Meta-communication is a secondary communication (including indirect cues) about how a piece of information is meant to be interpreted.
[4] Part of Birdwhistell's work involved filming people in social situations and analyzing them to show different levels of communication not clearly seen otherwise.
[7] In 1975, Frits Staal related the term to the metalanguage concept that is found in logic both in Western and Indian traditions.
[8][9] Staal considered the term metalanguage, or its German or Polish equivalent, to have been introduced in 1933 by the logician Alfred Tarski, whom he credits with having made apparent its real significance.
Mateus (2017), influenced by Derrida's Graphematic Structure of Communication, suggested to see metacommunication as a self-differentiating redundancy.
[12]: 247–248, 289 [14] Being rather technical, his definition was misunderstood,[15] and metamessage appropriated with the same meaning as subtext, especially in the field of business communication.
[16] Additionally, Bateson's strictly hierarchical theory was criticized for not reflecting some real-world communication phenomena, where any signal (regardless of level) can be deceitful.