Chapter 5

What meaning means?

You can found definitions of meaning in various dictionaries, but the real definition should come from you. While meaning is a very difficult concept to define or describe, it is worthy of discussion because understanding the why we acquire make, and interpret meaning can help us communicate more effectively.

Conveyor-belt fallacy is assumption that because the message is sent and received, the receiver therefore understands what the message means. While the receiver may physically get your message, he or she may not “get” your meaning. Messages are more than words, sentences, or visual images created as content for the purpose of transmission. Messages contain both intended and interpreted meaning. Intended meaning is the meaning the sender has in mind when designing his or her messages. interpreted meaning is the meaning the receiver interprets from the message. Also, when the intended meaning and interpreted meaning match, shared meaning is created. The connection between the sender and the receiver is not simply either. In our everyday lives we receive more than 10,000 bits of stimuli every second. but we actually focus on and mentally process only a small amount of the data we receive. This way we experience selected sensory stimuli (what we hear, see, taste, touch or smell) and we perceive, organize and interpret what those stimuli are and what they mean to us.

The initial act of sensing occurs whit perception, which happens when you receive and mentally record sensually information. Organizing essentially refers to ordering and categorizing the information you receive like a story and then associating it with knowledge you already have about objects, ideas, and people. Once you have organized the sensory information you began to interpret what the experience may mean. Interpretation refers to analyzing what you are experiencing and what it means from your past experiences with similar behaviors.

Meaning is created and interpreted by people. While meaning is an internal process much of what we perceive, thinks the mean comes from what we have learned from our experiences with family, with friends, and from our culture. Assigned is something that people agree represents something else. Assigned usually is linked with what it represents. A symbol is a type of a sign that has not natural link or has an indirect association to what it represents.

How we acquire meaning comes from the context in which our experience or our communication occurs. Context is the physical, social, and psychological situation in which our communication event occurs. A given context is a like a puzzle made up of many individual pieces that, when combined, help us to assembled the whole puzzle.

Interpersonal context

When we think, we communicate with ourselves. However, interpersonal communication is more than an ongoing dialogue we have with our thinking selves. It is a mental process of becoming an encoding, both internal and external stimuli. Interpersonal decoding is a process of receiving data that originate either inside or outside ourselves and then interpreting and assigning meaning to those data. Interpersonal encoding is a process of organizing data and translating thoughts into a managed internal response.

Personal history context

A personal history context is our memory of past experiences which we used to make sense and meaning of new experiences .

Culture context teach to view the meanings of ideas objects, motivation, behaviors, and fillings through our cultural lens.

Interpersonal context is the context when we interact with others, that interaction itself becomes a context from we derive meaning.

Business context

In the business environment, we learn what is meaningful from our coworkers and from culture of the organization.

Semantics includes the meanings of concrete and abstract words. Concrete words are easier to understand because they are associated with objects or events we directly experiences through our senses. Abstract words refer to concept or ideas that often less tangible.