Sending, or to send, is the action of conveying or directing something or someone to another physical, virtual, or conceptual location for a specific purpose. The initiator of the action of sending is the sender. With respect to humans, "sending" also encompasses instructing others to go to another physical location, whether voluntarily or by force.
Sending is generally an act of volition, requiring the intent and purpose of the sender to cause a thing to be sent. English language authority James C. Fernald, in his 1896 English Synonyms and Antonyms, with Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions, provided a lengthy examination of concepts falling within the rubric of sending: [1]
To send is to cause to go or pass from one place to another, and always in fact or thought away from the agent or agency that controls the act. Send in its most common use involves personal agency without personal presence; according to the adage, "If you want your business done, go; if not, send"; one sends a letter or a bullet, a messenger or a message. In all the derived uses this same idea controls; if one sends a ball into his own heart, the action is away from the directing hand, and he is viewed as the passive recipient of his own act; it is with an approach to personification that we speak of the bow sending the arrow, or the gun the shot. To despatch is to send hastily or very promptly, ordinarily with a destination in view; to dismiss is to send away from oneself without reference to a destination; as, to dismiss a clerk, an application, or an annoying subject. To discharge is to send away so as to relieve a person or thing of a load; we discharge a gun or discharge the contents; as applied to persons, discharge is a harsher term than dismiss. To emit is to send forth from within, with no reference to a destination; as, the sun emits light and heat. Transmit, from the Latin, is a dignified term, often less vigorous than the Saxon send, but preferable at times in literary or scientific use; as, to transmit the crown, or the feud, from generation to generation; to transmit a charge of electricity. Transmit fixes the attention more on the intervening agency, as send does upon the points of departure and destination. [1]
A message may be sent by both physical means of conveyance such as mail, or electronic means such as email and texting. The practice of communication by written documents carried by an intermediary from one person or place to another almost certainly dates back nearly to the invention of writing. However, the development of formal postal systems occurred much later. The first documented use of an organized courier service for the dissemination of written documents is in Egypt, where Pharaohs used couriers to send out decrees throughout the territory of the state (2400 BCE). [2] The earliest surviving piece of mail is also Egyptian, dating to 255 BCE. [3]
The phrase "send a message" or "sending a message" is also used with respect to actions taken by a party to convey that party's attitude towards a certain thing. For example, a government that executes people who commit acts of treason can be said to be "sending a message" that treason will not be tolerated. [4] Conversely, a party that appears through its actions to endorse something that it actually opposes can be said to be "sending the wrong message", [4] while one which appears to simultaneously endorse contradictory things can be said to be "sending mixed messages". [5] The sending of mixed messages is a common source of miscommunication, particularly where the words of a message convey one thing, but accompanying nonverbal cues convey another. [6] Mixed messages are also common in dating, where one member of a potential romantic couple may appear at different times receptive or dismissive of the pursuit of a relationship, for a variety of reasons including obliviousness to the likely interpretation of communications, internal uncertainty about pursuit of a relationship, or deliberate efforts to "appear cool and coy". [6]
Communications are not necessarily things that are sent at all. An alternative is to sending a communication somewhere is to create a sufficiently durable means of conveying the communication, such as carving or painting on a surface, or sculpting a three-dimensional representation, and placing it where persons arriving at that location will receive the communication. Some scientists have proposed the possibility of using quantum effects to convey messages without "sending" information at all, [7] though this proposition depends on a semantic distinction between different meanings of the word, "sending".
Physical items or objects can similarly sent from one place to another for a wide variety of reasons, for the benefit of the sender, the recipient, or others. Things may be sent by a merchant in response to a remote purchase, or as a gift. International trade is primarily focused on the sending of goods from one place to another. Packaging, containerization and the like have developed to help facilitate the sending of cargo. Items as well as messages may be sent through the services of a courier or a post office. The sending of objects as gifts may involve multiple models of sending. For example, if a person orders a gift for another through a third-party website, from a social perspective the person making the order is sending the gift, while from the physical and economic perspective, it is the third-party website, or a vendor doing business with it, that is sending the item to the recipient.
Sending of small objects is done through package delivery or parcel delivery. The service is provided by most postal systems, express mail, private courier companies, and less than truckload shipping carriers. [8] With respect to sending large items such as pieces of furniture, specialized less-than-truckload shipping carriers handle shipping furniture and other heavy goods from the manufacturer to a last mile hub. [9] [10] The last mile problem can also include the challenge of making deliveries in urban areas. Deliveries to retail stores, restaurants, and other merchants in a central business district often contribute to congestion and safety problems. [9] [11]
A person or group of people can be sent to places for various reasons, and the fact of one person sending another person somewhere often indicates that the person sent was not sent of their own volition. For example, persons who engage in disfavored conduct may be sent to prison or detention, expelled from a school, banished from a place, or sent to a remote or inhospitable place. An unruly or unwanted child may be sent to a boarding school, or to live with a different family. Conversely, people may volunteer or even campaign to be sent places in order to explore, or achieve some personal benefit or public good. In some cases a person might be sent away to protect them from danger, without a specific destination being determined in advance.
