Preface

When I was invited to edit and put together this book, as part of the Women in Science Competition in 2018 proposed by IntechOpen, I was very excited to get the opportunity to put together a collection of works in the field of communication that would resonate with the idea of pursuing a fundamental thread of how communication has evolved on life on Earth, from the very building blocks of life such as DNA or cells, to supra-human organisms such as institutions and computer systems.

The idea of finding universal, fundamental patterns of communication arose while I was working on a computational model of information exchange that could find its applications in molecular biology as well as in artificial intelligence. While researching this idea, I came across a wide variety of research from most fields of study, such as biology, anthropology, history, marketing, economics, information sciences, psychology, social sciences, to name only a few. Particularly in biology, psychology, and marketing or business, topics such as animal communication or communication with children or effective communication in business seemed very large, broad, and predominant, but without much reference between each other or across disciplines. This gap in the current literature and the siloed research within fields spurred the idea of trying to find what is common and fundamental in communication between these seemingly different subfields.

A first step towards opening the dialogue and research on common threads of communication in various and different systems was done by the publication of the book "Emergence of Communication in Socio-Biological Networks" at Springer in 2018. But this has only scratched the surface and, given the wide diversity of the fields and researchers involved, the next logical step was to gather into a collection the works of worldwide researchers that are intimately familiar with specific aspects of communication.

This book is highly curated, as the chapters published here are not the typical research on communication specific to each field, but research on communication as a complex system that can be read and understood across disciplines and that can address a wider audience than within one's specialty. This effort shows again how big the gap is in the cross-disciplinary approach of communication, how open and wide the field is and how important it is to keep on pursuing in this search for knowledge.

As this is another important step in the discovery of fundamental communication patterns, I am confident that it is also only another open door to an even wider and broader body of research and therefore I see this book as an invitation for the current and future scientists and scholars to look at this phenomenon through the lenses of complex systems, multidisciplinary and universality.

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the authors that put in a great deal of effort into their papers and for submitting their work to this edition, to the

publishers at InTech Open for working with me and supporting me in this effort, as well as to the Ronin scholars that gave me invaluable advice at their seminars on how to conceptualize and approach this idea in depth.

**Anamaria Berea, PhD**

**1**

Section 1

Introduction

Complex Adaptive Systems Laboratory, University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida, USA, Ronin Institute, USA

Section 1 Introduction

**3**

**Chapter 1**

*Anamaria Berea*

living systems as well [2].

exchanged [2].

Introductory Chapter: The Role of

Communication as a Fundamental

The area of research of communication is one of the largest and vastest one can find oneself immersed in. Without communication, none of the living systems on Earth could exist, as life itself is an emergent process of interactions between differ-

new organisms or to the death of one or both of the organisms engaged in the process of communication [1]. This is true both in the natural and the social worlds, where organisms are either single celled or human institutions. In the largest sense, communication can be viewed as peer to peer interactions. In the narrowest sense, communication can be viewed as specialized language. Either way, communication implies a process of information exchange and the latest developments in information and computer science can tell us a little bit more about the process of communication in

Unlike interactions, which are common in physical nonliving systems as well, communications are about intent and outcomes that are not necessarily deterministic in nature, such as chemical reactions are, for instance. In living systems, communication is intimately linked to the action, either to initiate or to receive information, or to take some action post-communication, based on the information

While each field of study has researched communication within its own framework, I was not able to find a broader view of communication that would encompass this larger view of the phenomenon. Surely, biologists have an in-depth view of animal communication with the specifics of each species, marketing specialists have an in-depth view of communication between institutions and customers, psychologists have an in-depth view of communication between humans in various contexts, and social scientists have an in-depth view of communication between groups or cultures, while linguists have an in-depth view of communication we call language. Yet, there is little attempt to cross borders between disciplines and to try to understand this phenomenon at large, in its universality, and not inside different contexts and scenarios. Perhaps because such a view is too large to be approached in one research endeavor, or perhaps because the phenomenon itself is too broad, or perhaps because attempts have been made but failed; nonetheless, as scientists, when faced with fundamental and ubiquitous phenomena, we have the duty to try to understand them in these terms and aim toward grasping their universality [3].

Nonetheless, given some ubiquitous and fundamental understandings of what communication is about, we must at least attempt to discover common and universal features

that run across disciplines, or characteristics that are similar in all living systems.

ent organisms, whether these interactions ultimately lead to the creation of

Process for Life and Society

**1. Communication as a fundamental process for life**

### **Chapter 1**
