What's the Topic? Theories of communication I

There comes a time, perhaps, when every Communication student has their shot at the Communication Studies equivalent of the Meaning of Life question: what is communication? Colin Cherry, whose reflections are offered in the extract below, had his go in the 1950s but it still stands as an elegant description of a process approach to the study of Communication. He does engage with signs and codes in the latter part of this piece but only largely at the level of encoding and decoding messages.