PRM(F)Q Practice Readings

Types of NOISE

A person's ability to interpret, understand, or respond to symbols is often hurt by noise. Noise is any stimulus that gets in the way of sharing meaning. Much of your success as a communicator depends on how you cope with external internal, and semantic noises.

External noises are the sights, sounds, and other stimuli that draw people's attention away from intended meaning. For instance, during a student's explanation of how a food processor works, your attention may be drawn to the sound of an airplane overhead. The airplane sound is external noise. External noise does not have to be a sound. Perhaps during the explanation, a particularly attractive classmate glances toward you, and for a moment your attention turns to that person. Such visual distraction to your attention is also external noise.

Internal noises are the thoughts and feelings that interfere with meaning. Have you ever found yourself daydreaming when a person was trying to tell you something? Perhaps you let your mind wander to thoughts of the good time you had at a dance club last night or to the argument you had with someone this morning. If you have tuned out the words of your friend and tuned in a daydream or a past conversation, then you have created internal noise.

Semantic noises are those alternative meanings aroused by certain symbols that inhibit meaning. Suppose that a student mentioned that the salesman who sells food processors at the department store seemed like a "gay fellow." If you think of "gay" as a word for homosexual, you would miss the student's meaning entirely. Since meaning depends on your own experience, others may at times decode a word or phrase differently from the way you intended. When this happens, you have semantic noise.

THE CROWD

The crowd is one of the most familiar and at times spectacular forms of collective behavior. It is a temporary, relatively unorganized gathering of people who are in close physical proximity. Since a wide range of behavior is encompassed by the concept, the sociologist Herbert Blumer distinguishes among four basic types of crowd behavior. The first, a casual crowd, is a collection of people who have little in common except that they may be participating in a common event, such as looking through a department store window. The second, a conventional crowd, is a number of people who have assembled for some specific purpose and who typically act in accordance with established norms, such as people attending a baseball game or concert. The third, an expressive crowd, is an aggregation of people who have gotten together for self-stimulation and personal gratification, such as at a religious revival or a rock festival. And fourth, an acting crowd is an excited, volatile collection of people who are engaged in rioting, looting, or other forms of aggressive behavior in which established norms carry little weight.

FOUR TYPES OF ESP

Parapsychologists (psychologists who study claims of more-than-normal happenings) have proposed four types of extrasensory perception, or ESP, each of which is said to occur without using the physical senses. Telepathy is one person's sending thoughts to another. For example, in an experiment, one person may look at a picture and try to "send" this picture to a “receiver" in another room. Clairvoyance is perceiving distant events, such as sensing that one's child has just been in a car accident. Precognition is "preknowing" (foretelling) future events, such as the assassination of a political leader. Psychokinesis is "mind over matter"--for example, levitating a table or, in an experiment, influencing the roll of a die by concentrating on a particular number.

Credit belongs to Langan, John. Reading and Study Skills, various editions.