Icy Flame

If you've already looked at the other models in this section on basic models of communication, you'll be aware that a criticism that could be made of some of them is that they present communication as a linear process, within which the roles of sender and receiver are clearly distinguished.
Schramm stated:
In fact, it is misleading to think of the communication process as starting somewhere and ending somewhere. It is really endless. We are little switchboard centers handling and rerouting the great endless current of information....
(Schramm W. (1954) quoted in McQuail & Windahl (1981)

The Osgood and Schramm circular model is an attempt to remedy that deficiency: The model emphasizes the circular nature of communication. The participants swap between the roles of source/encoder and receiver/decoder.

Interpreting
The model is particularly helpful in reminding us of the process of interpretation which takes place whenever a message is decoded.

The more mechanical models, particularly those concerned primarily with machine communication, tend to suggest that fidelity will be high as long as physical noise is reduced to a minimum or strategies (such as increasing channel redundancy) are adopted to counter the noise. This circular model reminds us that receiving a message is not simply a matter of decoding, but also of interpreting the message.

Whenever we receive data from the world around us, even in, say, the apparently very simple act of seeing what's in front of us, we are engaged in an active process of interpretation, not simply taking in information, but actively making sense of it. An important question is: what criteria are we using to make sense of what we are receiving? Since the criteria we use will inevitably differ from one person to another, there will always be semantic noise. If we can answer that question about our audience, then we stand a chance of communicating successfully.

But it's certainly not an easy question to answer, as you will see if you take a look at Berlo's SMCR Model, which is one of the most useful models as a starting point for organizing any practical work in communication.

If you have looked through the examples of typical everyday forms of communication, you will have noticed that some of the examples refer to less immediate methods of communication than face-to-face interaction, e.g. using the radio, newspapers or the telephone. In these cases, technology is introduced.

When, for instance, the telephone is used, you speak, the phone turns the sound waves into electrical impulses and those electrical impulses are turned back into sound waves by the phone at the other end of the line.
Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver produced a general model of communication:


This is now known after them as the Shannon-Weaver Model. Although they were principally concerned with communication technology, their model has become one which is frequently introduced to students of human communication early in their study. However, despite the fact that it is frequently used early in the study of human communication, I think it's worth bearing in mind that information theory, or statistical communication theory was initially developed to separate noise from information-carrying signals. That involved breaking down an information system into sub-systems so as to evaluate the efficiency of various communication channels and codes. You might ask yourself how viable the transfer of Shannon's insights from information theory to human communication is likely to be. The concepts of information theory and cybernetics are essentially mathematical and are intended to be applied to technical problems under clearly defined conditions. After you've read this section, which, I think, is a reasonable attempt to loosely apply Shannon's ideas to human communication, ask yourself whether you feel enlightened.

The Shannon-Weaver Model (1947) proposes that all communication must include six elements:

a source
an encoder
a message
a channel
a decoder
a receiver
These six elements are shown graphically in the model. As Shannon was researching in the field of information theory, his model was initially very technology-oriented. The model was produced in 1949, a year after Lasswell's and you will immediately see the similarity to the Lasswell Formula

The emphasis here is very much on the transmission and reception of information. 'Information' is understood rather differently from the way you and I would normally use the term, as well. This model is often referred to as an 'information model' of communication. (But you don't need to worry about that if you're just starting.)

Apart from its obvious technological bias, a drawback from our point of view is the model's obvious linearity. It looks at communication as a one-way process. That is remedied by the addition of the feedback loop which you can see in the developed version of the model:


Some essential cencepts for this model:

1. The Source
All human communication has some source (information source in Shannon's terminology), some person or group of persons with a given purpose, a reason for engaging in communication. You'll also find the terms transmitter and communicator used.
For a fuller discussion of 'source', see The Lasswell Formula


2. The Encoder
When you communicate, you have a particular purpose in mind:

you want to show that you're a friendly person
you want to give them some information
you want to get them to do something
you want to persuade them of your point of view
and so on. You, as the source, have to express your purpose in the form of a message. That message has to be formulated in some kind of code. How do the source's purposes get translated into a code? This requires an encoder. The communication encoder is responsible for taking the ideas of the source and putting them in code, expressing the source's purpose in the form of a message.

It's fairly easy to think in terms of source and encoder when you are talking on the phone (transmitter in Shannon's terminology). You are the source of the message and the 'phone is the encoder which does the job of turning your sounds into electrical impulses. The distinction is not quite so obvious when you think of yourself communicating face-to-face.

In person-to-person communication, the encoding process is performed by the motor skills of the source - vocal mechanisms (lip and tongue movements, the vocal cords, the lungs, face muscles etc.), muscles in the hand and so on. Some people's encoding systems are not as efficient as others'. So, for example, a disabled person might not be able to control movement of their limbs and so find it difficult to encode the intended non-verbal messages or they may communicate unintended messages. A person who has suffered throat cancer may have had their vocal cords removed. They can encode their messages verbally using an artificial aid, but much of the non-verbal messages most of us send via pitch, intonation, volume and so on cannot be encoded.

