Communication

See also: Information | Network

Contents

Introduction

A system or systems of message creation where information is transmitted or exchanged. It occurs in a myriad of ways from our surroundings. Although intelligent, cooperative, accurate communication is the goal, this is often not done in a collaborative or progressive manner.

Developing standards and protocols for linguistic communication together with high literacy rates, allows for the good education and the sharing of knowledge, expressions, ideas, opinions, etc on a huge range of topics. It should also be noted that non animal, inanimate objects can communicate information such as their appearance or sound and can be percieved directly.

At the moment, communication is not totally free, because signals can be modified, moderated or obscured by many things, including;

Politics, Journalism, chat, art including music, public relations and advertisements all heavily involve various forums for communication.

Communication can be aided by of objects and technology including social networking, broadband, photography, agents, multimedia, steganography, cryptography, Pretty Good Privacy, cyberspace, the global village, file sharing and Freedom of Speech.

Modern Communications

Information technology provision will greatly influence a society or community. Television is one of the most dominant communications media. Largely broadcast in analog, television is now becoming a digital service. Before TV, newspapers and radio were popular ways to communicate.

Computer and Internet, particularly E-Mail and the World Wide Web are valuable modern technologies benefitting many users. Internet communications are characterised by the fact that for a document or file to be published it does not have to be physically delivered to a central repository.

This is the growing trend of complex networks, such as the internet, called decentralization.

Our modern communication networks allow for increased surveillance, including eschelon, carnivore and many other pieces of spyware.

Communications, Politics and Public Engagement

The notion of democratic theory and the role of the mass media as an agent is a vital part of democracy and other forms of government. The need for politicians to use the media and the people to get political news, is important especially in relation to the perception of adversaries and unknown threats to security.

A multiplicity of interactions is occurring with the widening of social arenas are the major results of a shift to information technologies. Some argue that the sheer volume and diversity of communications will result in social changes taking two forms, firstly economic changes, which provide a comparative advantage, and secondly communication technologies allow for an expansion of the public sphere, by changing scales, involving an abundance of active stakeholders.

In an Information Age the codification of theoretical knowledge is the transforming resource for progress. Information, rather than labor as during the industrial revolution. The digitizing of content into files has become a major source of information, along with the spoken, written and broadcast word. The Internet represents the largest source of files. With modern information technology the material costs of production are near zero, that is, it is very cheap to create the 10000 th copy. It is unlikely that these developments in decentralized software development with afffect those seeking profit from intellectual property. Specifically no single global system of DRM seems secure.

Cybernetics is the study of control and communication theory. Mathematics has developed some communication theory as well.

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