Page 82 - Effective Communication Soft Skills Strategies For Success by Nitin Bhatnagar, Mamta Bhatnagar

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The Process School
This school looks at communication as a process, a simple transmission of
messages or meanings, which the sender wants to convey irrespective of the
reaction of the receiver or his interactions. On one extreme end of the scale,
the works of art, sculpture, music painting, etc. fall in the process category,
because the messages are created not with any motive, but as an expression
of the sender’s feelings or emotions. Besides, each receiver may interpret the
message in his own individual way. On the other extreme, in the second
category of semiotics, belong the messages of commands, instructions,
warnings, and propaganda. Here the sender expects the receiver to interpret
the messages in an accepted conventional way and react accordingly. All the
other forms, news, documentaries, films, dramas, entertainment, etc. fall in
between these two extreme ends of the scale. In the study of communication
by semiotics, the focus of common concern is the sign. The study of signs
and the way they work is called semiotics or semiology.
Equally important is the status of the receiver or reader who in semiot-
ics is seen as playing a more active role than in most of the process schools
(George Gerbner’s model of communication is an exception).
Semiotics prefers the term ‘reader’ (even of a photograph of a painting)
to ‘receiver’ because it implies a greater degree of activity and also that ‘read-
ing’ is something that we learn to do. It is, thus, determined by the cultural
experience of the reader. The reader helps to create the meaning of the text
by bringing to it his own experience, attitudes, and emotions. Assimilation
of meanings and understanding messages is a continuous process of human
activity.
The human brain is in perpetual interaction with the environment from
which the learner receives stimulation, which activates the sensory appara-
tus that n turn is transformed into neural information. Initially the infor-
mation enters a structure called selective perception. This activity depends
on the learner’s ability to attend to certain features of the sensory register.
Transformed and identified information then enters the short-term memory
where it persists for a limited period—say 20 seconds. The given evidence
explains the three forms of short-term memory storage.
The first form is acoustic information—information internally heard by
the learner. The second is the articulated form, in which the learner finds
himself re-iterating the information, for example, in retrieving a telephone
number for the first time. The third is visual—remembering—pictures of
scenes witnessed.
A critical transformation of the information now occurs when it leaves
the short-term memory and enters the long-term memory. Perceptual infor-
mation is converted into concepts (like darkness, light, colours, etc.). Such
storage in memory can also be in a coded form or in a semantic organization

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