By popular demand (of maybe two or three people) I am sharing my recollection of one of the early foundational concepts in Communication Theory. This came about when cotterperson raised some questions about communication studies and noted that “Communication is a relatively new academic field”. Since my Bachelor’s degree was in that field back in the 1970’s I had to smart off, and mentioned the possibility of doing a diary. Well, it’s `put up or shut up’ time. If very basic Communication Theory floats your boat – keep going.
Even way back then increasingly complex and sophisticated models of how communication works were being developed. However, Chapter 1 always had the cornerstone of models. It was actually stolen from the phone company.
“In 1948, a model of communication was proposed by Claude Shannon. Shannon worked for the Bell Telephone Company in America, and was concerned with the transmission of speech across a telephone line. Warren Weaver, in association with Shannon, wrote a preface to this model and it was published as a book in 1949. Weaver saw the applicability of Shannon’s model of communication to a much wider sphere than just telephony, and it has served as a basis for explaining communication since that time.”
If you want to dig deeper, you can go here
As promised, here is the “quick and dirty”
Shannon’s model described a sender, a receiver, and a line between them that was subject to noise. From a telephone perspective it means that when I talk I am trying to send information that I hope you will receive; but there may be static on the line that interferes with the clarity of my message. If my message as sender is too garbled by the noise then you, the receiver, will not get the full message. Land lines have gotten better since 1948; but modern cell phones give currency to the example. I’m trying to set up a meeting with you and drive through a tunnel where my cell transmission goes dead. You get to hear “I’ll expect you to meet me at 6 PM sharp at garble, garble, garble, dead air but if you aren’t there I’ll cancel our contract and get bids from XYZ”
It doesn’t take much of a mental stretch to imagine “noise” in a face to face dialogue. Consider trying to talk in a bar with a loud band, or on a street corner when a dump truck goes by. “Noise” doesn’t have to be auditory. If the Seussian parade down Mulberry Street is just outside my window I’m probably paying more attention to the “Rajah, with rubies, perched high on a throne” that is passing by than I am your words. There’s also “noise” on the line between us when I really, really, really neeeed to go to the bathroom; or when it’s an hour past my lunch-time and the guy down the hall is eating a pizza. Obviously, we don’t have to be face to face for these kinds of noise to interfere with our communication. We could be on the phone or on e-mail.
A more subtle kind of noise comes from the varying denotations and connotations of words. Denotation is the literal definition. Connotation brings in feelings, experiences, and other more uniquely individual levels of meaning. Google the definition of each word if you want to explore the distinction further.
Take a nice, simple word we all understand. Dog. We all know what a dog is, right? So when I tell you I’ll stop by your place this Saturday to pick up the newsletters on my way to the lake, and I’ll have my dog with me…. we all know what’s what – right? Unless the word “dog” conjures up that memory of the Rottweiler who bit you on the butt when you were 5. So you will offer to meet me at the curb with the newsletters and I will end up wondering why you are so stuck up you can’t invite me in for a beer. Or maybe you are OK with dogs in general, and you ask me what kind I have and I tell you “my precious is just the cutest poodle doodle – yes he isms” and you picture your aunt’s toy poodle curled up in his little bed and go “Awww. Come by a little early and we’ll have a beer”. And then I show up with my full size standard poodle who is bigger than the kitchen in your efficiency.
Look at all the ways we can have communication “noise” over a word we all learned in pre-school. Dog. No wonder we have communication “noise” on the line when we talk about politics, religion, sex. All those connotations for all those words – feminist, conservative, Christian, politician, peace, gay, right (or right-to-xxxxx) – the whole damn dictionary practically.
Two key things to take away from this:
1. Keep the dialogue open and active until you figure out what’s causing the “noise” in the communication. What does “dog” mean to me? To you? What does “feminism” mean to me? To you? Or “marriage”? Or “support the troops”?
2. This is part of why everybody is talking about “framing” these days – Privatization, personal accounts, ownership, etc. If I know you got bit on the butt by that Rottweiler I’m going to “frame” my pooch as cute, cuddly, well-trained and well-behaved.
Part 2 coming soon. We will explore why Aristotle, if he were alive today, would most likely be a front page poster.
but I suppose someone with deep knowledge of Communication Theory would have the ability to communicate.
hah!
You know the adage about psychiatrists being in the greatest need of mental health help?
wanna come to some of my department meetings?
AH!
Yet Another, All University Open Invitational Inter-Mural Sneer Fest & Faction Fight?
No.
😉
First you promised an “All University Open Invitational Inter-Mural Sneer Fest & Faction Fight”
Then you cancelled it? “No”.
No pie for you.
