Communication Channels & Happiness

Communication is all that is in our life. If you don't believe this info, we shall walk through a path that will raise our awareness of our life and through this path you will see that we are transmitting and receiving continuously, thus if we would like to be happier,  we shall select happier dialogues. We would explore the communication in our world more clearly and deeply to spot happy interactions and choose them. Together we shall understand how easy it is to clear those linkage channels through understanding how they work and how they link us to other people and things. Then you would be in a better position to select the interface channels that make you happier.

All wires are similar but carry and spread different pieces of information and feelings

What is Communication?

Communication is a vast topic from the physical and spiritual aspects of life especially in the digital life we are encountering and the so-called social media era. That's because it is actually what we are doing all the time. Here, in our first chat together, we shall be exploring the overview ideas, then in the subsequent chats, we shall delve deeper in every way we are affected by communication.

Let us start by how WAS our correspondence with each other fifteen or twenty years ago?

We were also communicating but the sources of both incoming and outgoing communication were limited to our local environment plus the narrow window through which we were accessing what is outside these localities. This narrow window was limited to TV, pay-TV, newspaper and all of those were forms of communication pushed in our way. Our outgoing communication was limited to our family, colleagues, and friends. All of those were colocated with us where we physically exist unless you are a TV star or a news writer.

Although we were having methods to communicate remotely with people 100's of KMs away, that was typically called phones still, it is a point to point communication with a definite purpose and a definite person.

Easily in those days, we could highlight the obvious standard connections which were the verbal ones and we can feel their effect on us as a cheerful Good Morning or a one filled by depression. As described on etymonline.com on early 15c., " act of communication, act of imparting, discussing, debating, conferring," from Old French comunicacion.

Todays changing world imposed itself even on the definitions of what we use daily in our life. You can see in Merriam-Webster the definition of communication which states that it is "a process by which information is exchanged between individuals through a common system of symbols, signs, or behavior" and Oxford definition "The imparting or exchanging of information by speaking, writing, or using some other medium." 

Also in those days, we were able to sense the message we receive from the scenery and smell of a flower in our way. This flower is all the time communicating its message of happiness but we receive it only when our receiptors are opened and tuned in the right direction.

But is there a science behind how we communicate?

Yes. if only we consider a few words exchanged between 2 persons we can relate to a study in 1966 by Prof. Albert Mehrabian that lead to what is widely known and still considered as a reference, as the 7% rule. The study showed that the receiving side of the conversation receives the visual message i.e body language and gesture correctly up to 55%, while 38% of the message is received correctly through the tone and music of the words and only 7% of the message is received from the spoken words.

These results still hold true till now because you can relate examples to them from everyday life, you conceive a well-dressed person on top of the well-being scale while an unknown person with simple clothes can drive pitty feelings. Even the spoken words can't be well received without its tone and music, listening to a podcast where the sound is flat will cause many words to drop from our ears and we will lose focus. 

Nowadays, science extended our control to some other unseen and unheard ways of message conveying as the audio and visual subliminal level of conveying a message that speaks to our unconscious mind.

Does communication evolve with time?

Yes, although the basic instincts through which we receive the information and interpret the situation are the same since our creation and, some researches say it is weakened due to our dependency on the technology which is no more than the extension of our senses. When your favorite song is playing in a low voice you use your remote control to increase the voice or get a better speaker but never look at it as an opportunity to sharpen your hearing sense.

Still, these senses are strong behind the seen and can capture what we don't explicitly hear or see. That's why a lot of the media channels and the social media especially instruments on conveying their messages to these subconscious senses that we don't control and so it is vulnerable.

Now, being on social media by default throughout a big portion of your day makes you engaged in the cycle of sending your image and receiving what adds up to it or bites out of it. Here we don't mean a literal image. What we mean is the hologram we virtually impose on every image we see on social media or what we hear and, read. The others sharing the social media space contribute by creating a hologram for us based on our presence on social media.

In conclusion, 

We are all the time communicating and in various ways to deliver different messages and we are receiving back in the same way. There are 10's maybe 100's of communication ways some of which we don't know or to be more realistic most of us don't know them. We need this knowledge to be happier and have control over what we send and receive.