{~} communication
communication is the act of encoding information, transmitting it through a medium, and, hopefully, having it be decoded by the receiver. the information thus arranges is called a message, or "text". it is typically coherent with itself, enunciated in a common encoding, and the sender and receiver can be expected to be different by the very nature of the act (beings tend not to send themselves messages; we do not like superfluous information, and even less so the waste of energy).
however once can imagine communication
- without a sender
- without encoding
- without a medium
- without a receiver
- without decoding
- without information.
the encoding and decoding stages imply the sharing of a common understanding of the encoding. this is called syntax.
language is a principal form of communication. perhaps they could be considered synonymous: "body language", "programming language" reveals this intuition.
playing with communication plays with meaning. the medium can be manipulated, bent, rearranged, and the resulting "text", which is differently shaped but still bound by the (immobile?) rules of syntax, takes on a new meaning or variety of meaning. sense differs, sense depends on the treatment in encoding and decoding of the original intended message.
loss in translation
"lost in translation" is only one side of the corruptive coin. translation results in mutation, false equivalencies, and both losses and gains. because no two encodings are perfectly equivalent and do not map onto one another seamlessly, meaning is shifted a little bit, words take on a slightly different colour. to avoid adding in false senses and improper information, the translator tends to choose vagueness and anti-aliasing over a colouring that goes even slightly outside the lines. this vagueness seems like loss, but in fact it provides room for interpretation, it clears some of the water from the bowl and allows for the insertion of new varieties of sense, etc. it makes room for the creation of new texts and new meanings.
the exploration of syntactical vagueness is one aspect of my engineered language, graminee.
thought
all speech is not directed to the outside. i said before that the sender and receiver are typically different. but is that the case for thought, the "internal monologue"? monologues are, as the name implies, spoken by oneself to oneself; or is it spoken to the world, with oneself eavesdropping on one's confidence to the outside world? and what about the internal monologue? does the psyche communicate, and with whom? the body? see object-oriented ontology.