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asher553When we as humans speak or communicate with one another, typically that communication is happening on a number of levels and may aim at a number of goals.
To keep things simple, I'm going to say that communication usually serves one or more of three, maybe four purposes:
(1) to exchange information;
(2) to make a request;
(3) to establish a relationship; and
(4) to convince or persuade somebody of something.
That last one might be a combination of the other three: you are giving them information, which you are asking them to incorporate into their world-view, and probably you want to establish some kind of relationship with the person so that your words will carry more weight. It is literally a matter of "winning friends and influencing people".
We use communication to establish relationships all the time, in obvious ways and subtle ones. Your tone and demeanor might signal that you want to create a friendly relationship, or a respectful one. (Some languages even have grammatical forms exactly for this.) You may also wish to signal your membership in a particular group, which may include certain listeners and exclude others: it's why you use your region's dialect, your profession's jargon, or your generation's slang.
When computers exchange messages, the message normally includes a header and/or footer with metadata about the message itself, such as: sender's identity, recipient's identity, security and permissions, forwarding information, encoding and encryption, priority and timeliness, and expected length of the message.
Human beings are not computers, but we communicate some of the same kinds of metadata in our daily interactions: who we are (or who a message is coming from), who the message is for, who else is allowed to know about it, the urgency of the message, the authority or reliability of the information being presented, what language (or dialect) we're using, and perhaps even how long the conversation is expected to last - does the speaker have a lot that they want to talk about? does the listener have the time (or patience) to listen to it all? [345]
To keep things simple, I'm going to say that communication usually serves one or more of three, maybe four purposes:
(1) to exchange information;
(2) to make a request;
(3) to establish a relationship; and
(4) to convince or persuade somebody of something.
That last one might be a combination of the other three: you are giving them information, which you are asking them to incorporate into their world-view, and probably you want to establish some kind of relationship with the person so that your words will carry more weight. It is literally a matter of "winning friends and influencing people".
We use communication to establish relationships all the time, in obvious ways and subtle ones. Your tone and demeanor might signal that you want to create a friendly relationship, or a respectful one. (Some languages even have grammatical forms exactly for this.) You may also wish to signal your membership in a particular group, which may include certain listeners and exclude others: it's why you use your region's dialect, your profession's jargon, or your generation's slang.
When computers exchange messages, the message normally includes a header and/or footer with metadata about the message itself, such as: sender's identity, recipient's identity, security and permissions, forwarding information, encoding and encryption, priority and timeliness, and expected length of the message.
Human beings are not computers, but we communicate some of the same kinds of metadata in our daily interactions: who we are (or who a message is coming from), who the message is for, who else is allowed to know about it, the urgency of the message, the authority or reliability of the information being presented, what language (or dialect) we're using, and perhaps even how long the conversation is expected to last - does the speaker have a lot that they want to talk about? does the listener have the time (or patience) to listen to it all? [345]
