Communication as Gesture

While the concept of communication has long been bound to a reductive model of the exchange of information, very few scholars of communication would argue that these assumptions are realistic, without a long list of qualifying caveats. But the concept of communication, built from the integration of semiotic signification with the idea of information as the ''carrier'' of transmitted meaning, is so deeply ingrained and simple that even displacing it can seem futile, if not absurd. Nevertheless, these foundational assumptions tightly constrain the ways in which any interactional phenomena can be conceived--and constraints upon our ways of understanding communication drastically limit our capacity to understand our worlds and the social processes that generate them, at any scale or level of abstraction.