What communication is: the word, its definitions and the making of shared meaning

What this chapter is for

This chapter answers the first question of the subject: what communication is. You will learn where the word comes from and why its roots still matter, the main ways scholars have defined it, and the idea at the centre of the modern definition, that communication is the making of shared meaning. You will also meet the two great ways of looking at communication, as sending messages across space and as holding a community together, and the critics who doubt that meaning is ever fully shared.

Everything else in this subject rests on this chapter. The models in head I draw the process this chapter defines, the theories in head II argue about its effects, and the Pakistani chapters apply it. The chapter runs in three parts: the word and its definitions; how meaning is made and shared, with the two great views; and communication in Pakistani life, the critics and the field today.

FPSC set this ground directly in CE-2021, asking “Is communication the process of creating shared meaning? Explain in detail.”¹

Before you start

The words

• Communication. The process by which people share meaning through signs and symbols. The chapter builds this definition step by step.
• Message. What is communicated: a sentence, a picture, a gesture, a news report.
• Sign. Anything that stands for something else to someone. Smoke is a sign of fire; a red light is a sign to stop.
• Symbol. A sign whose meaning is set by agreement among people, not by nature. The word “tree” and the green crescent on the flag are symbols.
• Meaning. What a message stands for in the mind of the person who receives it.
• Field of experience. Everything a person brings to a message: language, education, beliefs, memories. Wilbur Schramm made the idea famous.
• Encode, decode. To encode is to put an idea into signs; to decode is to turn signs back into an idea.
• Feedback. The receiver’s response, which tells the sender how the message was taken.

The people

• Warren Weaver. An American mathematician who in 1949 wrote the introduction to Claude Shannon’s theory of communication and gave the field one of its broadest definitions.
• Wilbur Schramm. The American scholar who did more than anyone to found communication as a university subject. He described communication as the attempt to establish a “commonness” between people.
• David Berlo. An American scholar whose book The Process of Communication (1960) taught that meanings are in people, not in words.
• James W. Carey. An American scholar of journalism who in 1975 set out the “transmission” and “ritual” views of communication.
• Frank Dance. An American scholar who in 1970 showed how much the definitions of communication disagree.

The story in plain words

1. The English word “communication” comes from the Latin for “to share” or “to make common”. The idea of sharing is in the word itself.
2. Scholars have defined communication in many ways. Some stress sending a message, some stress changing the other person, some stress sharing meaning.
3. Meaning is not inside the words. It is in the people who use them, and it depends on what each person brings to the message.
4. So communication succeeds when the sender and the receiver come to share enough of a meaning. They never share all of it.
5. One way to see communication is as sending messages across distance, like goods along a road. Another is as a ritual that holds a community together, like a shared prayer.
6. Both views are useful. A news report sends information, and it also tells a nation who it is.
7. Some critics say perfect sharing of meaning is impossible, and that we should value communication for what it does even when it is imperfect.

1. What the word means, and why its roots matter

Picture a village in Punjab where the elders gather in the evening at the dera or the chaupal. A man back from the city tells them the price of fertiliser has gone up. Another asks which shop he went to. A third remembers that the same thing happened last year before the sowing. Nobody is giving a speech, and nobody is reading a newspaper. Yet in half an hour the whole gathering knows something it did not know before, has argued about what it means, and has come to a rough common view of what to do. That evening is communication in its oldest form.

The English word carries that scene inside it. “Communication” comes, through Old French, from the Latin commūnicātiō, meaning imparting or sharing, which comes from the verb commūnicō, “to share, to impart”, “to make common”. The verb in turn comes from commūnis, “common, public, general”.³ So at its root, to communicate is to make something common between people. Several English words share that root: common, community, communion and communication all come from the same Latin family.

