At a word from the chief engineer, a half mile away, a worker throws a switch. The mountain erupts into cascades of pebbles and boulders crashing down the raw slope. Communication consists of conveying or imparting something, some impulse, over a given distance, presumably to some receiver. It implies a connection, if not always control. Those miniscule flows of energy expended in the engineer's or anyone else's communication can aspire to command, to some extent, the infinitely vaster energies of nature.
Communication can transcend and conquer distance and space.
It can even reach forward through time. And through communication human beings gain immense powers to transform environments. Our very act of communicating creates its own spaces and landscapes and relies on transformed environments to produce its effects. Shaped under natural selection, it must also contribute to the differential perpetuation of particular genetic traits in humanity. As it operates to serve these ends, communication incorporates the individual not only into an environment or habitat, and into a place or community, but also into a geographical universe of regions and boundaries, places and networks, as well as societal and cultural universes of interdependence and conflict, subjection or dominance.