A Message Is Only One Part of Communication
@jorgebscomm for @empowervmedia
Communication is not only information moving from sender to receiver. Meaning also develops through interaction, relationships and the contexts in which people meet.
“Can we talk?” is only three words, but the message surely is not finished when the sentence is spoken. Said by a friend, a manager or a stranger online, it arrives with different expectations. Tone, history, relationship and setting matter.
That is why communication is more than sending messages. Human communication involves people interpreting one another within relationships, roles, norms and environments that shape what can be said, heard and done.
The transmission picture is useful, but incomplete
One influential way of picturing communication is linear: a source produces a message, the message travels through a channel, and a receiver gets it. Claude Shannon’s 1948 mathematical theory of communication formalised this problem for engineering. Shannon was explicit that semantic meaning was not the engineering problem he was solving.
The model remains useful for transmission, but human communication adds problems that a signal diagram was never designed to settle. A message can arrive intact and still be misunderstood, resisted or reinterpreted because of who sent it and where the exchange occurred.
Communication is interaction
Transactional approaches make a different assumption. Dean Barnlund’s transactional model treats communication as a continuing process in which people are not simply taking turns as fixed sender and receiver. They are simultaneously interpreting and producing verbal and non-verbal cues, with meaning developing through interaction.
This changes the practical question. Instead of asking only “Did I send the message clearly?”, we can ask “What happened between us while the meaning was being worked out?”
A nod, pause, facial expression, clarification, silence or change of tone can alter an exchange before a sentence is complete. Feedback is not an optional extra. Often, it is part of communication itself.
Relationships are part of the meaning
Communication also takes place inside relationships that have histories. A 2026 chapter in The Cambridge Handbook of Personal Relationships describes communication as interdependent: messages influence, and are influenced by, messages that come before and after them. It also emphasises ambiguity and complexity, including the possibility that a message may perform several functions at once.
That helps explain why identical wording can do different social work. “Fine” can signal agreement, resignation, irritation or an attempt to end a conversation. The dictionary meaning remains, but the relationship supplies information needed to interpret it.
Institutions communicate too
The frame widens when communication happens inside organisations and institutions. A university email, newsroom correction, hospital form or workplace meeting is not just an exchange between individuals. Roles, procedures, professional norms, technologies and authority structures help shape the encounter.
Research on the communicative constitution of organisations goes further than saying organisations “use communication”. This tradition asks how organising itself is produced, sustained and changed through communication. A 2025 overview in the Academy of Management describes communication as a constitutive element of organisations, rather than treating the organisation simply as a container in which messages happen.
Communication alone cannot explain every institutional outcome. Resources, law, technology and hierarchy matter too. The narrower point is that communication helps make those structures meaningful and actionable in organisational life.
Context is key
Setting, culture, medium, timing and wider social conditions can change an interaction. A joke that works among close colleagues may fail in a formal public statement. A request that sounds ordinary face to face may feel abrupt as a text notification. A policy written clearly may still be difficult to act on if the institution provides no realistic route for questions or feedback.
Context is therefore not something added after the “real” message. It helps determine what kind of communication event is taking place.
A better set of questions
Thinking about communication simply prevents the message from carrying the whole explanation. Accuracy, clarity and good design still matter.
When communication succeeds or fails, four questions are often more useful together: What was said? What happened between the people involved? What relationship shaped the exchange? What institutional and social context made some interpretations or responses easier than others?
Communication certainly involves messages. But messages become communication through interaction, and interaction always happens somewhere.
Key sources
Shannon, C. E. (1948). A Mathematical Theory of Communication. Bell System Technical Journal, 27(3), 379-423.
Barnlund, D. C. (1970). A Transactional Model of Communication. In Language Behavior, 43-61.
Sillars, A. L., & Vangelisti, A. L. (2026). Communication: Basic Properties and Their Relevance to Relationship Research. The Cambridge Handbook of Personal Relationships.
Schoeneborn, D., Vásquez, C., & Kuhn, T. (2025). Communication-as-Constitutive Perspectives on Organization. Academy of Management Collections.
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