The roots matter because they point to the heart of the idea. Communication is not only one person talking. It is something that becomes common to two or more people, and in doing so it ties them together. The American scholar James Carey made exactly this point in 1975, when he wrote that the oldest sense of communication “exploits the ancient identity and common roots of the terms ‘commonness,’ ‘communion,’ ‘community,’ and ‘communication.’”⁴

The same idea runs through the Muslim tradition. The Quran presents speech as one of God’s first gifts to people: “The Most Merciful. Taught the Qur’ān, Created man, [And] taught him eloquence” (55:1 to 4), where “eloquence” translates al-bayān, the power of clear expression.¹² It presents the variety of peoples as made for mutual knowledge: “We have created you from male and female and made you peoples and tribes that you may know one another” (49:13).¹² Knowing one another across differences is a fair short description of what communication does.

2. The many definitions, and why there is no single one

If the word is clear, the definition is not. Scholars from many fields have studied communication (engineers, psychologists, sociologists, linguists, journalists) and each has defined it to suit their own question. In 1970 the American scholar Frank Dance gathered the definitions then in use and showed how far they disagreed. His article, “The ‘Concept’ of Communication”, concluded in effect that the field had not one concept but a family of related ones.⁶ A candidate does not need to choose one definition and defend it to the death. What earns marks is knowing the main kinds of definition, who gave each, and what each one stresses.

The definitions fall into four broad kinds. Each kind sees one part of the process as the essential part.

Take the broadest first. Warren Weaver, introducing Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory in 1949, wrote that “The word communication will be used here in a very broad sense to include all of the procedures by which one mind may affect another.” He added that this “involves not only written and oral speech, but also music, the pictorial arts, the theatre, the ballet, and in fact all human behavior.”⁵ Weaver’s definition is a transmission definition with an influence definition inside it, since it speaks of one mind affecting another. He then split the problems of communication into three levels. The first is technical: how accurately can the symbols be sent? The second is semantic: how precisely do the symbols that arrive carry the meaning the sender wanted? The third is about effectiveness: how far does the meaning received change the receiver’s conduct in the way the sender wanted?⁵ A telephone line that drops words fails at the first level. A message that arrives whole but is misread fails at the second, and one that is understood but ignored fails at the third.

The psychologist Carl Hovland led the American army’s studies of its wartime films, published with Arthur Lumsdaine and Fred Sheffield as Experiments on Mass Communication (1949).⁸ His work treated communication as an attempt by a communicator to change what an audience believes and does, and measured it by that change. This is the purest influence view: communication is judged by what it does to the receiver. It fits advertising, propaganda and public health campaigns well, and it explains why so much early research in the field asked about effects.

Wilbur Schramm moved the stress from the sender to the meeting of the two sides. In his 1954 essay “How Communication Works” he described communication as an attempt to establish a “commonness” with someone, to share information, an idea or an attitude.⁹ David Berlo, in The Process of Communication (1960), made the point sharper with a phrase every student of the subject learns: meanings are in people, not in words.¹⁰ The section on shared meaning below takes this kind of definition apart, because it is the one CE-2021 asked about.

James Carey’s definition is the widest of all. He called it a definition “of disarming simplicity”: “communication is a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed.”⁴ By this he meant that people do not first see the world and then talk about it. Through talk, news, stories and ceremonies they make and keep up a shared picture of what the world is. The section on the two great views below explains it.

3. What every definition shares

The definitions disagree on what to stress, but they share a core, and the core is what an examiner expects a candidate to state. Five things appear in almost every definition.

There is always more than one party. Even talking to yourself, which the chapter on the types of communication calls intrapersonal communication, is treated as one part of the mind addressing another. There is always a message, something that stands for something else. The message always travels in signs and symbols: words, pictures, gestures, sounds. There is always a channel through which the signs travel, whether the air of a room, a printed page or a mobile network. Finally, communication is always a process, something that happens over time and changes as it goes, not a single fixed act.

Where the definitions part company is on three questions, and Dance’s survey and the scholars since have kept returning to them.⁶⁷ The first is how broad communication is. Does it include animals and machines, as Weaver allowed when he said it might cover one mechanism affecting another, or only people?⁵ The second is intention. If a candidate yawns during the viva, has he communicated boredom, though he meant nothing? Some scholars say yes, since the board certainly received a message; others say communication needs a purpose. The third is success. If a message is sent but misunderstood, has communication happened? A transmission definition says yes, since the signal arrived. A shared-meaning definition says only partly, since the meaning was not shared.