Shannon was not particularly concerned with the communication of meanings. In fact, it is Wilbur Schramm's model of 1954 which places greater emphasis on the processes of encoding and decoding. The inclusion of the encoding and decoding processes is very helpful to us since it draws our attention to the possibility of a mismatch between the operation of the encoding and decoding devices, which can cause semantic noise to be set up. With good reason, the source of the message may wonder whether the picture in the receiver's head will bear any resemblance to what's in his/her own. Schramm went on to introduce the notion of a 'field of experience', which shows a much greater awareness of the subtleties involved in human-to-human communication, drawing our attention to the numerous shared socio-cultural factors which are necessary for successful communication to take place (see David Berlo's S-M-C-R model).


3. The Message
The message of course is what communication is all about. Whatever is communicated is the message. Denis McQuail (1975) in his book Communication writes that the simplest way of regarding human communication is 'to consider it as the sending from one person to another of meaningful messages'.

The Shannon-Weaver Model, in common with many others separates the message from other components of the process of communication. In reality, though, you can only reasonably examine the message within the context of all the other interlinked elements. Whenever we are in contact with other people we and they are involved in sending and receiving messages. The crucial question for Communication Studies is: to what extent does the message received correspond to the message transmitted? That's where all the other factors in the communication process come into play.

The Shannon-Weaver model and others like it tends to portray the message as a relatively uncomplicated matter. Note that this is not a criticism of Shannon since meanings were simply not his concern:


Frequently the messages have meaning, that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These considerations are irrelevant to the engineering problem.
1949

This was particularly emphasized in Warren Weaver's introduction to Shannon's paper:

The word information, in this theory, is used in a special sense that must not be confused with its ordinary usage. In particular information must not be confused with meaning.
In fact, two messages, one of which is heavily loaded with meaning and the other of which is pure nonsense, can be exactly equivalent, from the present viewpoint, as regards information.
It may however be a criticism of the application of Shannon's model to the more general area of human-to-human communication. Meanings are assumed to be somehow contained within the signs used in the message and the receiver can, as it were, take them out again. Matters such as the social context in which the message is transmitted, the assumptions made by source and receiver, their past experiences and so on are simply disregarded. In this respect, models which incorporate such factors are probably more revealing of the complexity of the communication process. (See, for example, the sections on Berlo's SMCR model or Maletzke's model of mass communication)


4. The Channel
You tap on a membrane suspended above a steadily flowing jet of water. The air under the membrane causes slight deflections in the jet of water. A laser is aimed at a receiver. The jet of water flows through the laser beam, deflecting it from its target. Every time the water jet is deflected by the movement of the air, the laser beam hits its target. The laser receiver is connected to a computer which takes each 'hit' and turns it into a 1 and each miss and turns it into a 0. The computer sends these etc. etc......

You get the idea: the air waves, the jet of water and so on are all channels. The words channel and medium are often used interchangeably, if slightly inaccurately. The choice (a pretty stupid one above) of the appropriate channel is a vitally important choice in communication. It's obvious that you don't use the visual channel to communicate with the blind or the auditory channel with the deaf, but there are more subtle considerations to be taken into account as well.


5.1 Physical noise
Shannon is generally considered to have been primarily concerned with physical (or 'mechanical' or 'engineering') noise in the channel, i.e. unexplained variation in a communication channel or random error in the transmission of information. Everyday examples of physical noise are:

a loud motorbike roaring down the road while you're trying to hold a conversation
your little brother standing in front of the TV set
mist on the inside of the car windscreen
smudges on a printed page
'snow' on a TV set
It might seem odd to use the word noise in this way, unless perhaps you're a hi-fi buff, in which case you'll be familiar with looking up the claimed 'signal-to-noise ratio' for the various bits of equipment you buy. In this technical sense, 'noise' is not necessarily audible. Thus a TV technician might speak of a 'noisy picture'. Generally speaking, in this kind of everyday communication, we're fairly good at avoiding physical noise: we shout when the motorbike goes past; you clout your little brother; cars have demisters.

However, it is possible for a message to be distorted by channel overload. Channel overload is not due to any noise source, but rather to the channel capacity being exceeded. You may come across that at a party where you are holding a conversation amidst lots of others going on around you or, perhaps, in a Communication lesson where everyone has split into small groups for discussion or simulations.

Shannon and Weaver were primarily involved with the investigation of technological communication. Their model is perhaps more accurately referred to as a model of information theory (rather than communication theory). Consequently, their main concern was with the kind of physical (or mechanical) noise discussed above.

