ThirstyFish

These two bucks walked up to each other, stood in this position for a moment and then walked away. A tacit agreement?

Communication is the activity of conveying meaningful information. For humans, language is the most conventional means of communication. We communicate through our senses. Visual communication may include body language, eye contact, sign language, pictures and writing. Haptic communication involves touching. Speech, music, sounds, paralanguage are auditory means of communication. Research indicates that somewhere between 60 to over 90 percent of our communication is non-verbal.

The first issue related to communication is the diminished perception of the conveyed message. Accurate communication is rarely realized. Even in situations where both sides are willing to communicate accurately, communication suffers. Words are interpreted differently, intonations lead to parts of the message being prioritized, non-verbal elements, such as appearance and gestures, alter the perceived message. And of course, there are industries built on manipulating how information is perceived; politics and marketing would be the obvious examples. Simply put, human communication is extremely weak and prone to all sorts of errors and manipulations.

Tacit knowledge is knowledge possessed only by an individual that is difficult to communicate to others via words and symbols. It contrasts "explicit knowledge", knowledge which is easy to communicate. Conveying tacit knowledge requires extensive personal contact and understanding between the parties. Although there are studies about, and claims of, converting tacit knowledge into reusable explicit knowledge, some knowledge will most probably always remain tacit. With the Internet, and reduction in human-to-human contact, I'm afraid some tacit knowledge will be forever lost.

Song of the Day: Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood - Yusuf Islam (2007)