Nonverbal Communication is a term of social psychology. Nonverbal elements of communication are as follows:

What does perception have to do with communication?

The process of perception is a loop of selecting information, organizing information, and interpretation of gathered information. We perceive and based on our our perception, we act (p.198) (Kruger-Artificial Reality II p.230) Telecommunication, is an artificial reality creates an illusory space in which remote participants can interact as though they are together. The effectiveness of the communication medium depends on the strength of this illusion, the sense of really being together in the graphic world.
  1. Process of perception, and emphasis to understand gap in perception. (Fundamentals of Communication Dr. Lee McGaan)
  2. Often times we just don’t see what is presented, we are used to the auto selection and comfortable with the perceiving process.
  3. http://open.lib.umn.edu/communication/chapter/2-1-perception-process/
  4. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-psychology/chapter/introduction-to-perception/
Perception is the (active) process of assessing information in your surroundings.” It involves becoming aware of one’s environment in a way that is unique to the individual and is strongly influenced by communication. Top-down, bottom up process.
It’s easy to make mistakes in perception. We stereotype, we rely on perceptual sets, we commit attribution errors, and more. The first step to improving our perceptual abilities is to be mindful of our perceptions. We must be aware of our perceptual tendencies, and conscious of how those tendencies might affect accurate perception. The first thing we can do is to know yourself: Recognize your own tendencies toward bias. The second thing we can do is to focus on other people’s characteristics. We might recognize their group memberships, but it’s important to treat each person as an individual. Third, we should check the accuracy of our perceptions. In part, this means separating interpretations from facts. This also means generating alternative perception s. We can test our perceptions for accuracy, sometimes by simply asking the other person if our perception is correct. Lastly, we should revise our perceptions as necessary. Sometimes our perceptions are accurate from the start, and other times they simply are wrong. It’s important to recognize and admit this.
How can we improve from what we learned in visual perception and communication?
Age seven to twelve children learning at school who would like to improve their learning performances. For example, in traditional school setting, children learn the same material in classroom but have different results when it comes to testing their understanding of materials. A grade and rank is given depending on how well they do on understanding the material. A yearly check up of student’s visual perception ability will help to understand individual improvement in overall performance and sustainable way of learning.

Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

Goffman is a sociologist, in one of his most influential of the presentation of self in everyday life.Goffman made the analogy of our life as a play in the theatre. It takes about the face to face interaction. In this piece, it imagined a play in daily life. Take myself for example, I have face to face communication with people everyday, from purchasing a cup of coffee, to attending school lectures, but rarely I think of my daily life as a play or theatre. In Goffman’s piece, the presentation of self in everyday life. He uses this imaginary theatre to talk about face to face interaction. There is front stage where people contact the other person, there are some degree of control to present the impression, this contact will change one person’s “setting.” Goffman’s theory takes us to a closer look to small scale people’s interaction.
In order to understand the bigger picture, sometimes it takes to see from bottom up and it is what Goffman’s approach for people sudy back in 1956 when it is first published. However, I found the idea interesting and useful. The same method is seen in use in psychodrama therapy between 1920-1940 created by Jacob L. Moreno. The timeline make me wonder does it have to do with the war? Then people started to re-think of what people to people interaction means and how we see it. To stressed the importance of people to people communication, I would like to take a look of the experiment done in April 1967 at Cubberley High School, Northern California. The well-known experiment is called the Third Wave. It started out as a history class experiment, where there have students participate a week long experiment which modeled after Fascism and Nazi period in Germany. There were about 30 student participants in the class and they started out with made up salutation posture and disciplines. “Strength through discipline! Strength through community! Strength through action!” From an outsider’s point of view, it seems strange how an obviously wrong concept can move so many people, and followed by a nation’s population. The experiment later turned into a novel for young adult called “The Wave.” However, in reality the experiment runs well, in terms of getting students into the concept of fascism. But what is the problem here? In the later written novel, it attribute the reasoning to peer pressure. Do they know it was a play and the students were all actors in the setting? Besides the novel, the “successful” experiment later turned into film, tv shows, and numerous article. Was it too late to learn from history? Or can we educate students what to see from the begiing to avoid peer-pressure, to see beyond what is presented? Even it is, as Goffman said, a “All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify” (Goffman, 1959: 72).
In Goffman’s piece, one important notion that consist the modern stage of the play, which is: telecommunication. To me it adds more complication, and it can be a strength to the modern world if we see it wisely. Otherwise, I can see the situation of communication worsen. Because when we can’t communicate well in face-to-face with enough information to read and understand the actor’s intention. How can we tell from telecommunication, when we can’t see the other party. Does it mean there are more backstage acting?

