Communication Science

Scientific communication systems have evolved out of necessity to deal with the ever increasing amount of information. This glut of information is a result of technological advances in collecting scientific data. Automated collectors make it possible for data to be collected with less and less effort by the scientific personnel. This has posed a new problem, "How do scientist / researchers transfer this glut of data to a place where it will be analyzed?" Technology has answered the communication cr isis handily. From the telegraph to the present day internet data transfer has kept pace with data acquisition.

Scientific communication, like all types of communication, has difficulties associated with it. Codes of one type or another do the brunt of the communication work. A code could be as simple as the "on" and "off" states of many transistors linked tog ether or as complex as the English language. Communicated data must first be encoded, transferred through a media ( speech for example), and finally interpreted by the receiver. All three of these steps have inherent difficulties which effect informatio n quality. Since meanings are not shared globally, the largest resistance to information transfer occurs when a viewer interprets the code he or she receives. The languages of science, music, symbolic logic, and mathematics are exceptions to the previou s rule, but these languages have limits in their application. The viewer places quality judgments and a variety of other "tags" on the newly acquired information. These tags are predisposition's determine how a particular viewer will interpret the subs tance of the communication. Technology allows communication to become faster and more powerful, but information interpretation remains as a limiting factor.

Written by