meta-communication

Meta-communication is a secondary communication (including indirect cues) about how a piece of information is meant to be interpreted. It is based on the idea that the same message accompanied by different meta-communication can mean something entirely different, including its opposite, as in irony. The term was brought to prominence by Gregory Bateson to refer to "communication about communication", which he expanded to: "all exchanged cues and propositions about (a) codification and (b) relationship between the communicators".

==Origin of the concept== Gregory Bateson invented the term in 1951. Bateson suggested the significance of metacommunication in 1951, and then elaborated upon one particular variation, the message "this is play," in 1956. A critical fact for Bateson was that every message could have a metacommunicative element, and typically, each message held metacommunicative information about how to interpret other messages. He saw no distinction in type of message, only a distinction in function.