Communication Occurs Through Various Channels

Choosing the appropriate channel for a specific message is important, particularly when conflict is involved. As you learn in Chapter 8, breaking up with someone via Facebook rather than through a more personal channel (like face to face) can worsen an already difficult situation. Such channels don’t allow for nonverbal communication (tone of voice, eye contact, etc.), which helps you present difficult news clearly and sensitively.

Once, the only means of communication—the only channel—was face-to-face contact. But as society became more sophisticated, other channels emerged. Smoke signals, handwritten correspondence, telegraph, telephone, e-mail, and text messaging are all examples. A channel is simply the method through which communication occurs. We must have a channel to communicate.

Most people in technologically advanced societies use many channels to communicate, though they are not always proficient at adapting communication for the channel being used. Do you have a friend who leaves five-minute voice mail messages on your cell phone as though speaking directly with you? Or do you have a cousin who shares deeply private information with all of her six hundred Facebook “friends”? We all need to identify the channel that will work best for certain messages, at certain points in our relationships with certain people, and then adapt our messages to that medium.