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The water had receded within hours, but the isolation was just beginning. When Hurricane Sandy sent a fourteen-foot storm surge barreling across New York City’s tiny Rockaway peninsula, homes and cars were destroyed and the community of 130,000 was left without power, phones, or transportation. Those lucky enough to charge their phones with a generator found signals were fleeting for the first week or so; one might manage to get one text or tweet out before the connection was gone. Radio became the only news outlet, although the mayor’s daily briefings proved difficult to catch for people with a lot of cleanup work to do. Nonetheless, news that the New York Marathon, scheduled for the following weekend, would go on as planned sent locals reeling, wondering if anyone on the mainland even knew how bad things were (Boyle, 2012).

But elsewhere, social networks were buzzing. Surfers from the mainland converged on the Facebook page of the local surf club, figured out what was needed, and began gathering supplies and arranging car pools to get volunteers to the scene (Tockett, 2012). The very networks that organized protests of the financial sector the year before became vital information hubs as well: occupy Wall Street had become Occupy Sandy (Feuer, 2012). Churches, civic groups, schools, and everyday citizens showed up en masse to help their fellow New Yorkers. And when the city finally did cancel the marathon, runners who had trained all year for the event joined the volunteer efforts (Macur & Eder, 2012).

With cold weather bearing down, weary neighbors found themselves gathering—around small bonfires on the street, in homes with working generators, and around the trucks that delivered warm meals. Eventually, comfort tents popped up, providing residents with information, food, water, in-person support—and a place to charge those cell phones.

Communication is the process by which we use symbols, signs, and behaviors to exchange information. That process is so crucial that communication is described as “the process through which the social fabric of relationships, groups, organizations, societies, and world order—and disorder—is created and maintained” (Ruben, 2005, pp. 294–295). Successful communication allows us to satisfy our most basic needs, from finding food and shelter to functioning in our communities and developing meaningful relationships—like many Sandy victims did after the storm. But because communication is such a natural part of our daily lives, we often take it for granted, which can make communication breakdowns all the more difficult. Failures in communication—from the loss of electronic communication to the decision to hold a marathon in the aftermath of a disaster—can lead to feelings of isolation, frustration, and anger.

Communication challenges exist in every profession and every personal relationship. For example, communication professor (and reserve police officer) Howard Giles claims that 97 percent of law enforcement practices involve communication skills (Giles et al., 2006). But police academies usually spend little time teaching those skills. Most citizens lack these crucial skills as well. One professor who teaches college-level communication classes to prisoners notes “the vast majority of my imprisoned students have been caged, in large part, because of their communicative illiteracy” (Hartnett, 2010, p. 68).

Effective communicators understand how their communication choices affect others and why others’ communication choices affect them as they do. So in this chapter, we introduce you to this exciting discipline by looking at why we communicate, how we communicate, and what it means to communicate well. Then we examine ways of visualizing the communication process and consider the history of this rich field.