COM 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 24: Critical Thinking, Mass Media

• School: Tunxis Community College
• Department: Communication
• Course: COM 100
• Professor: Clark

Document Summary

Critical thinking is a process through which one reflects upon information/actions before responding rather than responding automatically or superficially. Communication is a process in which individuals generate meaning through the exchange of verbal and nonverbal messages. The components of communication are; message creation, meaning creation, participants, channel, noise, and feedback. We create messages by encoding and exchanging two types of messages verbal and non- verbal. Most of the messages we create are symbolic a symbol is something that represents something else and conveys meaning symbols are arbitrary, or without inherent meaning their meaning is created as people use agreed upon definitions. The verbal system is composed of linguistic symbols (words) The non-verbal system is composed of non-linguistic symbols (smiles, winks, laughter) Messages also can be composed of signs. They bear some resemblance to the thing the represent. There are two types of sings iconic and indexical. Iconic signs bear a direct resemblance to the things they refer to.