Although physical noise and how to avoid it is certainly a major concern of scholars of communication, the Shannon and Weaver model turns out to be particularly suggestive in the study of human communication because of its introduction of a decoding device and an encoding device. The possibility of a mismatch between the two devices raises a number of interesting questions. In technological communication: I give you a PC disk and you stick it into a Mac - the Mac can't decode it; I give you an American NTSC video tape and you stick it into a European PAL video recorder - the recorder won't decode it. Transfer this notion of a mismatch between the encoding and decoding devices to the study of human communication and you're looking at what is normally referred to as semantic noise (see below). That concept then leads us on to the study of social class, cultural background, experience, attitudes, beliefs and a whole range of other factors which can introduce noise into communication.

It might be worth mentioning here, especially in connexion with the reference to the linearity of the Shannon-Weaver model, that some workers in the newly developing science of complexity have pointed to a fundamental twin flaw in our science since Newton (I am greatly simplifying here), namely that science has been concerned to understand the world using linear models and has also been concerned to discount as 'experimental noise' anything which might hinder the application of a linear model. Complexity theorists point out that when you add the noise into the system, you generally end up with something non-linear, complex, unpredictable.


5.2 Semantic noise
Semantic noise is not as easy to deal with as physical noise. It might not be an exaggeration to say that the very essence of the study of human communication is to find ways of avoiding semantic noise. Semantic noise is difficult to define. It may be related to people's knowledge level, their communication skills, their experience, their prejudices and so on. There is more detailed discussion of those factors in Berlo's SMCR Model.

Examples of semantic noise would include:

Distraction: You are physically very attracted to the person who is talking to you. As a result, your attention is directed to their deep blue eyes rather than what they are saying. There is no physical noise which prevents the message from reaching you. You hear it, but you don't decode it. Equally, your attention could be distracted by the other person's peculiar tics and so on. Or think of when you watched the TV news: the reporter was standing outside No.10 Downing Street, but behind him the policeman outside the door was picking his nose. As soon as the report's over you realize you haven't a clue what it was about.
Differences in the use of the code: The other person is waffling on in Aramaic about fishes and loaves. You don't understand. There is nothing which physically prevents the elements of the message from reaching you, you simply can't understand it.
Emphasising the wrong part of the message: Maybe you can think of an advertising campaign which has been so successful with some new style or gimmick that everyone is talking about it. However, no one has actually noticed what product is being advertised.
Attitude towards the sender: You're talking to someone a lot older than you. On the basis of their age, you make a lot of assumptions about the kind of code appropriate to them - and the conversation goes wrong because they were the wrong assumptions.
Attitude towards the message: I may have a very positive attitude to the Aramaic-speaking bearded chap in the flowing robes. But, despite that, I'd be unlikely to find him very persuasive even if he were talking to me in English about his fishes and his loaves. He believes in transcendent beings and I don't. Whilst I may respect his right to hold to what I consider to be silly convictions, I can find little respect for the beliefs themselves. So, unless he can find what I consider a more convincing explanation of this particular trick, he's wasting his breath, however convinced he may be.


6. The Decoder
Just as a source needs an encoder to translate her purposes into a message, so the receiver needs a decoder to retranslate. The decoder (receiver in Shannon's paper) is an interesting and very useful development over, say, the Lasswell Formula.

If you take a look at our discussion of the receiver, you'll see that we considered how, for example, a blind person would not have the equipment to receive whatever non-verbal messages you send in the visual channel. The notion of a decoder reminds us that it is quite possible for a person to have all the equipment required to receive the messages you send (all five senses, any necessary technology and so on) and yet be unable to decode your messages.

Can you think of where you might come across a similar inability to decode where the English language is concerned? Suppose you've been reading around Communication Studies and have come across a reference to the philosopher Immanuel Kant. So you ask your teacher about him. She replies, "Well, the Critique of Pure Reason is essentially all about answering the question: how are synthetic judgements a priori possible?" Eh? You probably have a meaning for every one of those words, except perhaps 'a priori'. You might perhaps guess that she is using the title of one of Kant's works in her answer. But the statement is incomprehensible unless you know the technical jargon of philosophy. You can't decode the message - and your teacher is a pretty lousy teacher for having failed to predict your inability to decode it (or for having accurately predicted your inability and using it as an excuse to show off!).

we make the false assumption that receivers decode messages in the same way we do, that they use the code in the same way. There's a whole host of reasons why they won't - age differences, class differences, cultural differences and so on (dealt with more thoroughly in Berlo's SMCR Model).


8. The Receiver
For communication to occur, there must be somebody at the other end of the channel. This person or persons can be called the receiver. To put it in Shannon's terms, information transmitters and receivers must be similar systems. If they are not, communication cannot occur. (Actually Shannon used the term destination, reserving the term receiver for what we have called decoder. However, I think the terminology I have been using is more common in the broader understanding of 'communication theory' as distinct from Shannon's information theory.)

