In common understanding, we tend to equate communication with language: speaking, writing, and exchanging information. However, neurobiology shows that this is only the most visible layer of a much deeper process. Furthermore, every form of communication involves emotions. Even the most abstract statement, e.g. mathematical, scientific or technical, takes place in a specific emotional atmosphere that influences the way it is received. In addition, every message can be interpreted differently by different people. This is influenced by many factors, including the unreliability of memory. These days, overstimulation and the difficulty of organising an excess of inconsistent messages are also significant communication challenges from the brain’s point of view.

Commonly, the word communication may be associated with everyday conversation, news services, lectures, and email exchanges. Meanwhile, in our close proximity, in the grass, on tree leaves, and sometimes even in our homes, there exists a constant exchange of data that has nothing to do with human conversation. It is a world where ‘words’ take the form of chemical molecules and touch is replaced by the precise systems of microscopic levers. We are thus entering the territory of insects, specifically the fascinating and little-known sensory reality of hemiptera, or true bugs.

For hundreds of millions of years, reptiles have inhabited diverse environments – from arid deserts to forests and rivers to the open oceans. Biologists from the University of Silesia in Katowice are studying the development, structure and biology of the organs of invertebrates and vertebrates, including the sensory systems of reptiles, which enable them to effectively perceive and interpret a variety of stimuli from the environment. Chemoperception plays a particular role here, enabling the detection and differentiation of chemical substances. It is one of the oldest sensory mechanisms in the animal world and forms the basis of communication not only in reptiles but also in many vertebrates.

Conspiracy theories have always been out there, but in the past they were rather isolated concepts focused on specific groups. They often emerged as a result of situations that were difficult to explain conclusively, as well as large-scale events such as terrorist attacks, economic crises, and epidemics. Researchers from the University of Silesia and the University of Ljubljana have been cooperating for several years to analyse movements based on conspiracy theories in three thematic areas: political science (the political potential of conspiracy theories), communication (paths of theory dissemination), and psychology (individuals’ susceptibility to conspiracy thinking). The project devoted a lot of space to analysing the profile of people who turn away from knowledge and science and choose to rebuild their worldview on the basis of conspiracy theories. 

Language is the most important and, at the same time, the most poorly defined tool of marketing communication. In an era of message overproduction, linguistic clichés, and growing content automation, it is really easy to get lost between meaning and convention. Marketing language increasingly utilises a recognisable form rather than precise communication. This raises questions about responsibility for one’s words, the limits of persuasion, and whether marketing language is still capable of communicating.

For decades, the mass media based their power on providing information to their audience – initially newspapers, and later radio and television, had the resources to be the only ones able to convey facts. When the rules of the game changed with the advent of the internet and widespread access to it, traditional media shifted their focus from information to opinion and journalism. Since information is available almost instantly and there is no need to wait for tomorrow’s newspaper or the next news broadcast, it has become more important to convince readers and audience members of a particular interpretation of facts. Traditional media are currently facing a multitude of problems, including how to engage young audiences. Perhaps immersive media offer an effective remedy for these ills, and journalism based on them, offering in-depth information, will be the next stage in media development.

In recent years, the creation of memes has increasingly been supported by all manner of tools based on generative artificial intelligence, thanks to which it is much easier and faster to produce a ‘viral’ piece of content. However, this humorous side of artificial intelligence should not distract from situations where its use is much more subtle, and therefore much more dangerous. Today, we see a host of negative consequences of AI’s use. Artificial intelligence, as a tool, was supposed to help us search for information more efficiently, process data, and access knowledge more easily. And even if this has indeed been the case in some situations, we have also been presented with a host of new problems: a flood of misinformation, new methods of manipulation, and secondary illiteracy combined with intellectual laziness.

Today, workplace monitoring is nothing like a supervisor looking over our shoulder or a CCTV camera in the office. Increasingly often, it takes the form of algorithms and artificial intelligence systems that analyse efficiency, organise tasks, prepare schedules, and identify risks. Algorithmic surveillance is silent, dispersed, and often not very transparent. This poses a challenge for communication. Good communication begins with understanding the problem, translating into human language the instances as to where an algorithm acts in the process, what it measures, how the result is used, with whom it can be discussed, and how it can be appealed.

Entropy is a concept used in physics to describe the degree of disorder in thermodynamic processes. In classical thermodynamics, it is a state function whose change allows us to distinguish between possible and impossible processes. The entropy of an isolated system – that is, one which exchanges neither energy nor matter with its surroundings – never decreases. It may remain constant (in ideally reversible processes), but in real processes it has to increase. The existence of entropy has its consequences. It determines the arrow of time in macroscopic physics, explaining why certain processes occur spontaneously in only one direction. Although the concept of entropy was born in relation to heat engines and energy processes, over time it turned out to have a much broader meaning – extending to information theory, computer science, biology, and even cosmology.