerated one by one, not even necessarily in any particularly order. This allows people to draw their own conclusions from the facts. Occasionally while this form of communication is in use, a conclusion or two are drawn, but certainly it never leads to a full description of the complete picture. It is even often biased by the types of facts that get emphasized or omitted. The greatest example of such form of communication is the modern western media. The media sees it as its main mandate to just report the facts. Of course, the emphases that it puts on this or that particular fact skews the communication away from the truth. But it does communicate a particular world view. It certainly constitutes a form of communication. Other examples of this form of communication are people who seem to go on and on on every topic that they talk about. They fail to grasp what are the most important details and so they proceed to list all the details that they can remember.


The last example of communication is the one that is, of course, the most effective and the most difficult to achieve. It borders on creating a sense of empathy in the listener (or reader). It comes out of understanding one's audience to such an intimate degree that the speaker knows how the audience thinks before uttering a word. The most successful practitioners of such communication are artists. They are the people who can tap into part of ourselves that makes it impossible not to understand what they have to say, show, etc. So what does it take? It takes being very attuned to what the audience knows and believes to be true. And then trying to communicate the idea that one needs to communicate in such a way that the audience already knows most of the details that abstraction that is about to be presented to them is based on, but filling in those details which the audience may not be familiar with. After those details have been filled, the "conclusion" (or the statement of the new world view that is comprised of the abstractions which naturally arise from the newly communicated information and the information already internalized by the audience) becomes self-evident. And forces the audience to simply think to themselves "how did I not think of this before"?