Having taken that Communication Theory undergrad on down the road to a graduate degree in counseling and eventually a career in social work there are some examples I might use….
but a fair bit of learning in the school of hard knocks.
Well done. I’ve sometimes stopped in the middle of a discussion with someone, where it looked like we were just going around in circles, and asked them to define what they mean by X.
Sometimes it turns out that we were discussing similar but different things.
And then sometimes we were discussing the same things, it’s just that they were wrong ;).
Thanks for the diary, the next one sounds fun too.
“the next one sounds fun too”
Dang – does this mean I have to actually produce Pt 2?
well – I teach Human Communication, so I hope you don’t mind if I weigh in.
First, the roots of the discipline do extend to Aristotle. But saying that is a bit tricky. The discipline today has a fairly wide (though amicable) chasm: on one side is rhetoric, the classic study that represents a more humanistic/philosophical approach to human communication. The other side is communication theory, where both interpretivists and positivists approach human communication as a social science. (I’m a member of the second camp though I have a great affinity for rhetoric, as it was the primary emphasis of my undergraduate program and my research interests concentrate on symbolic interactionism, which is probably the closest thing to a bridge that we have.)
Even the name is kind of tricky, and I don’t mean the part where people automatically assume I do journalism or speech pathology. The discipline was, in its earliest forms, an outgrowth of English departments who saw the need to teach students how to speak in public – and consequently, was called simply, Speech. We were often merged/lumped with Theatre & Drama, as early emphases placed priority on voice and diction and so forth. The emergence of a social science in the discipline lead to “Speech Communication,” which many have shortened simply to “Communication” (no ‘s’, please), or extended to “Human Communication / Studies,” or my graduate department’s current “Communication Arts and Sciences”. (that’s Penn State, to save you the googling time.)
Contemporary communication study is widely varied. On the rhetorical studies side of the field, health communication is approached as a study of public health campaigns. Comm theorists study doctor/patient interaction. Rhetoricians may look at how groups form online, using classical group theories like Fantasy Theme Analysis, while comm theorists look at how corporate communication leads to disasters like Challenger and Enron, using similar theories. The field encompasses gender, culture, computer mediated, educational, lifespan, interpersonal, critical studies, pop culture, nonverbal, political, legal, and group communication, and occasionally steps on the toes of our bigger and better known academic fellows in comm journ and english, particularly when we stray too far into media (though generally we focus on media effects and analysis, not production).
The issue of models in the field is actually a fairly complicated one. The model you cite was preceded by Laswell’s. It is a fairly simple, linear model of communication, and can be summed up by the following question: “Who says what to whom in what channel with what effect?” Probably the most notable component of this model is that it proposes a “channel” of communication – which broadens the scope to include more than speech, and recognizes that we can have more than one message being transmitted at a time. Given that we estimate 93% of meaning to be derived from nonverbal channels of communication, this is a significant addition to the understanding of how communication works.
The Shannon and Weaver model adds noise to the mix. In general, noise is defined as any disruption of a message in a channel, and typically is cast as being derived from 3 primary sources – physical (environmental – the jackhammer outside), psychological (distracted by the upcoming meeting), or physiological (headache, illness, etc).
In 1954, Schramm drew circles and renamed the “sender” and “receiver” as “source/encoder” and “destination/decoder”. Both are significant. The circles represent a field of experience – the totality of the person interacting in the model. Usually we see a degree of overlap – overlapping fields of experience – and the assumption is that more overlap leads to more effective communication. Encoding and decoding represent a more nuanced understanding of the process of perception in the field at this point.
From here a few models develop (Westley & McClean, Dance, etc, in the 50s and 60s), which have all contributed in some part to the model we currently use, the Transactional Model (http://pirate.shu.edu/~yatesdan/model.html). The link isn’t the best, because it leaves out the most significant component – the recognition that a message and feedback are simultaneous.
It is also important to note that the models, as depicted, represent dyadic, or interpresonal communication. However, the transactional model is easily extended (we refer to public speaking, for instance, as “an extended conversation”). Just add more circles. And, of course, this is why group and public communication becomes – not necessarily more difficult, but comprised of more facets – because suddenly we have 7 or 19 or however many overlapping fields of experience.
