Over the telephone my boss gives me an instruction. I hear it, give my recognition, hang up then realize that I am not clear on exactly what it is that I am to do. Something about the proper way to add up my hours is the basic message, but the way she has explained it is not clear to me. Yet. As far as she is concerned, every word she spoke, that is, the way she described her instructions, was perfectly spelled out. She sits in her office confident that her explanation is clear, while I sit behind my desk like some detective trying to solve this great mystery. Although I understood every word she spoke, what she spoke does not register. No eureka bells are setting off. I have trouble decoding her words. I cannot apply the words she's "transmitted." I am experiencing communication problems.

This happens all the time. As in the case just described, somewhere between her message and my reception of it, the meaning got lost. To the best of her knowledge, she has gone over a procedure that I have successfully grasped. But it remains unclear to me because I do not understand the way in which she is presenting it. To my boss, it is of course direct and sound, as it is from her mind that the words and thoughts are being emitted. However, as soon as they collided with my own thinking processes they lost complete lucidity. My faculties tell me she is talking but saying nothing sensible. Her faculties tell her her circular sentences are making sense. I periodically acknowledge what she is relaying. She keeps relaying. We are communicating. But are we really?

Given this situation, one is led to consider whether it is possible that, that is, can it be that, true communication is impossible? After all, Daniel Chandler's piece "The Transmission Model Of Communication" points out that Shannon and Weaver already note three problems with communication as we understand it today, namely the technical, semantic and effectiveness issues which hardly seem debatable given my example. Even Chandler himself proposes that "communication is about meaning rather than information . . . and information and meaning arises only in the process of listeners, readers or viewers actively making sense of what they hear or see," meaning effective communication is relative, debatable, up in the air. On the other hand, contemporary communication theorists claim that individual thoughts and feelings do not play a role in communication because even "our language isn't our own. Words have connotations we don't choose for them. An emphasis on creative individuality is itself a culturally-shaped myth . . . "

This kind of logic seems to define human communication as being uniform and unchanging, like that of fish or birds who seem to react and act as a collective. That is, they seem to have socialized maneuvers and/or means of communication. Consider the way birds and fish move in unison. In groups, they switch directions simultaneously as though it is just understood that that is what they do in that situation at that very moment. Likewise, the contemporary theorists treat human "communication as a shared social system." Whatever it is that one communicates to another, because the meaning of the words being used are set, the point being communicated is undoubtedly transparent. There should be no problem in getting the meaning since the meaning has already been established.

But then again Chandler holds that the "creativity of the act of interpretation" by the individual makes getting one definite meaning of information virtually impossible. The notion that "meanings exist in the world awaiting only decoding by the passive spectator" is naive realism according to Chandler.

So when my boss and I were communicating were we doing so as birds and fish, communicating as a collective under set, established modes of communication simply because we were using the same language? And if this is so, then why did her presentation of the information pose a problem? Considering we should have understood each other by the virtue of the fact that we speak the same language, this should not have been the case. As a matter of fact, this case shows that even though we were using the same language I could not decipher her meaning. Her mind works in ways that mine does not. And if it is through our minds that we formulate information, then how can it be that what we are communicating will be received in its true form? No two minds work alike nor are their two beings which feel alike. Therefore, how can anyone know exactly what is being communicated? Each of us has a one-of-a-kind make-up. And though, yes, we do understand the use of words and their semantic properties, the fact that we even have to use words to effectively communicate alone makes true communication questionable.