Some communication behaviors indicate that we are not communicating mindfully, such as withdrawing from a romantic partner or engaging in passive-aggressive behavior during a period of interpersonal conflict.
I think that it is very cool that this textbook and this course are teaching us not only how to be better professional communicators, but also better personal communicators. I feel like this could be very helpful for a lot of people.
many students still resist taking communication classes. Perhaps people think they already have good communication skills or can improve their skills on their own. While either of these may be true for some, studying communication can only help. In such a competitive job market, being able to document that you have received communication instruction and training from communication professionals (the faculty in your communication department) can give you the edge needed to stand out from other applicants or employees.
I think that many students resist taking communications classes because of the stress they cause, although that may just be me. I know that I didn't want to take communications not because I'm "too good" at it. No I didn't want to take communications because every time I have to speak in public my heart starts beating really fast and I get really bad anxiety for a while. I know that isn't how it is for everyone, however I just wanted to share my experience with avoiding communications and classes like it.
then you’re what some scholars have called “digital natives.”
Calling someone a "digital native" is very interesting to me, because as someone born ten years after the invention of the internet I've obviously never seen the pre-internet world. And it is just a very strange thing for me to hear, as a world without internet doesn't exist for me and never has. The same with computers too, I cannot imagine a world without computers, and I especially can't imagine a world without the internet, as I'm sure many others in my generation agree.
Of course, we don’t just communicate verbally—we have various options, or channels for communication. Encoded messages are sent through a channel, or a sensory route on which a message travels, to the receiver for decoding. While communication can be sent and received using any sensory route (sight, smell, touch, taste, or sound), most communication occurs through visual (sight) and/or auditory (sound) channels. If your roommate has headphones on and is engrossed in a video game, you may need to get his attention by waving your hands before you can ask him about dinner.
This is especially interesting to me now, as we saw the rise of smartphones people started to talk to each other in person less and less, especially after 2020. And I just think it's interesting to see how peoples interactions with each other changed after that. There is simply a lot more communication that is only text based now, I'd argue more now than there has ever been before. And I know from experience how easy it can be to misinterpret a text that someone sent, because you can't tell what tone they said it in through text and you can't see if they make a hand or arm motion to show its a joke, or a million other things could happen and cause someone to misjudge the situation that could never happen in person for a million different reasons.
The beginning of the “Manuscript Era,” around 3500 BCE, marked the turn from oral to written culture. This evolution in communication corresponded with a shift to a more settled, agrarian way of life (Poe, 2011). As hunter-gatherers settled into small villages and began to plan ahead for how to plant, store, protect, and trade or sell their food, they needed accounting systems to keep track of their materials and record transactions.
It's crazy to me how even though the vast majority of human history has been spent as practically cavemen. However we never really started to advance until we started agriculture. This is very interesting to me in particular, because I am very interested in history and how we as people started inventing slowly at first and then faster and faster until today and we'll hopefully keep on going and inventing wonderful things like agriculture and computers until long after I'm dead too. But as we invent new things we need to come up with new words for them.