What does this mean? Well, definitionally, I prefer Julia Wood, who defines communication as “the systemic process in which two or more people interaction with and through symbols in order to create shared meaning.” I like to break it down –
system – systems theory is a significant part of the early development of human comm studies and is still informative today. Simply put, our communication with one person affects future communication with that person, as well as communication with others. We have an argument with a coworker, go home, and take a well-intended comment as criticism, and so forth.
process – communication occurs over time
symbols – my favorite part – and one you clearly get, as illustrated by the dog example (I have a husky named Suka – long story short, we adopted her, picked the name from a native Alaskan sled dog site, and found out later – from a student! – that it means bitch in most Slavic languages. Ah, well – the dog is female, and the kids can swear in Russian). Symbols are linguistic representations of ideas, thoughts, emotions, etc – they are not the actual thought or emotion itself. (signs are much closer to the actual meaning) 3 important principles –
*symbols are arbitrary – we decide what to name something
*symbols are ambiguous – the meaning for you may not be the meaning for me (the dog example), and meanings change over time
*symbols are abstract – ah, Plato. I can talk about the desk without dragging it around with me.
shared meaning – at times, too painfully clear what is intended there.
So a couple of conclusions I would add to yours, which I agree with. Mine stem from the basic thesis that communication is powerful:
The connection to politics is one that, for me, is rich and significant. I rarely go a semester without including Gingrich’s GOPAC memo – Language: A Key Mechanism of Control. I suspect that this is where your second entry will take you, so I won’t attempt to preempt it. But I will be back ; ) God save you from my geekdom.
Some links:
http://www.icahdq.org/
http://www.isca-speech.org/
http://www.natcom.org/nca/Template2.asp – our national organization
Regional: eastern, central states, and western:
http://www.ecasite.org
http://www.csca-net.org
http://www.westcomm.org
when there was the small clamor for some basic communication theory? Looks like you could have saved me from several days of research and writing 😉
I wasn’t needed.
You did a helluva job!
One comment before I have to collapse. (Lots of meat here & I hope this diary will still be around tomorrow.)
“Given that we estimate 93% of meaning to be derived from nonverbal channels of communication, this is a significant addition to the understanding of how communication works.”
I knew human communication had a strong non-verbal percentage but I had no idea it is 93%. Cripes! Given the greater ability of females to access, and thereby cognize/verbalize, the (so-called) ‘Right Side of the Brain’ it’s no wonder gender communicaton frustration is a constant experience. Women are frustrated that men “won’t communicate” or are “clue-less” and men are frustrated by demands we, even with the best will in the world, are neuro-physiologically unable to meet.
ah, the gender issue.
Well, first – the 93% (or so, depending on who/what you read) is comprised of multiple channels – including vocal intonation, rate, etc – factors classified as vocalics and paralinguistics. Each of these, along with kinetic, proxemic, oculesic, etc behavior contribute to that %. The basic premise is that the more channels available to us, the more likely we are to be successful in communication (see Media Richness and Social Presence Theories). Start with face to face conversation, then phone, then email – try to be sarcastic in each!
As for gender – again, I’m a social constructionist, and firmly believe that differences in communication are due to the social and cultural experience of gender, and not biology (Canary & Hause’s meta analysis puts actual differences that can be accounted for by sex at 2-3%). You mention nonverbal decoding, which is a good point of entry – many studies do show that women have a greater nonverbal decoding ability. The bio-evolutionary explanation (P. Andersen, for one) is that women have spent more time caring for preverbal (infants) and aphasics. Huh? Enough people have sustained head injuries that rendered them nonverbal to have had an evolutionary impact?
More likely is the explanation advanced by cultural studies scholars and others in communication who have found that African Americans – men and women – have similar nonverbal decoding abilities as white women. The explanation is that power (or the lack thereof) better accounts for nonverbal decoding – if you lack power, you have to pay more attention to the nonverbals of others than if you have power. Simply imagine a woman walking alone across campus after dark and contrast that experience to a man in the same situation.
Incidently, if anyone is interested in good texts on comm theories (rhetoric & social science), I recommend both Littlejohn and E.M. Griffin. Littlejohn provides a lot of context on the development of the field, while Griffin gives a veritable who’s who of comm theories.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0534549578/104-3860489-1332727?v=glance
Littlejohn – not advocating Amazon, just the easiest link
http://www.afirstlook.com/
Griffin
A 2 or 3% based difference has the potential to a 100% difference after 100 iterates or so, depending on the Lyapunov Exponent of the particular system. Also Sprach Chaos. BUT neither do I accept the “Biology is Destiny” proposition. And the widespread deployment of Evolution as a explanatory panacea leaves me cold as well.
As I have ‘no dog in this hunt’ it would be overstepping the boundaries for me to be dogmatic so I’ll be anecdotal. My experience in Formal and Informal, but structured, communications leads me to conjecture Communication is a Complex phenomena and ‘linear’ approaches are only going to take one so far.
This diary was an offering for the “lay-person’ interested in basic communication theory.
Y’all start in with “social constructionist” “Lyapunov Exponent” and so on. Please – don’t scare the villagers.
but why bother? Wouldn’t it dribble down to the bottom of the list in about 5 minutes?
communication. But yeah you are right.