Communication: What does it mean?

There are two strands of thinking in communication studies.

In one view (Lippmann, Bernays, Lasswell), communication signified something like the dispersion of persuasive symbols in order to manage mass opinion.

Manufacture of consent among dispersed populations.

symbols are not just aesthetic ornaments but prime movers of social organization;
strategically cultivated perceptions lost or won battles and sent men in the trenches to their graves. 

Lasswell: if the mass will be free of chains of iron, it must accept its chains of silver.

if the will of the people, the feste Burg of democracy theory, was little more than a bog of stereotypes, censorship, inattention, and libido to be manipulated by experts or demagogues, what did that say about the rationality of the public?

Lippmann: popular irrationality could be both malleable and intransigent. 

Carl Schmitt: people's faith that government business got done through public discussion in a parliament that reflected public opinion in general was little more than a joke.

Marxist theoretician Georg Lukacs: the revolution process was inseparable form the development of class consciousness on the part of the proletariat and hence involved choosing the right slogans and rallying cries. 

Neither Lippmann nor Lukacs believed in the spontaneous self-organization of popular will; each gave a major role to a "vanguard," whether of social-scientific experts or intellectual party leaders.

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A second version (C.K. Ogden, I. A. Richards) saw communication as the means to purge semantic dissonance and thereby open a path to more rational social relations.

communication as the accurate sharing of consciousness.
the twin enemies of communication: the impasse of solipsism and the veritable orgy of verbonmania: 
inaccessible individuality and mass gullibility.
mixing the symbolic and emotive functions of language.

remedy: Lippmann argued for elite rule; Ogden called for an educated public
Communication = education
in both macro and micro application:

language is a necessary but flawed instruments: words ... are at present a very imperfect means of communication.
language ties us dangerously to our primeval origins: tens of thousands of years have elapsed since we shed our tails, but we are still communicating with a medium developed to meet the needs of arboreal men.

Indeed, the word-magic so prominent in early human cultures - the belief that the names gives power over the thing - has not declined but increased in the twentieth century, thanks to the ability of the "symbolic apparatus" to disseminate cliches. 

Whereas propaganda preyed on atavistic word madness, semantic analysis would provide a medium of communication for the needs of modern scientific men and women. 

since meaning is in the mind of the beholder, the labyrinth of solipsism always looms. 

communication for Ogden and Richards was not the coordination of action or the revelation of otherness, but a matching of minds, a consensus in idem: a language transaction or a communication may be defined as a use of symbols in such a way that acts of reference occur in a hearer which are similar in all relevant respects to those which are symbolized in the speaker. 

identity of consciousness between speaker and hearer.
psychology therefore remains the best science for studying communication.

communication as contact between minds via some delicate and error-prone sign medium.
Communication is are rare and fragile as crystal. Their mentalism (心理幻术： 魔术师假冒具有特殊的心智力，如心灵能力或数学奇才) logically entails the specter of miscommunication.

lonely crowd is so vulnerable to the wiles of propaganda!
communication as an insummountable barrier.
interpersonal desolation figured as sexual malfunction

The Waste Land (1922) by T.S. Eliot

I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirm a prison.

Lukacs gives a class analysis: he sees solitary self-hood not as a general existential condition but as a specifically bourgeois plight: the system of private property creates souls who know only the freedom of preying on other isolated individuals.
Capitalist reification brings about simultaneously an overindividualization and a mechanical objectification of people.

isolation and propaganda as two sides of the same coin.
claustrophobic self-hood, with fear of the impossibility of communication.