The sending of military personnel to positions from which they can prepare for or engage in combat is called deployment. The word "deploy" can be used in multiple senses within this framework, so that "it could mean, on the one hand, the sending of troops forward from their peacetime bases. The Navy, for example, calls extended cruises 'deployments' even when no combat operations are anticipated. In another sense, it might be countered that 'deploying the troops' means sending them onto the field of battle from their forward staging bases". [12]
Many religions incorporate beliefs in a supreme being "sending" things in a variety of ways, including sending messengers or prophets, and sending people (or components of people, such as souls) to specific afterlives. In some religions this raises the question of why a benevolent god would send souls to afterlives of eternal torment, which is resolved by claiming that the condemned souls have actually chosen to send themselves to that afterlife. [13]
The Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) is a supporting protocol in the Internet protocol suite. It is used by network devices, including routers, to send error messages and operational information indicating success or failure when communicating with another IP address, for example, an error is indicated when a requested service is not available or that a host or router could not be reached. ICMP differs from transport protocols such as TCP and UDP in that it is not typically used to exchange data between systems, nor is it regularly employed by end-user network applications.
A letter is a written message conveyed from one person to another through a medium. Something epistolary means that it is a form of letter writing. The term usually excludes written material intended to be read in its original form by large numbers of people, such as newspapers and placards, although even these may include material in the form of an "open letter". The typical form of a letter for many centuries, and the archetypal concept even today, is a sheet of paper that is sent to a correspondent through a postal system. A letter can be formal or informal, depending on its audience and purpose. Besides being a means of communication and a store of information, letter writing has played a role in the reproduction of writing as an art throughout history. Letters have been sent since antiquity and are mentioned in the Iliad. Historians Herodotus and Thucydides mention and use letters in their writings.
Short Message/Messaging Service, commonly abbreviated as SMS, is a text messaging service component of most telephone, Internet and mobile device systems. It uses standardized communication protocols that let mobile devices exchange short text messages. An intermediary service can facilitate a text-to-voice conversion to be sent to landlines.
The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the main protocols of the Internet protocol suite. It originated in the initial network implementation in which it complemented the Internet Protocol (IP). Therefore, the entire suite is commonly referred to as TCP/IP. TCP provides reliable, ordered, and error-checked delivery of a stream of octets (bytes) between applications running on hosts communicating via an IP network. Major internet applications such as the World Wide Web, email, remote administration, and file transfer rely on TCP, which is part of the Transport Layer of the TCP/IP suite. SSL/TLS often runs on top of TCP.
A message is a discrete unit of communication intended by the source for consumption by some recipient or group of recipients. A message may be delivered by various means, including courier, telegraphy, carrier pigeon and electronic bus. A message can be the content of a broadcast. An interactive exchange of messages forms a conversation.
Tactical communications are military communications in which information of any kind, especially orders and military intelligence, are conveyed from one command, person, or place to another upon a battlefield, particularly during the conduct of combat. It includes any kind of delivery of information, whether verbal, written, visual or auditory, and can be sent in a variety of ways. In modern times, this is usually done by electronic means. Tactical communications do not include communications provided to tactical forces by the Defense Communications System to non-tactical military commands, to tactical forces by civil organizations, nor does it include strategic communication.
The mail or post is a system for physically transporting postcards, letters, and parcels. A postal service can be private or public, though many governments place restrictions on private systems. Since the mid-19th century, national postal systems have generally been established as a government monopoly, with a fee on the article prepaid. Proof of payment is usually in the form of an adhesive postage stamp, but a postage meter is also used for bulk mailing.
A communication channel refers either to a physical transmission medium such as a wire, or to a logical connection over a multiplexed medium such as a radio channel in telecommunications and computer networking. A channel is used for information transfer of, for example, a digital bit stream, from one or several senders to one or several receivers. A channel has a certain capacity for transmitting information, often measured by its bandwidth in Hz or its data rate in bits per second.
Onion routing is a technique for anonymous communication over a computer network. In an onion network, messages are encapsulated in layers of encryption, analogous to the layers of an onion. The encrypted data is transmitted through a series of network nodes called "onion routers," each of which "peels" away a single layer, revealing the data's next destination. When the final layer is decrypted, the message arrives at its destination. The sender remains anonymous because each intermediary knows only the location of the immediately preceding and following nodes. While onion routing provides a high level of security and anonymity, there are methods to break the anonymity of this technique, such as timing analysis.