4. Communication as shared meaning

This is the part of the subject CE-2021 asked about, and the part most candidates answer with a slogan. “Communication is the process of creating shared meaning” is true, but it explains nothing until you can say where meaning lives, how it gets shared, and why it is never shared completely. This section builds that explanation in four steps.

Meaning is built by the receiver, from what they bring

Start with one Urdu word. Every Pakistani child knows that kal means both “yesterday” and “tomorrow”. On its own, written on a card, the word has no single meaning. In “woh kal aaya tha” it means yesterday; in “woh kal aaye ga” it means tomorrow. The tense of the verb, the rest of the sentence, and what the listener already knows decide which meaning the listener takes. The meaning is not in the word. The listener builds it from the word and everything around it.

This is what Berlo meant when he wrote that meanings are in people.¹⁰ Words, pictures and gestures are signs, and a sign only stands for something because people have agreed, or learned, that it does. The word “tree” does not look like a tree; English speakers have agreed to let it stand for one. A thumbs-up means approval in Pakistan and an insult in some other countries. The green crescent and star stand for Pakistan only to people who have learned the flag. Signs whose meaning rests on agreement are called symbols, and nearly all human communication is done in symbols.

If meaning is built by the receiver, then two receivers can build different meanings from the same message. Schramm explained why with the idea of the field of experience: everything a person brings to a message, their language, education, beliefs, memories and culture.⁹ A sender can encode a message only in terms of their own experience, and a receiver can decode it only in terms of theirs.

Take a doctor in a Karachi hospital explaining to a mother from a village in Tharparkar how to give her child oral rehydration salts. The doctor’s field of experience includes medical training, English medical words, and the habit of thinking in milligrams and millilitres. The mother’s includes Sindhi or Dhatki, the weight of a water pot, and what her own mother did for a child with diarrhoea. If the doctor says “dissolve one sachet in one litre of water”, the words may land in a gap between the two fields. If the doctor holds up a familiar bottle and shows how full it should be, the message falls in the overlap, and the meaning is shared. That is the whole art of communication in one ward.

Sharing is a process, and it is never complete

Because the receiver builds the meaning, the sender cannot simply push it across. The two sides have to work towards it. The mother repeats the instruction in her own words; the doctor hears that she has confused the sachet with a spoon and shows her again. Each exchange is feedback, a response that tells the sender how the message was taken, and each round of feedback widens the shared area. This is why the shared-meaning view describes communication as a process rather than a delivery. It unfolds over time, and both sides shape what it ends up meaning.

The chapter on the process of communication sets out each element of this process, and the chapter on Schramm’s model draws it as a circle. What matters here is the idea itself: communication is successful to the degree that the meaning the receiver builds matches the meaning the sender intended, and that match is made by both sides together.

The last step follows from the first three. If each person builds meaning from their own field of experience, and no two people have the same field, then no two people ever hold exactly the same meaning. Communication is never a perfect copy of one mind in another. It is a matter of degree: enough shared meaning for the purpose at hand. For the mother in Tharparkar, enough is the right amount of water in the bottle. For two judges reading a clause of the Constitution, enough may require pages of argument. The critics of this view, below, push the point further.

So the answer to CE-2021’s question is a qualified yes. Communication is the process of creating shared meaning, provided “creating” is taken seriously (the meaning is built, not delivered), “shared” is taken as a matter of degree, and “process” is taken to mean the back and forth of feedback.

5. Signs, symbols and codes

The shared-meaning view rests on one more idea: that communication is done in signs, and that signs come in kinds. A candidate who can name the kinds writes a sharper answer on almost any topic in head I.

