In mass communications there are many ways top get a message across to other people. In today's world, the means sometimes justifies the end. We have all the technology we can handle and for some reason communicating does seem to get any better, or easier. No matter how technologically savvy a person is, it doesn't mean anything if you do not understand the message being sent to you. Miscommunication, or misinterpretation, is one of the world's biggest problems. Not money, business, love, even one's mental capacity; the thing that always causes problems is miscommunication.
In Introduction to Mass Communications, it is taught that in order to communicate there needs to be five things - a sender (A), a message, a medium, a decoder and a receiver (B). A, the person who is sending the message, must take the time to create the content to which they are trying to communicate to B. That content is called the message - A can only create the message if they know who B is. After the message has been constructed, A must now find a way to get the message across to B. That particular method of getting the message out is called a medium. Some examples of a medium (the plural form being media) are the telephone, the Internet, newspapers, the air and one's voice, paper, TV, radios and a list of others.
After A - the sender - creates the content - the message - they must find a medium to convey the message to B and from there it is up to B to interpret the message. When the message physically gets to B they must then decode it - breaking it down so that they understand the message. In math terms, A+message+medium+decoder+B=communication. Understanding these basic concepts is not the problem, the problem is what comes in between A and B that causes miscommunication.
People don't stop to think about these five important steps to communicating. Some people figure that as long as they send the message it will be understood and that everything will be ok.