MoonDog

One of my degrees is in Communication. Thanks to those years of lectures, I had the Laws of Organizational Communication drilled into my head. They were developed by Wiio - a Finnish researcher (I think), and were listed in the textbook, "Organizational Communication" by Dr. Gerry Goldhaber, a leader in the field.

Take a read through them, and consider how you might use them in your posts here. I think that they might be helpful, and - while not solving world hunger - they may raise the bar a notch.
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1. Communication usually fails, except by accident.
This is because our communication employs symbols - and symbols are by their nature prone to misunderstanding. Language, culture, and personal differences are just some of the reasons for the failure of communication.
1.1 If communication can fail, it will.
The factors that can make human communication fail might not be very serious, when each of them is taken in isolation. However, there are so many risks and they can interact in so many ways that it is statistically almost certain that communication fails.
1.2 If communication cannot fail, it still most usually fails.
Even if you pay great attention to make your communication unambiguous, effective, and understandable, there will still be too many risks you haven't taken care of. Moreover, your measures are at best functional most of the time, which means that the combined probability for your communication to fail in at least one one of the ways in which it could fail is higher than you dare to imagine.
1.3 If communication seems to succeed in the intended way, there's a misunderstanding.
When communication seems to be simple, easy and successful, it's probably a total failure. The recipient looks happy and thankful, because he understood your message his way, which is what he likes, and very different from what you were actually saying.
1.4 If you are content with your message, communication certainly fails.
Being content with the formulation of your message is a sure sign of having formulated it for yourself.

2. If a message can be interpreted in several ways, it will be interpreted in a manner that maximizes damages.
This Murphyistic remark is a warning about the very real possibility that ambiguities will be resolved in just the way you did not mean. Notice that this does not mean the worst misunderstanding you can imagine; rather, something worse - an interpretation you could not have imagined when you formulated your message.

3. There is always someone who knows better than you what you meant with your message.
People who understand you can be a real nuisance. It might take some time before you see that they completely failed to see what you meant, but that does not prevent them for propagating their ideas as yours.

4. The more we communicate, the worse communication succeeds.
There's a widespread superstition that the more you communicate the better. In reality, increasing the amount of communication most probably just causes more misunderstandings.

There are people who keep repeating that there can't be too much information. Whether that's literally true is debatable. What what they mean (cf. to law 3) is just plain wrong. There can be, and there is, too large a volume of messaging. Data does not equal information.
4.1 The more we communicate, the faster misunderstandings propagate.
This refers to the fact that repetition strengthens false ideas. When people see the same message repeated over and over again, they usually start believing it. Even if your message happened to be true, they misunderstood it, so what they actually believe is not what you meant. And since the message has been presented so strongly, they tell it to their friends, who propagate it further, etc. Naturally, in that process, it gets distorted more and more.

5. In mass communication, the important thing is not how things are but how they seem to be.
This law is just remotely related to the basic law. It is however more and more important: mass communication creates a world of its own, and people orient themselves in that virtual world rather than the real one. After all, reality is boring.

6. The importance of a news item is inversely proportional to the square of the distance.
Even more remote to our main topic, this simply states that events close to us look much more important to us than remote events. When there is an aircraft accident, its importance in Finnish newspapers basically depends on whether there were any Finns on board, not on the number of people that died.

It is however relevant to law 1 in the sense that it illustrates one of the reasons why communication fails. No matter what you say, people who receive your message will interpret and emphasize in their own reference framework.

7. The more important the situation is, the more probably you forget an essential thing that you remembered a moment ago.
Similarly to law 6, this illustrates one of the causes of failures in communication. It applies both to senders and recipients. The recipient tends to forget relevant things, such as items which have been emphatically presented in the message as necessary requirements for understanding the rest of it. And the sender, upon receiving a request for clarification, such as a question during a lecture, will certainly be able to formulate an adequate, easy to understand answer - afterwards, when the situation is over.


Korpela's First Corollary: If nobody barks at you, your message did not get through.
Lack of negative feedback is often presented as indicating that communication was successful. Au contraire, it really means you failed miserably.

Since communication always fails, anyone who does understand part of your message will miss the other parts. If he is motivated enough, and understood well enough the part he understood, he'll write back to you. Whether he barks at you or politely asks for clarification is up to his education and character; for you, there should be little difference.

Human communication works through dialogues. If something that looks like one-directional communication, such as a book or a Web page or a newspaper article, miraculously works, it's because the author participated in dialogues elsewhere. He had discussed the topic with numerous people before he wrote the "one-directional" message.

So feedback is not just getting some nice comments "keep up the good work". Rather, feedback as a genuinely interactive process is a necessary part of human communication. Feedback has emotional effects, too; just getting any feedback is usually nice; but the content matters too.

By statistical certainty, if you get sufficient feedback, there will be negative feedback too. Even if your message is perfect, some people will tell you it's crap. In fact, especially if it is perfect, some people will say - often with harsh words - it's no good, because there are clueless people who envy you.

Thus, lack of negative feedback indicates that few if any people really cared about your message.

Korpela's Second Corollary: Search for information fails, except by accident.
The Web used to contain a large amount of unorganized and unclassified data. Now it contains a huge amount of unorganized and unclassified data and a jungle of "search engines", "catalogues" or "virtual libraries", and "portals".

The various searching tools have an immense impact. At best, they are very clever and useful. Ask Jeeves, and you might get an immediate answer to your question which you wrote in plain English. Occasionally, it might even be a correct and utilizable answer.

It still remains a fact that when you are looking for information on the Web, you'll find either nothing (when your search criteria are tight) or a useless list of zillions of addresses (when your search criteria are generic). Except by accident, that is.

The practical implication is that when searching for information, you need to be flexible and flighty. Learn to use a few searching tools well - that means knowing well the search language of one or two search engines and using some well-maintained catalogues - but keep your eyes open. Sometimes you need to learn to use new tools, and frequently you find crucial information just by accident. Searching for information on X, you stumble across an essential resource on Y, which is among your central interests too, but not the one you're thinking about now. It might take some time to study it with some care - perhaps it's just a resource to be added to your link list, but it might be much more important, something that needs top priority in your dealing with Y. Switch the context! At the very minimum, store a pointer to information you've found, even if that means doing something related to your hobbies during your working hours, or, gasp, the opposite. Remember that in searching for information, which is a peculiar form of human communication, accidents are your friends, and perhaps the only friends you've got.