A sign is anything that stands for something else to someone. Some signs are tied to what they stand for by nature or cause: smoke stands for fire, a fever stands for an infection, dark clouds over the Margalla Hills stand for rain. Other signs stand for things only because people have agreed they should: the word “rain”, the red light at a crossing, the call to prayer from a mosque that tells the neighbourhood the time. These agreed signs are symbols. Human language is the largest system of symbols there is, which is why the same idea can be said in Urdu, Pashto or English, each with its own symbols.

Symbols are organised into codes: languages, the grammar of a news photograph, the conventions of a television drama, the dress code of a wedding. A receiver who knows the code can decode the message; one who does not misreads it. A Pakistani viewer reads a drama’s closing shot of a woman at a prayer mat as a sign of her repentance because they share the drama’s code. A foreign viewer may not.

Signs also carry two layers of meaning. The denotation is the plain meaning: a photograph of a soldier at the Siachen glacier denotes a man in uniform on ice. The connotation is what the sign suggests beyond that: sacrifice, duty, the cold. Most of the power of the media lies in connotation, which is why the chapter on social representation spends so long on it.

Not all communication is verbal. Tone of voice, facial expression, gesture, posture, distance and dress all carry meaning, and in face-to-face talk they often carry more than the words. A “yes” said with lowered eyes and a long pause can mean “no”. The chapter on the types of communication sets out the kinds of non-verbal communication in full.

6. The two great views: transmission and ritual

James Carey’s essay of 1975, “A Cultural Approach to Communication”, gave the field two names that every candidate should be able to use. He argued that Western thought holds two views of communication, a transmission view and a ritual view.⁴

The transmission view is the commoner. Carey wrote that it “is defined by terms such as ‘imparting,’ ‘sending,’ ‘transmitting,’ or ‘giving information to others.’ It is formed from a metaphor of geography or transportation.”⁴ In the nineteenth century, he noted, the same word “communication” was used for railways and roads and for the telegraph, because both moved things across space. “The center of this idea of communication is the transmission of signals or messages over distance for the purpose of control.”⁴ Shannon and Weaver’s engineering model, the subject of its own chapter, is the purest form of this view.

The ritual view, Carey wrote, is “by far the older of those views”. In it, “communication is linked to terms such as ‘sharing,’ ‘participation,’ ‘association,’ ‘fellowship,’ and ‘the possession of a common faith.’” Its purpose is different: “A ritual view of communication is directed not toward the extension of messages in space but toward the maintenance of society in time; not the act of imparting information but the representation of shared beliefs.”⁴ Where the transmission view’s model case is a message sent across a map, the ritual view’s is “the sacred ceremony that draws persons together in fellowship and commonality.”⁴

Carey’s best example was the newspaper. Under the transmission view, a newspaper is “an instrument for disseminating news and knowledge”, and the questions are about its effects: does it inform or mislead, change attitudes or harden them? Under the ritual view, reading the paper is “less as sending or gaining information and more as attending a mass, a situation in which nothing new is learned but in which a particular view of the world is portrayed and confirmed.”⁴

The point is easy to see in Pakistan. On the morning of 14 August, the front pages, the television specials and the flag on every rooftop tell almost nobody anything new. Everyone already knows the date and its story. What they do is gather the nation, symbolically, around a shared past. A transmission view of those front pages finds very little in them; a ritual view finds the whole point. The same is true of the live broadcast of the change of guard at the Mazar-e-Quaid, or of the moment the whole country watches a cricket final together. Carey did not say the transmission view was wrong. He said that “Neither of these counterposed views of communication necessarily denies what the other affirms”, and that a full account needs both.⁴

Carey took the ritual view from the American philosopher John Dewey, whom he quotes: “Society exists not only by transmission, by communication, but it may fairly be said to exist in transmission, in communication.”⁴ The small change of preposition, from “by” to “in”, is the whole argument. Society is not only kept going by communication, as a machine is kept going by fuel. It consists of communication, the way a conversation consists of the people talking.

7. Why the definition matters for the rest of this subject

A definition is not a formality, because each kind of definition leads to a different kind of research, a different kind of model and a different kind of policy. A candidate who sees this can link this chapter to almost any question in the paper.

