Chapter 1 : Foundation of Human Communication

Human Communication is the field of study that focus on understanding how people communicate in various ways.

There are 5 subtopics covered in Human Communication :

1. Purpose of Human communication are:

• To help : Therapist or psychologist use communication to help others 
• To discover : Learning something new/discover a new thing.
• To relate : Maintain a relationship with others
• To persuade : To promote something to others
• To play : Create a exciting and playful environment.

2. Communication refer to the act by one or more persons of sending and receiving messages. We need communication skill in our life. For example, we have to communicate to order foods, asking for directions and etc. 

3.Areas of Communication divided into 5 categories : 

• Intrapersonal communication : Talking to yourself to know yourself better. Eg : Taking to a mirror to judge your own personality. 

• Interpersonal communication : Talking with others whom you have a relationship with to know about them and yourself. Eg : Talking with your parents and friends to know more about them. At the same time, you can ask their opinions about your personality.

• Small group & organizational communication : You share ideas and solve problems together. Eg : In a group discussion consists of 7 people, you and your friends are discussing on how to solve a Maths question.

• Public communication : Inform & persuade. Eg : Giving a talk on public stage about the importance of taking a safety precaution when going out alone. 

• Mass communication : Entertained or informed by media. Eg : We get to know about what is happening around the world by watching television or surfing the online news on Internet.

4.  Culture and Human Communication

   · Aim of a Cultural Perspective: To understand how communication influences a person, to distinguish what is universal (true for all people) and what is relative (true for people in one culture and not true for people in other culture) and communicate effectively in a wide variety of intercultural situations.

      5.  The Components of Human Communication is divided into two categories:

-          Communication context

·    Social Psychological Context: The relationships among participants, the roles that people play. Eg: In a meeting room at your office, you and your partnership most likely to talk and discuss about business.

·    Physical Context:  The concrete environment in which communication takes place. Eg: Lecturer hall versus tutorial class.

·    Cultural Context: Beliefs, values and ways of behaving that are shared. Eg: The Chinese believe that sweeping the floor on the first day of Chinese New Year will not bring any good luck.

·    Temporal Context: Time of day which the communication takes place. Eg: Morning is the ideal time to communication with others as their alertness is at the peak compare to night.

-        
  Components

·    Source-receiver: Two way role that interchanges actively in a conversation.

Source (Encoder): Encode messages like speaks, write and giving gesture.

Receiver (Decoder): Decode message like listen, read and respond.

·    Messages: Words, text or body language.

·    Feedback & feed forward: Response and preparation.

Feedback: From listener to speaker.

Feed forward: a pretext to the context like a trailer from a movie.

·    4 Channels: Vocal, Visual, Olfactory and Tactile Channel.

Vocal Channel: Spoken words.

Visual Channel: Hand gestures, body language can be see with eyes.

Olfactory Channel: Smells.

Tactile Channel: Touch.

·    4 types of Noises: Physical, Physiological, Psychological and Semantic Noise.

Physical Noise: Noise from transports.

Physiological Noise: Hearing loss or memory loss.

Psychological Noise: Impressions on people.

Semantic Noise: Jargons, a word we couldn't understand like APA style where some people don’t understand what APA style stands for.

·    Effects: Intellectual, affective and psycho-motor.

Intellectual/Cognitive: Changes in your thinking and mind

Affective: Behavioral change according to surrounding.
Psycho-motor: Physical behavioral change as you learn something new.

Class Learning ! 

In the first and second classes of Human Communication, our lecturer Mr. Anwari Ariffin asked us to answer few questions regarding ourselves so that he could understand his students well. We were also asked to write down in a piece of paper what does Communication means to us in our life.
We also did a small activity regarding the channels we had learnt such as vocal channel and visual channel. He divided us into 2 groups where on the right side will be the Blind people and the left side will be the Deaf people. We had to figure out how to communicate with each another. It is quite difficult when a disable person trying to communicate with another disable person.