Actor-network theory can affect people’s approach for using technology to communicate

In 1980 actor network theory first appeared in Europe. The major creators of the theoretically methodology to the social study is Michel Callon, Bruno Latour, and visiting British Professor John Law. Among the three creators, the ANT theorists writing are equally esoteric. However, Bruno Latour’s philosophical approach provokes my thoughts profondally. The ANT methodology makes me rethink and define my relationship with events around me. If Goffman’s presentation of self in everyday life imagine the world as a theatre stage. Actor-Network Theory on the other hand, is the script that describes individual character’s relationship with one and another.
One aspect which illustrates the relations between people, communication, and technology can be identified as Actor-network theory(ANT). In brief, the theory is constructed by Bruno Latour, John Law, ,and Michel Callon. It discussed the actor which is human and actant, which is acting upon non human such as electricity or in this paper which will be technology. And everything is in the network, what we need to think about is the connection. Network here is intermediation which connects from one to another, regardless it is an actor to an actor, an actor to an actant, whithin the network occur action. However, the chaos we experience in modern society as human based on ANT have two main reasons. First of all, we assign agency to things and perhaps consciousnessly; secondly, we mix nature and culture together. He starts with newspaper reading, about ozone, anarchy, etc. The newspaper opens the opinion of overall about Chemical reaction and political reaction, reaction from nature versus culture. Global and Local. Then The author explain the notion Hybrid, and proliferation both recognize and deny it. We describe phenomenon as hybrid but it is not the same nature and culture.
In Shapin and Schaffer book who are the figure of culture and science?
In ANT critics’s point of view, the methodology maybe utopian and simplified. Throguh Actor network theory to understand the world, it will divorce the notion of sexism, racial discrimination
Instead of identifying what nonhumans are, ANT encourages us to consider what nonhumans do. For Sayes it is what things in the world contribute to society that matters most. In other words, instead of focusing on what kinds of things (e.g. scallops, classified documents, unbuilt French transportation systems) are qualify as “nonhuman” for the purposes of analysis, we should just ask what role it plays in the scenario you’re trying to understand. Sayes classifies the contributions of nonhumans into four categories: Actor netowork provide a lens to understand what technology’s role in society’s setting.
ANT does not a priori divide the world into micro and macro contexts or attribute agency to either individuals or social structures. Rather, agency is assumed not to be limited to individuals, objects or social determinants, but as emerging as an effect of the interactions of network components. These components theoretically consist of the same basic building blocks [46]. ANT therefore focuses on examining the micro context. For instance, individuals directly interacting with technology) and uses findings to draw conclusions about the macro context (e.g. the political environment in which individual practices are situated). This is achieved by incorporating actors from both contexts into the same network ].
Complexity is, however, difficult to study and it is important to recognise that one will never be able to capture the full picture of social reality. Nevertheless, ANT can help researchers to ”zoom in” on the way networks consisting of human and non-human actors are formed at any point in time. This focus on micro contexts can help to shed light on the subtleties of social reality and thereby help to make inferences in relation to wider social processes (”by zooming out”).

Actor-Network Theory

ANT’s main feature is its focus on inanimate entities and their effect on social processes. An actor is thus defined as the ”source of an action regardless of its status as a human or non-human”; this is a radical notion in that it contests that inanimate things (e.g. such as technology) can also have agency. An actor can however only act in combination with other actors and in constellations that give the actor the possibility to act - this is because reality is assumed to be actively performed by various actors in a particular time and place [8, 13, 15, 16]. Thus inherent to ANT is a move away from the idea that technology impacts on humans as an external force, to the view that technology emerged from social interests (e.g. economic, professional) and that it thus has the potential to shape social interactions. (Cresswell, Worth, and Sheikh 2010)

Jeffrey Sconce’s Haunted Media, what are people’s first impression to new technology.

