A Follow-up to "What Do You Mean by 'Communication'?"

My dear father and Socratic teacher, Wayne Unks, was kind enough to probe thoroughly into the meaning of my previous post. I started replying in the comments, but...it really just got too long. His comments were:

"Must mutual understanding be achieved in order for an exchange of thoughts to be considered communication?"
and
"...if the recipient doesn't understand the sender's thoughts and, according to the above definition, communication did not happen, then what did take place? With respect to your analogy, a download still occurred - data got to the intended destination. It may not be useable (i.e. understood), but the download took place. The same can be true of sharing - I may share an object with you, you receive it (hear or read it in the case of a thought exchange), but don't make use of it (or understand it). That doesn't mean I didn't share with you."

My reply is as follows:

I am trying to draw a distinction that is difficult to pin down in English. I think Japanese might help me better, here, but then you would have no idea what I was saying! 

My distinction is that sharing and communication require dual...use? Understanding? A mutuality? A shared car is one that you drive and that I drive, but if you had a car for 5 years that I could have used but never did, then it had never been shared. You could not say, after those 5 years, "We shared this car" because we didn't. Only you drove it. There was the availability, but as it was never taken advantage of, the effect was that the car was exclusively used by you.

The counterpoint to this view of sharing would be offering, or even giving. You can offer a cookie to someone, but they do not have to take it. You can even give it to them, but just because it is in front of them does not mean that they will eat it.

Back to communication. Communication is communal, mutual participation. As offering is to sharing, so speaking or writing is to communication. Words and thoughts go out, but even though they may be heard or read does not mean that they will be understood. Then, for all the effect that those ideas had, they might as well have not been written or spoken.

There is a lot of talk these days about communication in the workplace to improve management practices and working relationships. If mutual understanding were NOT necessary for communication to occur, then Communication would not be a buzzing, new, heart-of-many-studies thing. Lots of words and thoughts fly around a company, and many of them are even significant and helpful--this has always been the case. But now people are realizing that words going out are not enough. Words going out can never change anything unless they are received and understood. (Note that understanding does not require agreement.) Unless mutual understanding results from words and ideas, all you have is noise. No sharing, no unity of thought or feeling.

Sometimes I get really bothered by the use of "communication" to refer to computer technology with networks and all that, because it makes it very difficult for me to search for jobs and articles that relate to people-based communication. But that is really one application of the word that makes the most sense. When computers interact over a network, they communicate. It is a perfect exchange of information, with everything remaining intact from the source to the destination. If it doesn't work, we talk about their being connection problems and fixing this or that because, if information doesn't arrive exactly the way it was sent, we know that the system is broken. At the very least, we know that there is incompatibility--like trying to upload a Word document to Google Drive and then send it to someone who only has Open Office, only to find that the format is all out of whack. With computers, if the information doesn't transmit perfectly then we try to fix it. With computers, if the information doesn't come out exactly as it was sent, then there was not communication.

So why isn't it like that with people? Why shouldn't we strive for precise understanding of others, and for making ourselves clearly understood by those around us?