Effective Communication

Effective Communication

Purpose

The overall purpose of the research project is to relate the technological development with human (organizational) communication. Technology highlights human communication possibilities and limitations, making them more explicit. Simultaneously, human communication creates the ground for the technological applications and development.

To state it simply, today the technological potentiality exceeds the human communication capability. This creates ineffectiveness. By combining knowledge from the human communication research with the technological development, more effective, ecological and synergetic systemdevelopment is expected.

Goals

The goals of the project is to

- increase the understanding of the relationships between technology and human communication in different organizational contexts and communicative dimensions
- effectivize and improve qualitatively the introduction and use of new technology in and between organizations
- facilitate communication between different knowledge domains (such as small companies and research) where technology plays an important role
- diminish the problems of growing information overload because of inability to "digest" (communicate) the available information

Objectives

Depending on the organizational perspective, the objectives of the subprojects are defined somewhat differently.

- to identify communication patterns in intra- and interorganizational communication and define how these patterns determine the attitudes, expectations and use of technology
- to describe global/local communication from the regional perspective, that requires a new collective approach in communications and raise many "paradoxes", previously avoidable.Stockholm-Mälar Region is used as an example.
- to describe how "sustainable" or ecological environmental communication is today , using the Baltic Region as an example

Basic Assumptions

Without communication we do not know anything, without information there is nothing to know.
Communication is a basic life process on the higher level of living systems.
Communication is the processing and transformation of information by living systems in order to create meaning and to adapt.
Receptivity and responsiveness are fundamental qualities in this process of adaptive meaning creation.
Meaning creation has following components; attention, reception, interpretation, memorizing, evaluation, response, feedforward.
Technology is extension of human intellectual capacity and externalization of human communication capability.
Technology that is based on and supports the fundamental components of meaning creation is effective and survives longer.

Staff contact and project manager at SISU for this project is Klara Pihlajamäki.