How can we learn from existing and relatively more established communication technology. Jeffrey Sconce take us on a media archaeology tour. What can we learn from the development of technology, what phonoem do we see throughout the recent history of communication?
Originally, I didn’t find the piece interesting or related to discover new particularly found relations with my research in visual perception. After the second and third read, I started to understand through Sconce’s piece, it closely and intentionally document telecommunication from telegraph’s use in 1840 and continuously swift to elegraph to television, wireless telegraph, network radio broadcasting in the 1920s, television in the early 1960s, and cyberspace today. What were people’s reaction in a culture historian’s view. For example, in the opening the Sconce takes three distinctive news in different places to emphasis the phenomenon of telecommunication. //insert examples.
A cultural interpretation. For Sconce there are ”three recurring fictions or stories” and ”five distinct moments in the popular history of electronic presence” that need to be considered (8). The first of these stories is about disembodiment that allows the communicating subject ”the ability, real or imagined, to leave the body and transport his or her consciousness to a distant destination” (9).The second and closely related fiction tells of a sovereign electronic world that is somehow beyond the material realm that we mortals live in. A cast of androids and cyborgs inhabits the third fiction, which addresses the anthropomorphizing of media technology. These three stories, Sconce asserts, have been told countless times during the last 150 years. Yet, as Sconce is quick to emphasize, it is the discontinuities that matter more than the supposed similarities. ”Tales of paranormal media are important, then, not as timeless expressions of some undying electronic superstition but as a permeable language in which to express a culture’s changing social relationship to a historical sequence of technologies”

Conclusion

\cite{latour1993}

\cite{latour1993}

Visual is the primary information collecting point for the majority of us. The nature of information development from seeing to meaning often has a gap for various reasons. The gap creates misunderstanding between the actor’s intention and the receiver’s interpretation, and negative emotion derives from the misinterpretation. How can we fill-in the gap for more accurate information perception? I would like to explore the possibility with visual perception, in particularly perceiving nonverbal communication and the reading from receivers. I am interested in the topic because of personal miscommunication experiences. With the progress of technology taking off rapidly, the underlying structure around technology didn’t seem to catch up with the innovation. We know how to use the technology but do we really understand what we are seeing or is there confusion hinder us to further form trust?
The evidence highlights in perception. It is often studies as though it were an isolated activity. However, it is a necessary part of physical behavior, and often it provides the motive for that behavior. We perceive, and based on our perception, we act. We use perception to monitor and control our action. To improve our ability to perceive, we often move toward the object of perception. We filter out most of the information we receive, and attend to only those features of our perception that we need to guide an action. (\cite{kruger}p.199) Most of us knows about vision test, it tests your vision accuracy, if its 20/20 or adjustment is needed. But there are more to learn about visual perceptual ability. For example, focusing, eye tracking, fixation, binocular, fusion visions…just to name a few. When visual information is perceived incorrectly, instead of reinforcing the experience, it distracts, and treated as cannot be trusted. The visual perception test at the market are either expensive or in the designer’s world, it is used to accommodate the perceptual tendency. I see this research in steps and the first step is reminding people that there is more than if you can see, there is your visual perception. Then understand individuals visual perception strength and weakness. There are so many factors can affect communication. To begin with, we need to learn what we are looking at, and understand our visual perception strength and weakness because it is the first and most used information reception which contacts to our brain.
As human we tend to be biased. We believe what we see. But what we see often does not process correctly. It is even seldom mentioned. I begin the exploration form small incidents, and events that perceptual me. Which mentioned in case studies. And I try to examine them in different ways. The journey so far has been exciting, I found out about different ways to understand my surroundings. In this paper, I dived deeper in visual perception and particularly how to recognize facial expressions. I believe, understanding how we see and know what we are seeing will mitigate the gap of understanding. It’s easy to make mistakes in perception. We stereotype, we rely on perceptual sets, we commit attribution errors, and more. The first step to improving our perceptual abilities is to be mindful of our perceptions. We must be aware of our perceptual tendencies, and conscious of how those tendencies might affect accurate perception. The first thing we can do is to know yourself: Recognize your own tendencies toward bias. The second thing we can do is to focus on other people’s characteristics. We might recognize their group memberships, but it’s important to treat each person as an individual. Third, we should check the accuracy of our perceptions. In part, this means separating interpretations from facts. This also means generating alternative perceptions. We can test our perceptions for accuracy, sometimes by simply asking the other person if our perception is correct. Lastly, we should revise our perceptions as necessary. Sometimes our perceptions are accurate from the start, and other times they simply are wrong. It’s important to recognize and admit this. At the same time we still have haptic, audio, olfactory, taste to explore.
We know we notice different things, and there are differences between culture, up-brings which can affect how we understand or feel the same material. But the one thing that we all share is visual perception ability. If we can understand what we are seeing, we can approach other factors objectively. The specialist who have profound knowledge of visual perception ability usually work around it, or wait for the symptom occurs then try to cure it. I think we can work toward it.
To conclude, this essay has addressed a number of significant issues including how we see and perceive using cognitive psychology to understand, what we perceive may interpret in different meanings in our brain, the problems we have with communication through technology through the sociology and readings from established researchers. Actor-network theory which shows that we study subjects individually and forget about the connection in between.
\cite{1956}
\cite{latour1993}