What is Communication?

I have it on authority that the question 'What is communication?' has been posed many times in the past week, tentatively typed into the oracle also known as Yahoo! Search, second only to Google in my personal search engine rankings.

Ah yes, indeed, what is communication? You, the searcher, were probably trying to find out what a job in the communications industry would entail. I understand your confusion. After all, a short time ago job titles were so much more simple: we had plumbers and teachers, lawyers and garbage collectors (juxtaposition not intentional) scientists and librarians. Nowadays we have IT Level III Technicians, Field Engineers, Contract Specialists and Bus Operators.

Perhaps you were looking for information on mass media, speech therapy or wireless phones. After all, they all fall into the category of communication. The evening news anchors drone on from their TV soapboxes, reading a script and sometimes faltering, and the masses are being communicated to. An office cubicle dweller receives an email from the manager who sits two desks away, and there's communication going on there, right there in that series of tubes that form the internet (for those who are not in on the joke, I know the internet is not a series of tubes, but a contemporary, out of touch US Senator said so, and I was taught to respect my elders).
A kindly woman encourages a child to lose his lisp, and she is a communications specialist.

This communication title is in high demand, every modern industry tries to to snag a place under its vast umbrella and while this happens, some of us look back and sigh: 'What is Communication'?

Dictionary.com has various friendly definitions for this loaded word of ours.

Communication:
-the act or process of communicating; fact of being communicated.
-the imparting or interchange of thoughts, opinions, or information by speech, writing, or signs.
-something imparted, interchanged, or transmitted.
-passage, or an opportunity or means of passage, between places.

It would seem that our modern times could well fit the bill. The world is one big network, information reaches every corner and the earth and back in a nanosecond, nobody can hide and nothing is left a secret. Iraqis know what Americans are saying, the French listen to Canadian music, a Japanese student uses Google for research, parents find their rebellious daughters on MySpace, a Spaniard watches Australian Rugby on cable.

We are transmitting and communicating, all right.
But are we saying anything?

Communication to me is sifting through hundreds of letters, snail mail from cousins, parents, siblings, camp friends, school friends, grandparents. Communication is sitting on a plane for hours in order to get to the wedding of a relative, who will probably be too apprehensive to exchange more than two words with you. Communication is when you argue with your husband over the fine details and then easily make up with him because they were only fine details after all, and we were communicating, and this communication is what keeps us going and loving. Communication is finding a picture drawn by your now 17 year old brother, then only 7. Communication is knowing how to go beyond the internet and the cell phone, and feel it.

But I feel that communication as I know it will not last long. Communication now is having a MySpace page, getting blog hits, one touch dial, ecards. Communication is emailing your older sister once a month, asking 'how r u? skool is tuff'.

Only twenty five and already a generation behind, I ask you, dear Yahoo! Search user, what is communication?