Model of Communication

Communication, like anything else, can be studied in order to find out exactly how it works. This can be done is real life or it can be done in a more 'academic' level. On one hand, you would think that we all understand what communication is well enough to talk about it meaningfully, since we all do it from a very young age. On the other hand, personal experiences show that people get very easily confused about the communication that occurs in the real world.

A very well-known model of communication developed by Shannon and Weaver (1949) will be the prototypical example of a transmissive model of communication; a model which reduces communication to the process of 'transmitting information'. Shannon and Weaver's model is one which is, in John Fiske's words, 'widely accepted as one of the main seeds out of which Communication Studies has grown'. 

Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver were not social scientists but engineers, who developed a model of communication which was intended to assist in developing a mathematical theory of communication. Shannon and Weaver's work proved valuable for communication engineers in dealing with such issues as the capacity of various communication channels in 'bits per second'. However, these directions are not our concern here. The problem is that some commentators have claimed that Shannon and Weaver's model has a much wider application to human communication than a purely technical one.

A Standard Communication Model

Shannon and Weaver's original model consisted of five elements:

1. An information source, which produces a message.
2. A transmitter, which encodes the message into signals.
3. A channel, to which signals are adapted for transmission.
4. A receiver, which 'decodes' (reconstructs) the message from the signal.
5. A destination, where the message arrives.

Shannon and Weaver argued that there were three levels of problems of communication:

• A The technical problem: how accurately can the message be transmitted?
• B The semantic problem: how precisely is the meaning 'conveyed'?
• C The effectiveness problem: how effectively does the received meaning affect behaviour?

Shannon and Weaver somewhat naively assumed that sorting out Level A problems would lead to improvements at the other levels.

Communication can be modelled as a set of connections along which messages flow from a sender to a receiver on some medium. A given interaction may require several such connections to model; even a simple web request requires two connections (one from the person requesting the page, one to return the page to that person). We observe that only humans communicate. 

We also note that we either must accept this as true, or give up any hope of having a rational system of ethics that can actually claim something is ethical or unethical.