The transmission view produced the linear models of head I (Lasswell, Shannon and Weaver), the powerful effects theories of head II, and the early idea of development communication in head VI, in which a government sends the right message to farmers and farmers adopt it. The shared-meaning view produced the circular models (Osgood and Schramm), the attention to feedback, and the later idea of participatory development communication, in which the community helps make the message. The ritual view produced the cultural studies of head II and head IV, which ask how the media shape a society’s picture of itself, and how they represent women, minorities and the poor.

The same split runs through public relations in head VII. A press release that simply announces a policy treats communication as transmission. A ministry that asks citizens what they think, listens and adjusts treats it as the making of shared meaning, and the chapters on PR call this two-way communication. Governments that only transmit tend to be surprised when their message is not believed.

8. Communication in Pakistani life, case by case

The idea of shared meaning is easiest to grasp through cases where it succeeded or failed. Each of these is ordinary, and each shows one step of the argument.

Take first a polio worker at the door. Pakistan’s polio teams have long found that the hardest part of their work is not reaching a house but being believed once they get there. Where a family has heard rumours that the drops are harmful, the worker’s message (“these drops protect your child”) is decoded through that fear. The campaigns have learned to send the message through people who share the family’s field of experience: local women workers, religious scholars, respected elders. The chapter on development communication in Pakistan sets out those campaigns. The point here is that the same words carry a different meaning when they come from inside the community’s field of experience.

A weather warning before a flood shows the same gap. A warning of “heavy rainfall with a likelihood of flash floods” means one thing to a meteorologist and another to a farmer on the bank of a river who has heard many warnings that came to nothing. The warning is transmitted perfectly, yet the meaning that would make the farmer move his family may not be shared. Disaster agencies across the world have learned that a warning works only when it says, in local words, what the danger is and what to do.

The same happens in a classroom taught in English. A student from a rural school who learned in Urdu may sit in a university lecture in English and receive every word, yet build little meaning from them. The words fall outside her field of experience. The best teachers in Pakistan know this and move between languages, examples and pictures until the meaning lands. That is communication understood as sharing, not sending.

A national celebration works the other way. On Independence Day, as the section on the two views showed, the newspapers and channels perform a ritual. Nothing much is transmitted; a great deal is shared. The same is true of the national anthem before a cricket match, or of the call to prayer, which tells the time and also gathers a neighbourhood into one community five times a day.

Even a WhatsApp message obeys the rule. A short message such as “ok” carries little information but much meaning, and the meaning depends almost entirely on the relationship. From a close friend it is a reply; from an angry parent it may be a warning. Digital communication strips away tone and face, so the receiver must build more of the meaning alone, which is why so many quarrels start in family chat groups.

These cases also show why Pakistan is a hard place to communicate in, and an interesting one to study. The country speaks dozens of languages, and its people range from the highly educated to the unlettered, from the wealthy city to the remote valley. The fields of experience overlap less than in a small, uniform country. Every Pakistani journalist, public servant and teacher has to work harder to build shared meaning.

9. The study of communication, in the world and in Pakistan

Communication became a university subject in the twentieth century. Before that, its questions belonged to rhetoric (the ancient art of persuasion), to philosophy and to the craft of journalism. In the United States, research on propaganda in the two world wars, on radio and on voting brought psychologists, sociologists and political scientists to the same questions, and Wilbur Schramm gathered them into a new field with its own departments and journals. The chapter on the four eras of effects research tells that story.

In the Muslim tradition the study of clear speech is far older. The sciences of balāgha (eloquence) and bayān grew up around the Quran, and the scholars of hadith built a careful method for checking reports, asking who passed each one on and whether each narrator could be trusted. The Quran itself teaches the first rule of a careful journalist: “O you who have believed, if there comes to you a disobedient one with information, investigate, lest you harm a people out of ignorance” (49:6).¹² The chapter on the press code of ethics returns to it.

