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Outline of communication

overview of and topical guide to communication

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 19, 2026
Entity authorityQ7112587
Source-derived summary

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to communication:

Communication – purposeful activity of exchanging information and meaning across space and time using various technical or natural means, whichever is available or preferred. Communication requires a sender, a message, a medium and a recipient, although the receiver does not have to be present or aware of the sender's intent to communicate at the time of communication; thus communication can occur across vast distances in time and space.

Essence of communication

Communication theory

Development communication

Information

Information theory

Semiotics

Branches of communication

Types of communication

Types of communication by scope

Intercultural communication

International communication

Interpersonal communication

Intrapersonal communication

Mass communication

Nonverbal communication

Verbal communication

Organizational communication

Types of communication by mode

Computer-mediated communication

Email

Conversation

Mail

Mass media

Book

Film

Journalism

News media

Newspaper

Technical writing

Video

Telecommunication (outline)

Morse Code

Radio

Telegraphy

Telephone

Television

Internet

Verbal communication

Writing

Social Network

Fields of communication

Communication studies

Cognitive linguistics

Conversation analysis

Crisis communication

Discourse analysis

Environmental communication

Health communication

Interpersonal communication

Linguistics (outline)

Mass communication

Mediated cross-border communication

Organizational communication

Political communication

Pragmatics

Risk communication

Science communication

Semiotics

Sociolinguistics

Theories, schools, and approaches

Theories of communication

Agenda-setting theory

Content analysis

Community structure theory

Conversation analysis

Coordinated management of meaning

Critical theory

Cues-filtered-out theory

Cultivation theory

Cultural studies

Cybernetics

Decision downloading

Diffusion of innovations

Elaboration likelihood model

Ethnomethodology

Framing

Hermeneutics

Hypodermic needle model

Heuristic-Systematic Model

Hyperpersonal Model

Information theory

Knowledge gap hypothesis

Media ecology

Narrative paradigm

Network analysis

Nonviolent Communication

Opinion leadership

Political economy

Priming

Problematic Integration Theory

Relational dialectics

Scheme (linguistics)

Social learning theory

Social construction of reality

Social Identity model of Deindividuation Effects (SIDE)

Social Information Processing theory

Social Penetration Theory

Spiral of silence

Structuralism

Symbolic interactionism

Technology acceptance model

Theory of cognitive dissonance

Theory of Planned Behavior

Theory of Reasoned Action

Third-person effect

Two-step flow of communication

Uses and gratifications

Uncertainty reduction theory

History of communication

History of communication

Cave painting

Early postal systems

Heliograph

Historical linguistics

History of alphabet

History of the book

History of computer science

History of computing (see also Timeline of computing)

History of computer hardware

History of Internet

History of linguistics

History of mass media

History of radio

History of telegraphy

History of telegraph

History of telephone

History of television

History of writing

Ideograms

Origin of language

Petroglyphs

Pictograms

Proto-language

Semaphore line

Smoke signals

General communication concepts

General topics of communication

Autocommunication

Empathy

People skills

Persuasion

Propaganda

Public speaking

Reading

Rhetoric

Small-group communication

Speech

Translation

Writing

General communication terms

Censorship

Community structure

Cultural imperialism

Democracy

Dialectic

Digital divide

Freedom of the press

Freedom of speech

Hegemony

Identity

Imagined community

Information society

Late capitalism

Media imperialism

Morpheme

Nationalism

Phoneme

Postmodernity

Public sphere

Semiotics

Social capital

Social network

Sophist

Stereotyping

Stigma

Syllable

Transactive communication

Universal service

Avatar (virtual reality)

Communication scholars

Theodor Adorno

Aristotle

Roland Barthes

Gregory Bateson

Walter Benjamin

Kenneth Burke

Manuel Castells

Cicero

Noam Chomsky

Karl W. Deutsch

Walter Fisher

George Gerbner

G. Thomas Goodnight

Jürgen Habermas

Max Horkheimer

Harold Innis

Roman Jakobson

Irving Janis

Wendell Johnson

D. Lawrence Kincaid

Walter Lippman

Juri Lotman

Niklas Luhmann

Herbert Marcuse

George Herbert Mead

Marshall McLuhan

Desmond Morris

Maxwell McCombs

Walter J. Ong

Vance Packard

Charles Sanders Peirce

Chaïm Perelman

Plato

Neil Postman

Nora C. Quebral

Quintilian

I. A. Richards

Everett M. Rogers

Wilbur Schramm

Thomas Sebeok

Claude Shannon

Deborah Tannen

James W. Tankard, Jr.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Outline of communication” is overview of and topical guide to communication. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Outline, communication and overview, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current 562-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Outline, communication and overview is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “overview of and topical guide to communication” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7112587. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.

Critical limits

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Outline of communication” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.