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interpreted as a signal of friendliness by you. In this way, both you
and your interlocutor could influence each other without being aware
of it (Allwood, 2002).
A wide notion of communication will include such cases, i.e.
unaware and unintentional sharing of information, while a more
narrow notion might, for example, require that communication must
always be intentional and/or aware.
Two important characteristics of human beings are that they can
be, and mostly are, social and often rational. The primary means for
sociality and rationality is communication. We can incorporate a little
more of this in our definition of communication in the following way:
Communication = sharing of old or new factual, emotive
and conative aspects of cognition through co-activation and
co-construction of content, information or understanding, occurring
as a part of and means for joint social activities involving degrees
of coordination in a way which is often multimodal and interactive.
This definition incorporates sociality by stressing coordination and
collaboration and rationality through the reference to goal-directed
activity.
We should also note that even if face-to-face communication
is always multimodal and interactive, there are other forms of
communication, which are less multimodal, e.g. telephone conversations
or exchange of written information (SMS, e-mail, letters, chat) and
forms of communication which are less interactive, like reading a
topic, watching TV or listening to the radio.
Similarly, communication is not always collaborative and
cooperative. We communicate also when we are quarreling or compete.
In fact, communication is often essential in carrying out both conflict
and competition.
It might here be interesting to compare the use of the term
communication with use of the term dialog , which even if sometimes
also used in the general sense we have used communication , instead
often is used in a more restricted sense for non-competitive and non-
conflictual communication: “We want dialog, not conflict”. To avoid
this more narrow interpretation, we will here use “communication”
as the general term.
3.1 Language
In order to facilitate communication, mankind has evolved natural
languages as our most important means of collective information
processing, enabling coordination, collaboration and cooperation.
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