In South Asia the formal study of journalism began in Lahore. The University of the Punjab says its Department of Journalism, founded in 1941, was the first in the subcontinent. It changed its name to the Department of Mass Communication in 1985, and it is now the university’s Institute of Communication Studies.¹³ Many Pakistani universities now teach mass communication, and the Allama Iqbal Open University teaches it at a distance.

10. The critics of shared meaning

The shared-meaning definition is the one most textbooks now teach, and CE-2021 more or less invited candidates to agree with it. A strong answer still gives the critics, because their objections make the definition clearer.

The first objection is that perfect sharing is impossible, so the definition sets a goal no communication can reach. The American scholar John Durham Peters argued in Speaking into the Air (1999) that the dream of minds meeting completely has haunted Western thought, and that it leads people to treat every misunderstanding as a failure.¹¹ He suggested we would do better to accept the gaps between people and value communication as a way of caring for each other across them. On this view, the doctor in the Karachi ward does not need the mother to share her meaning exactly. She needs the child to get the right amount of salt and water. Communication succeeds by its results, not by a perfect match of minds.

The second objection comes from the transmission side. Engineers point out that much of the world’s communication involves no human meaning at all: machines talking to machines, signals controlling traffic lights, satellites relaying data. Weaver himself allowed a broader definition “which would include the procedures by means of which one mechanism … affects another mechanism”.⁵ A definition centred on human meaning leaves all of that out. For a subject about the mass media this matters less, but in the age of algorithms that choose which news a person sees, the machines are part of the process.

The third objection is about power. Shared meaning sounds equal and friendly, as if both sides built the meaning together. In practice, critics in the Marxist and cultural traditions argue, the meanings that get shared are usually the ones the powerful want shared. A television channel, a government or an advertiser has far more power to fix what a symbol means than any viewer. The chapters on media hegemony and the propaganda model set out this argument. It does not reject the shared-meaning definition; it asks whose meaning is being shared.

Each criticism, read carefully, refines the definition rather than replacing it. Communication is the making of shared meaning, shared only in part, judged partly by its results, and shaped by the power of those who send.

11. Where the study of communication stands now

Communication today is studied as a broad field that joins several traditions. Scholars no longer expect one definition to win. They use the transmission view to study how information spreads (how fast a rumour travels on social media, how many people a broadcast reaches), the shared-meaning view to study how messages are understood, and the ritual and cultural view to study how the media shape identity and belief.

The digital age has made each view more pressing. Messages travel faster and further than ever, which suits the transmission view. Yet the same messages are understood in more ways than ever, by audiences who choose what to watch and talk back, which suits the shared-meaning view. Online communities, from fan groups to religious groups, gather around shared symbols in ways Carey would have recognised as ritual. A candidate who can use all three views on one case, such as the spread of false news during a crisis, shows exactly the understanding the paper rewards.

In Pakistan, the field is growing in universities and in the state’s own work. The government’s ministries, the polio programme, the disaster agencies and the regulators all depend on communication that builds shared meaning with a very varied public. The later chapters of this subject, on development communication and public relations in government, are in a sense one long application of this chapter.

12. What students mix up

Communication and information. Information is what a message contains; communication is the whole process of sharing it, including what the receiver makes of it. A message full of information can communicate nothing if it is not understood.

Sending and communicating. A transmission definition counts a message as communicated when it arrives. A shared-meaning definition counts it only when the meaning is shared. Say which definition you are using.

Meaning in words. Words do not carry their meaning inside them. People build meaning from words and context; kal is the easy proof.

Sign and symbol. All symbols are signs, but not all signs are symbols. Smoke is a sign of fire by nature; the word “fire” is a symbol by agreement.

Transmission view and ritual view as rival truths. Carey said they describe the same acts from two sides. A newspaper both sends information and gathers a community.

Communis and communicare. Communis is the adjective, “common”; communicare is the verb, “to share” or “to make common”. Communication comes from the verb, which comes from the adjective.

13. What FPSC has asked

The ground of this chapter has been set once in Part-II and underlies many other questions.¹

• CE-2021, Q.2: “Is communication the process of creating shared meaning? Explain in detail.”

