The Complex Layers of Face-to-Face Talk

Interpersonal communication is a process whereby two or more people within a particular context and
who are aware of each other act together to create and manage shared meetings. All of this goes on
through nonconscious display or conscious sending and receiving of messages using a shared repertoire
of both verbal and nonverbal symbols. The model of face-to-face communication developed by
communication theorists and researchers over the past 50 years reveals what is actually happening as
we talk with one another. It turns out that what we say between the lines about ourselves and our
relationship to the other actually shapes the meaning of the lines we deliver about the conversational
topic. This is an important revelation because it helps to explain why we are effective communicators in
some situations and not in others.

By the 1950s, we had put together a basic model that says every face-to-face moment has a sender, a
message, channels, and a receiver. We also added two additional concepts: noise (anything that
interferes with the sending of a message) and feedback (the receiver’s immediate verbal response to
whatever the sender said). As the model began to work, scientists came to recognize that what’s in
people’s heads actually isn’t noise but rather their personal experience. What the receiver got from our
words may not be our meanings but the meanings they put into the words as they were coming in.

What’s interesting about this is it shifts our focus from the sender to the receiver. After 2,000 years of
rhetorical analysis focused on the sender, we put the receiver—the other—at the center of our analysis.
As our thinking and research progressed, we also realized we needed to move away from our traditional
emphasis on words to a focus on the relationship between words and nonverbal displays in our analysis
of the continuous and simultaneous À ow of messages.

The system of face-to-face talk is outlined in a set of axioms that were published by Paul Watzlawick in
one of the classic treatises on interpersonal talk, Pragmatics of Human Communication. The ¿ rst axiom
is that in face-toface situations, communication is inevitable. You don’t have to say a word; as soon as
you’re in somebody’s sight, you’re telling them something. The second axiom says that face-to-face
communication always combines words and nonverbals. What you say and how you say it is tied
together—and these two levels can reinforce or contradict each other. The third axiom is that it’s always
about content and relationship at the same time. The fourth axiom says that all communication is either
symmetrical or complementary. Faceto-face communication is a process of mutual exchange and
adjustment, and the ¿ fth axiom is that this process is punctuated differently by each of the participants.

Our model includes external communication and internal feedback as well as messages working at two
levels (topic and relationship feedback) that happen instantaneously, also at two levels (verbal and
nonverbal). People are senders and receivers at the same time—encoding and decoding while talking to
themselves very, very quickly, all while talking to somebody else. If it seems very complicated, it is! But
rather than focus on the complexity, look at what this model does. It gives us many more ways of
understanding how talk works; perhaps more importantly, it gives us explanations for why talk doesn’t
always work. Ŷ