Barriers and difficulties in the communication process - Whenever we write or speak trying to convince, to explain, to influence, to educate or to fill any objective through the communication process, always follow four main purposes: to be received (heart or read); to be understood; to be accepted; to provoke a cause ( behavior change or attitude)



When we fail to reach any of these objectives, means that something is not working properly in the communication conduct, that something interfered while sending the messages. Everything that interferes with the communication process is called the barrier, difficulty or "noise".

The communication barriers occur when the receiver of the communicated message, does not receive or misinterpret the desired meaning of the transmitter. The purpose of studying communication is to reduce the reason that causes these phenomena. As I said before, “the meanings are found in humans and not in the words, and so the first step is to identify the factor that leads to incorrect assumptions. These are:

Differences of perception – the way we see world is influenced by our previous experiences so that people of different ages, nationalities, cultures, education, occupation, gender, temperament, etc, will have other perception and they will interpret situation differently.

Rushed conclusions – we see often only what we want to see and heart what we want to hear, avoiding recognizing the reality itself.

Stereotypes – learning constantly from our experiences, there we may face the risk of treating different people as if they were one single. “If I met an engineer (student, merchant, etc), I have met them all”.

Lack of knowledge – it is difficult to communicate effectively with someone who has a different education, whose knowledge is much lower about one particular topic. It is certainly possible but it requires skill from the one who communicate; he must be aware of the discrepancy between levels of knowledge and he must adapt accordingly.

Lack of interest – is one of the largest and most common obstacles; where the lack of interest is obvious and understandable, it should be act with ability to direct the message to correspond with the interests and the needs of the person who receives the message.

Emotions – the transmitters and receivers emotionalism can also be a barrier. Strong emotion is responsible for almost complete blocking of communication. One way to prevent this deadlock is to avoid communication when transmitters are affected by strong emotions. However, sometimes the receiver message may be less impressed by a person who speaks whiteout emotions or excitement, considering him boring.

Personality – not just the differences between personality types can create problems but often our own perception of the people around us is affected; consequently, our behavior affects the partner’s behavior.  “Personalities clash” is one of the most common causes of failure in the communication. We are not always able to influence or change the personality, but of the other but, we must be prepared at least to study our own person to see if a change in our behavior can generate satisfactory responses.

Those are just a few factors that can make the communication less effective or even to fail completely. The potential barriers of communication not only depend on the receiver/ transmitter , but the communication conditions that we must know and also control and so the communication process will have a chance to be effective. Perhaps, this might be a barrier :)

Communication has the same age as life on Earth. Unicellular organism have found that if they receive and interpret chemicals signals from the environment, in some cases they can gain some advantages in front of the “competition”, advantage that can delineate success of the failure. From the message receiving, was then passed to their release as warning signals against enemy, or calling for dinner.

Multicellular formation of the organism has been possible dues to communication between cells, after all each man is composed of many cells. Between animals (of any kind they may be), communication has several roles: the delimitation of territory food, pack meeting, guidance to better places of food, maintain the group hierarchy, calling partners. The communication facilitates the activities which are meant to satisfy the preservation instinct of the individual or species.

To human, communication has reached a new level; moving from primary requirements, reaching the sharing states (feelings, physical stimulation), of the actions ( strategy, history ) and of ideas. The technical way through which communication takes place, evolved too; from the African drumming , or the Indian smoking clouds to the writing, telegraph, telephone, radio, television, internet.

The Sociology dictionary defines communication as a process of issuing a message and submit it in an encrypted manner, to a recipient for the reception with the help of a channel. The Psychology dictionary defines communication as: a relationship between individuals involving the intentional transmission but not to affect the receiver but with retroactive effect. The internet communication may have as interlocutors two people ( one man and one computer) or two computers.

Once with the development of the internet structure (quantitative and qualitative) the available services have multiplied and diversified too. Initially on the internet you could only send emails, talk in real time and send files from one computer to another. After that they were created some services for publishing the information, index services and searching services. Later, occurred a service of publishing the information (text and graphics), World Wide Web, which has become so popular that today many users consider it as a synonymous with the internet.

For understanding the internet, we must talk a bit about computer networks. In items of communication, we are interested especially in the physical environments trough which communication is performing and the rules for transmitting the information between computers.
-  Local network, LAN ( Local Area Network ), consisted by closely spaced computers, they are relatively small, usually a department, company , etc.
- Metropolitan networks, MAN ( Metropolitan Area Network), which they are covering a town or a part of it, for example a university with more buildings lying apart.
- Wan networks, WAN ( Wide Area Network ), which they are covering large areas as a country, a state.

Typically, the speed of communication between two computers (both - the theoretical and practical), decreases when the distance between them increase, and also the security and stability. We must make the distinction between theoretical speed and the real speed of communication which in some cases, can be significantly lower, depending on the network load or of the delays that can appear.
From case to case, communication can be:
-   Simplex – one of the computers only transmits, and the other only receives.
-  Duplex or full duplex – the computers transmit and receive simultaneously
- Half-duplex – one computer issues and one is receiving and after a time the roles are reversed.

Communication is an important aspect of our lives. Is it hard to imagine a life without communication. Actually, maybe is not even possible to lead a life without communication, and this is probably the reason why even deaf people, speechless people, etc, learn to communicate in any way. In one day, about 70 percent of our time is spent in communicating with others.

All definitions of human communication, regardless of the schools which they belong, have at least the following common elements: communication is the process of transmitting information, idea, opinions from one individual to another or opinions from one group to another group, any activity, from routine daily activities that each of us live every day and until the complex activities help in the organizations, companies, can not be conceived outside the communication.

Like most of the words of a language, the “communicate” verb and noun, both are polysemantic, in other words it has a plurality of meanings. Those in charges of communication domains, they met from the very first beginning, a major difficulty: they do not deal with a well-determined operation, but with a variety of operations, which is hard to say certainty, to what extent resembles.

Encyclopedic Dictionary Vol. I, gives to the “communication” term a very complex definition, covering almost all areas in which this term is used:
- Notice, news, message; bringing to the knowledge some parts of the procedural process, (action, decision, encountered), for the rights exercise and enforcement of obligations arising from these acts, within the limits of some terms, which are flowing as its usual course from the communication date.
-  Presentation in a circle of specialists, of one scientific paper.
-  3 (SOCIOL) “Fundamentally psych-social interaction of people, made in articulated communication way or trough other codes, for the information transmission, obtaining stability or of some individual/group behavior changes.
- Semiotics provides the most general definition of communication. From her point of view, communication is a “sigh system handled by some rules for fixing, processing and transmission of information” ( Birdwhistell, 1974 )

When a word is in fashion how it is today the word “communication” ? When it represents the activities or the events which they are multiply, the meaning tends to broad. Thus, once with the diversification of communication, politicians, enterprises heads, known artists and even any person whose career depends of the opinion that the public have about himself, appeals to the service of the specialists, named appointed advisers in communication domain.

We must understand in this case, trough the images communication transmission, the transmission is made mainly though the media. Of course, this image must be strong and in the same time favorable because otherwise we say that the subject does not have the “crossing pass to the public”, that the “communication failed”; his image is not the one that he wants to offer and rather than to leave it in the wind, is his interest to strengthen it and make it positive.

Anyway, this depends on many factors such as clothing, physical appearance, voice timbre,  elements that often have nothing to do with the real personality of that person. It remains to be established if we talk about communication to the true sense of the word, only to extent in which way this image is wanted (by the person in question or by its agents), or when some evidence say to the person in question, unintentionally “something”.