Communication (from Latin communicare, meaning "to share") is the act of developing meaning among entities or groups through the use of sufficiently mutually understood signs, symbols, and semiotic conventions.
In Claude Shannon's and Warren Weaver's influential model, human communication was imagined to function like a telephone or telegraph. Accordingly, they conceptualized communication as involving discrete steps:
The formation of communicative motivation or reason.
Message composition (further internal or technical elaboration on what exactly to express).
Message encoding (for example, into digital data, written text, speech, pictures, gestures and so on).
Transmission of the encoded message as a sequence of signals using a specific channel or medium.
Noise sources such as natural forces and in some cases human activity (both intentional and accidental) begin influencing the quality of signals propagating from the sender to one or more receivers.
Reception of signals and reassembling of the encoded message from a sequence of received signals.
Decoding of the reassembled encoded message.
Interpretation and making sense of the presumed original message.These elements are now understood to be substantially overlapping and recursive activities rather than steps in a sequence. For example, communicative actions can commence before a communicator formulates a conscious attempt to do so, as in the case of phatics; likewise, communicators modify their intentions and formulations of a message in response to real-time feedback (e.g., a change in facial expression). Practices of decoding and interpretation are culturally enacted, not just by individuals (genre conventions, for instance, trigger anticipatory expectations for how a message is to be received), and receivers of any message operationalize their own frames of reference in interpretation.The scientific study of communication can be divided into:
Information theory which studies the quantification, storage, and communication of information in general;
Communication studies which concerns human communication;
Biosemiotics which examines communication in and between living organisms in general.
Biocommunication which exemplifies sign-mediated interactions in and between organisms of all domains of life, including viruses.The channel of communication can be visual, auditory, tactile/haptic (e.g. Braille or other physical means), olfactory, electromagnetic, or biochemical. Human communication is unique for its extensive use of abstract language. Development of civilization has been closely linked with progress in telecommunication.