What that probably meant as far as he was concerned was that you need a telephone at one end and a telephone at the other, not a telephone connected to a radio. In rather more obviously human terms, the receiver needs to have the equipment to receive the message. A totally blind person has the mental equipment to decode your gestures, but no system for receiving messages in the visual channel. So, your non-verbal messages are not received and you're wasting your energy. See also the Lasswell Formula for a more detailed discussion of 'receiver'.


9. Feedback
Feedback is a vital part of communication. When we are talking to someone over the phone, if they don't give us the occasional 'mmmm', 'aaah', 'yes, I see' and so on, it can be very disconcerting. .This lack of feedback explains why most of us don't like ansaphones. In face-to-face communication, we get feedback in the visual channel as well - head nods, smiles, frowns, changes in posture and orientation, gaze and so on. Advertisers need feedback which they get in the form of market research from institutions like Gallup. How else would they know if their ads are on the right track? Broadcasters need feedback which they get from BARB's ratings. Politicians need feedback which they get from public opinion polls and so on.

Why do people often have difficulty when using computers, when they find it perfectly easy to drive a car? You'd think it should be easier to operate a computer - after all there are only a few keys and a mouse, as against levers, pedals and a steering wheel. A computer's not likely to kill you, either. It could be due to the lack of feedback - in a car, you've the sound of the engine, the speed of the landscape rushing past, the force of gravity. Feedback is coming at you through sight, hearing and touch -overdo it and it might come through smell as well! With a computer, there's very little of that.





Well, that's the Shannon-Weaver model. Do you feel enlightened? I shouldn't imagine that any student of human-to-human communication would feel especially enlightened by Shannon's original paper, since it's all to do with information theory and, in essence, human beings don't process information, but process meanings. In the above discussion of the model I have often referred to meaning, a topic largely absent from the original model, but it is only by broadening the model to take in meaning and the biological, cognitive, technological, socio-cultural and other factors which influence it that this model can be of any use.

However, it has to be said that the model's separation of the communication process into discrete units has proved fruitful and has formed the basis of several other models which provide some more insightful elaboration of the human communication process. However, in disregarding meaning it may well be downright misleading. Those researchers who take this model and simply slap meaning on top of it are probably even more misleading. Some models developed upon the basic constituents of the Shannon-Weaver model are linked to below under 'related articles'. I would refer you also to the article on criticism of transmission models.

I've got disconnected when I am trying to post this blog. Luckily I've already made a backup in my pc.
I begin to think of the relationship—to be more specific, think of the relationship between Mark and me. Are there any possibility for us to develop a healthy long-term love relationship? What will be the difficulties or any barriers between us if we really decide to have a love relationship?
Mark said he fell in love with me several days ago. I felt it was too good to be true but I did know he was serious. I knew he excepted some words from me also. However, I just said thank you very much and then kept silent because I really didn’t know how to say and what I should say. He stopped for a while and waited. On seeing no respond from me he asked me not to think too much. It was very hard for him to speak that out but he just wanted to let me know his feelings. My eyes were even full of tears at that moment. I remember when we first met each other he said to me jokingly he might fall in love with me and asked me whether I was attracted to him. I laughed and told him he was quite a handsome and charming guy but maybe it was quite possible that I might fall in love with him. Since I wasn’t interested in any guys for the past one year and a half since the breakup with my ex-b/f and actually I began to doubt about my sexual orientation nowadays (just joking, I think I am still straight).
How could all this happen and when did it happen? It happened before we could notice it. Just within two months we knew each other.
Am I beginning to love him now? Even I cannot be sure of it myself. One thing I can be completely sure is that I really like him and care for him a lot. His smile can light up my heart. His wit, nice sense of humor, caring and patience to me really impresses me. Surely I have to admit this, too—I am attracted to his handsome looking soon after we knew each other.
Okay obviously thing is going on pretty well between us. So why can’t I speak the word Love out since I’ve already realized he is really more than a buddy friend for me nowadays? The reasons are a lot. But the main reason is because I am lacking the feeling of security. It doesn’t mean that I don’t trust his love or believe in him. It is because I am analytical (he said this to me several times) and down-to-earth. Maybe often I have a short temper and don’t have enough patience. Also I always want to finish my work as soon as possible. But that’s just for the things but for the people I care for. I always prefer to take my time to know a person well and take my time to develop a relationship. I never want to dash of it.
He is so different from me., totally, completely different. Here I won’t focus on the details again.,,but……sigh..
I think I’d better quit thinking of this right now. I really have a headache at this moment when I begin to think too much.

Anyways…I want to change my topic now. I will talk about another of my favorite bookJ