2.7 Interaction and human communication

Impossibility of not communicating

Those behaviors to which meaning is assigned become messages. Since any behavior can become a message, it is impossible to keep from generating meaning within an interaction. In this sense one cannot communicate.

In an interaction, anything you do or not do is communicating some message. If you move closer to someone when talking to them, you are communicating one thing, if you stay where you are, you are communicating something else. Depending on the role each person is in, who they are, what the current situation is, different actions and words could communicate different things.

Self-disclosure and self-image

The self or self-image is the center from which all communication occurs. When there is a perceived threat to the self-image, communication will be characterized by defensiveness. Defensive communication involves a person's attempt to conceal some significant meaning in order to protect his or her self-image. For example, if someone criticized someone else by calling them incompetent, the other person may start to feel stupid, and would want to hide that. It might make them defensive and want to conceal their self, or self-image of being a stupid person. People try to defend their self-images. Someone could try to hide aspects of their self-image or hide feeling and decisions they have about their lives. These feelings and decisions may or may not be understood by other people. Someone could go a long time in a relationship with someone else and be hiding certain feelings because they are being defensive or they just don't want the other person to know.

Disclosure of experience in the here and now

Effective communication involves congruency between what a person is experiencing and what the person is expressing in an interaction. So if a person is feeling angry, they should express that they are angry in an appropriate fashion. Disclosure doesn't necessarily mean that the person needs to reveal all their secrets, it does, however, mean they need to reveal the appropriate amount of information at the appropriate times. For instance, a parent getting angry at a child without expressing why they are angry wouldn't be appropriate because the child wouldn't know what to do to stop the parent from getting angry at them in the future. The parent would appear to the child to just get angry and the parent wouldn't then be properly disclosing, or communicating, that they are angry and the cause of their anger.

Incongruency between role and context

This could be a source of great amusement. You could consider every interaction one in which each person is supposed to fit a certain role, or roles. If they don't fit those roles things could go dramatically wrong.

Incongruency between roles