Store and forward is a telecommunications technique in which information is sent to an intermediate station where it is kept and sent at a later time to the final destination or to another intermediate station. The intermediate station, or node in a networking context, verifies the integrity of the message before forwarding it. In general, this technique is used in networks with intermittent connectivity, especially in the wilderness or environments requiring high mobility. It may also be preferable in situations when there are long delays in transmission and error rates are variable and high, or if a direct, end-to-end connection is not available.
A bounce message or just "bounce" is an automated message from an email system, informing the sender of a previous message that the message has not been delivered. The original message is said to have "bounced".
IBM MQ is a family of message-oriented middleware products that IBM launched in December 1993. It was originally called MQSeries, and was renamed WebSphere MQ in 2002 to join the suite of WebSphere products. In April 2014, it was renamed IBM MQ. The products that are included in the MQ family are IBM MQ, IBM MQ Advanced, IBM MQ Appliance, IBM MQ for z/OS, and IBM MQ on IBM Cloud. IBM MQ also has containerised deployment options.
IP multicast is a method of sending Internet Protocol (IP) datagrams to a group of interested receivers in a single transmission. It is the IP-specific form of multicast and is used for streaming media and other network applications. It uses specially reserved multicast address blocks in IPv4 and IPv6.
In computer networking, telecommunication and information theory, broadcasting is a method of transferring a message to all recipients simultaneously. Broadcasting can be performed as a high-level operation in a program, for example, broadcasting in Message Passing Interface, or it may be a low-level networking operation, for example broadcasting on Ethernet.
SMS spoofing is a technology which uses the short message service (SMS), available on most mobile phones and personal digital assistants, to set who the message appears to come from by replacing the originating mobile number with alphanumeric text. Spoofing has both legitimate uses and illegitimate uses. This can also send "mysterious" messages that look like they are from legitimate numbers or contacts.
Mobile marketing is a multi-channel online marketing technique focused at reaching a specific audience on their smartphones, feature phones, tablets, or any other related devices through websites, e-mail, SMS and MMS, social media, or mobile applications. Mobile marketing can provide customers with time and location sensitive, personalized information that promotes goods, services, appointment reminders and ideas. In a more theoretical manner, academic Andreas Kaplan defines mobile marketing as "any marketing activity conducted through a ubiquitous network to which consumers are constantly connected using a personal mobile device".
The Shannon–Weaver model is one of the first and most influential models of communication. It was initially published in the 1948 paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication and explains communication in terms of five basic components: a source, a transmitter, a channel, a receiver, and a destination. The source produces the original message. The transmitter translates the message into a signal, which is sent using a channel. The receiver translates the signal back into the original message and makes it available to the destination. For a landline phone call, the person calling is the source. They use the telephone as a transmitter, which produces an electric signal that is sent through the wire as a channel. The person receiving the call is the destination and their telephone is the receiver.
A relay network is a broad class of network topology commonly used in wireless networks, where the source and destination are interconnected by means of some nodes. In such a network the source and destination cannot communicate to each other directly because the distance between the source and destination is greater than the transmission range of both of them, hence the need for intermediate node(s) to relay.
Models of communication are simplified representations of the process of communication. Most models try to describe both verbal and non-verbal communication and often understand it as an exchange of messages. Their function is to give a compact overview of the complex process of communication. This helps researchers formulate hypotheses, apply communication-related concepts to real-world cases, and test predictions. Despite their usefulness, many models are criticized based on the claim that they are too simple because they leave out essential aspects. The components and their interactions are usually presented in the form of a diagram. Some basic components and interactions reappear in many of the models. They include the idea that a sender encodes information in the form of a message and sends it to a receiver through a channel. The receiver needs to decode the message to understand the initial idea and provides some form of feedback. In both cases, noise may interfere and distort the message.
Schramm's model of communication is an early and influential model of communication. It was first published by Wilbur Schramm in 1954 and includes innovations over previous models, such as the inclusion of a feedback loop and the discussion of the role of fields of experience. For Schramm, communication is about sharing information or having a common attitude towards signs. His model is based on three basic components: a source, a destination, and a message. The process starts with an idea in the mind of the source. This idea is then encoded into a message using signs and sent to the destination. The destination needs to decode and interpret the signs to reconstruct the original idea. In response, they formulate their own message, encode it, and send it back as a form of feedback. Feedback is a key part of many forms of communication. It can be used to mitigate processes that may undermine successful communication, such as external noise or errors in the phases of encoding and decoding.