  This article studies effective communication, one of the three forms
identified by Weaver and Shannon, as an enabler for the upcoming 6G use cases.
The envisioned tactile, holographic, and multi-sensory communications require
bandwidths in the order of terabits per second and latencies in the order of
microseconds for an immersive experience. We argue that a theoretical framework
for transporting information tailored to end-users' goals is necessary to
support such applications. Different from the recently emerging discussions
focusing on the meaning of exchanged messages, we focus on using these messages
to take actions in the desired way. We highlight the essential characteristics
of distributed knowledge accumulation as a facilitator for this upcoming
paradigm, and discuss the challenges of making effective communications a
reality and the potential opportunities for future research to address these
challenges. In a real-life use case, we showcase the potential reduction in the
number of bits transferred owing to the transferred accumulated knowledge.

Networking and Internet Architecture