communication

3THE PROCESS OF COMMUNICATION 24页少10We have just credited communication with performing some very important functions. How does it do these things? In other words, how does human communication work?我们刚才肯定了传播发挥的某些非常重要的作用。

那么，传播是怎样发挥这些作用的呢？也就是说，人类传播是怎样进行的呢？Let us begin with a few examples of everyday human communication and analyze what is going on:A driver studies a road map.A sentry‘s voice rings out in the night.A traffic light changes from red to green.A picture tube flickers on. We look over the shoulders of three newsmen who are asking polite questions of the President of the United States. The President speaks over their shoulders to us.我们先举几例子来说明人类日常生活中的传播，然后试图对所发生的情况进行分析。

☆一名司机在研究一份公路路线图。

☆一名警卫的喊声从黑夜里传来。

☆一个交通指挥灯由红色变成绿色。

☆显象管闪闪发光。

我们看到三个新闻记者正向美国总统提出一些有礼貌的问题。

美国总统隔着他们的肩头向我们发表讲话。

The girl is 13,blonde,blue-eyed,with a heart-shaped face. The boy is tall, lanky, with arms and legs that seems longer than necessary, as they usually do at 13.He moves toward the girl; his face is rather red. He says ,‖Linda, would you like…..‖and stopped in embarrassment. She smiles up at him. ‖I‘d love to.‖ she says.这位姑娘十三岁，金黄色头发，碧蓝色眼睛，圆尖脸。

男孩长得又高又瘦，像一般在十三岁那个年纪的男孩一样，四肢显得特别长。

他向姑娘走过去，脸胀得通红。

他说，"琳达，你愿意...."，说到这里他难为情地停下来。

姑娘朝他微微一笑，她说，"我愿意。

"A man buys a morning paper, climbers aboard a commuter train, finds a seat, and settles down to read the story under the black headlines.一个男子买了一份日报，登上一列郊区火车，找了个座位，然后坐下来阅读黑字标题下的消息。

These are all communication incidents, manifestations of the flow of communication through society. What is common to them all is information, a communication relationship in d, and the special kind of behavior that handle information and takes place only in communication relationships, which we all communication acts.这些全都是传播事件，是源源不断的传播流经社会的表现。

对于所有这些来说，共同之处是信息，是一种传播关系，而处理信息和只有在传播关系中才发生的特种行为，我们称之为传播行为。

THE NATURE OF INFORMATIONInformation is the stuff of communication . It‘s what distinguishes communication from, say, swimming or bouncing a ball (although information about one‘s watery environment and about the potion of the ball one wants to bounce is a necessary part of each of those behaviors ). All of the incidents just described exit for the purpose of convening, sharing, or processing information in some way信息是传播的材料。

它就是使传播有别于游泳或拍球（尽管关于一个人的水的环境的信息和关于一个人想要把球拍到的位置的信息，是这些行为中每一个行为里不可缺少的一部分）。

刚才讲的所有这些事件之所以存在，正是为了以某种方式传送，分享或处理信息。

Precisely. What do we mean by information? Obviously we are not just talking about ―facts‖ or ―truth‖(if anyone can be sure the truth in a given situation). We do not only mean news or instruction or the data we find in an encyclopedia. We are using the term in a way not unlike that in which Shannon and Wiener used it when they wrote about information theory and cybernetics; anything that the uncertainty in a situation. This is an idea that has influenced the thinking even of scholars who know very little about physics and engineering, and have never looked an information –theory formula in the face.我们所说的信息究竟指什么呢？显然，我们不只是在谈论"事实"或"真相"（如果有什么人在一种特定情况下确信这种真相的话）。

我们所指的并不仅仅是新闻或指导或我们在百科全书中找到的那种资料。

我们使用这个词时所指的意思，与香农和韦纳在他们撰写有关―Twenty question ―is a information game. When one asks, ―Animal, vegetable, or mineral?‖the answer reduces the uncertainty about that particular question to zero and contributes to the total uncertainty about what the game is supposed to discover. If one receives the answer ―Animal‖ and then proceeds to ask, ―Human or non human‖(answer :human),‖A particular human or a kind of human‖(particular),‖One human or a group of humans?‖(one),‖Male or female?‖(male),‖living or dead?‖ and so forth, the questioner is progressively reducing the uncertainty in the system.有一种问"二十个问题"的信息游戏。

当有人问"是动物、植物还是矿物？"，答案就把关于这个特定问题的不确定性减少到零，有助于消除关于这一游戏要发现的东西的全部不确定性。

如果那个人得到的回答是"动物"，接着问下去，"是不是人？"，如果回答是"人"的话，那他又接着问道"是一个特定的人还是一种人"，如果回答是"一个特定的人"，他又问道"是一个人还是一群人？"，如果回答是"一个人"，他就又要问"是男人还是女人？"果回答是"男人"，就又要往下问"是活人还是死人？"等等。

提问者这一过程中逐步消除了这一系列的不确定性。

There are formulas in Shannon‘s mathematical information theory by which to calculate the entropy of a given system and the informationrequired to eliminate uncertainty from it. In natural science entropy means ―shuffledness ,‖complexity, the opposite of simplicity or organization. When social scientists encounter the term entropy ,they have reason to be excited, because this is one of the general ideas used for a long time by natural scientists to describe the world . Eddington said that if it were possible to make a film of the developing universe, the only way a scientist could tell whether the film were running backward or forward would be to observe whether entropy increased or decreased, One of the great principles in evolutionary science is that entropy always increase . That is ,more types appear. Separate types are mixed in different combinations. The universe becomes more complex. And inasmuch as information is the tool that reduces entropy , it would require more information today to describe the spaceship earth and its flora and fauna than would have been required ,say , two billion years .ago.信息在香农的数理信息理论中有一些公式，按照这些公式来计算一个量和消除这一体系中的不确定性所需要的信息。