Part-I has tested the definition and its kinds indirectly. CE-2026 asked “Communicating within oneself is known as?”, which the chapter on types answers, and “The Shannon-Weaver Model of communication is also known as”, which tests the transmission view.²

14. Facts to carry into the hall

15. What loses marks on this topic

A definition with no name behind it. “Communication is the transfer of information from one person to another” is one kind of definition, unattributed. Give two or three kinds, each with its scholar and year.

The slogan without the explanation. CE-2021 asked candidates to “explain in detail”. Saying communication is shared meaning earns little; showing where meaning lives, how fields of experience overlap and why the overlap is never complete earns the marks.

No example. The shared-meaning idea is abstract until it is worked on a case. One Pakistani example, the doctor and the mother, a polio worker, the word kal, makes it concrete.

Only one side. A question that asks “Is communication…?” invites a judgement. Give the critics (Peters, the engineers, the critics of power) and settle the question.

Confusing the definition with a model. A definition says what communication is; a model draws how it works. Use a model in support, but define first.

16. A worked answer plan

The question is CE-2021, Q.2: “Is communication the process of creating shared meaning? Explain in detail.”¹

The tasks. One question with an implied judgement: is it, and explain. So the answer must define, explain the shared-meaning view in detail, and say how far it holds.

Opening. Give the Latin root (communicare, to make common) and say yes, with a qualification: communication is the process of creating shared meaning, but the meaning is built, shared only in part, and shaped by power.

The kinds of definition. A short table: transmission (Shannon and Weaver, 1949), influence (Hovland, 1949), shared meaning (Schramm, 1954; Berlo, 1960), ritual (Carey, 1975). Quote Weaver’s “all of the procedures by which one mind may affect another”.

Shared meaning explained. Meanings are in people (Berlo) with the kal example; the field of experience (Schramm) with the overlapping-circles diagram; feedback as the means of widening the overlap; meaning never fully shared.

The ritual view. Carey’s two views; the newspaper as a mass; Independence Day as a Pakistani case.

Pakistan. The doctor and the mother in Tharparkar; the polio worker trusted when she comes from inside the community.

The critics. Peters on the impossibility of perfect sharing; the engineers’ machine communication; the critics of power. Each refines, none overturns.

Conclusion. Yes: communication is best understood as the creation of shared meaning, provided “creating” means building by both sides, “shared” means shared in part, and the power to fix meanings is remembered.

What to remember from this chapter

• “Communication” comes from Latin commūnicō, to share or make common, from commūnis, common; community and communion share the root.
• Definitions differ in what they stress: transmission (Shannon and Weaver), influence (Hovland), shared meaning (Schramm, Berlo), ritual (Carey). Dance (1970) showed there is no single concept.
• Weaver (1949): “all of the procedures by which one mind may affect another”.
• Definitions split on breadth, intention and success.
• Meaning is in people, not words; each person decodes through their field of experience; meaning is shared only where fields overlap, and never fully.
• Carey (1975): the transmission view (messages across space, for control) and the ritual view (the maintenance of society in time); both describe the same acts.
• Critics: perfect sharing is a dream (Peters); machines communicate too; the powerful fix which meanings are shared.
• In Pakistan’s many languages and wide gaps of education, building shared meaning takes deliberate work.

Check yourself

Answer each question in your own words before opening the answer.

1. What does the Latin root of “communication” tell us about the idea? (The section on what the word means)

2. Name the four kinds of definition and give a scholar for each. (The section on the many definitions)

3. Use the Urdu word kal to explain the claim that meanings are in people. (The section on shared meaning)

4. Why is meaning never fully shared, according to the field-of-experience idea? (The section on shared meaning)

5. Explain Carey’s transmission and ritual views using a Pakistani newspaper on 14 August. (The section on the two great views)

6. Give one criticism of the shared-meaning definition and say how it refines rather than replaces the definition. (The section on the critics)

7. From the chapter on how to sit the paper: what are the three steps for applying a theory to Pakistan, and how would you apply them to the field-of-experience idea?