1 Introduction
Communication occurs only when there are two associated information producing
processes and the output from one process is the functional inverse of the other
process’s output. We can say that communication occurred and that information
was transferred between the input to the first process and the output of the second.
Note that communication and information are not synonymous terms. The formal
incorporation of information and process into a definition of communication provides
a model of communication that captures much of the common sense meaning
of communication while allowing us to both accurately predict and precisely
explain a great deal about communication systems. Dervin [Der93], in discussing
the discipline of communication, notes that “It is process, however—the verbs
of communicating—where we have something to offer that is, if not ultimately
unique, at least for now ahead of the others.”
How do we study “what happens in the elusive moments of human communicatings”
[Der93], and what are “communicatings”? When communication is
defined in terms of informative processes, one can study both the information that
is conveyed and the processes that carry it. Definitions of communication often
involve terms such as knowledge, belief, meaning, or intention. Moving beyond
terminology about which many epistemologists and cognitive psychologists disagree
to a definition that is often consistent with these abstract ideas but is based
on more precise concepts enables us to use and build on the definition, as well as
measure the output of communicating phenomena, both human and non-human.
Human communication, a subset of all communication, plays a special role in the
study of communication, but human communication is not equivalent to communication,
and the former needs to studied as a subset of the latter. A precise but
general definition of communication based on information requires a precise and
discipline independent definition of information [Los97]. This will be provided
below.