COMMUNICATION MATTERS
BY PAULA JANE COX
Typically, communication (from Latin commūnicāre, meaning "to share") is a purposeful activity of exchanging information and meaning, using various technical or natural means, whichever is available.
The first major model for communication was introduced by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver for Bell Laboratories in 1949. The original model was designed to mirror the functioning of radio and telephone technologies and makes sense to the average person. Their initial model consisted of three primary parts: sender, channel, and receiver. The sender was the part of a telephone a person spoke into, the channel was the telephone itself, and the receiver was the part of the phone where one could hear the other person. Shannon and Weaver also crucially recognised that often there is static that interferes with one listening to a telephone conversation, which they deemed as ‘noise’. This in my mind gives us the clear basis for learning and development take on ‘’communication skills’.
It gets more interesting however; looking at this back to front: Shannon and Weaver argued that there were three levels of problems for communication within this theory.
The technical problem: how accurately can the message be transmitted?
The semantic problem: how precisely is the meaning 'conveyed'?
The effectiveness problem: how effectively does the received meaning affect behaviour?
Daniel Chandler critiques the transmission model by stating:’ "It assumes communicators are isolated individuals. There are no allowances for differing purposes. No allowance for differing interpretations. No allowance for unequal power relations. No allowance for situational contexts.’’
In 1960, David Berlo expanded on Shannon and Weaver's (1949) linear model of communication and created the SMCR Model of Communication. The Sender-Message-Channel-Receiver Model of communication separated the model into clear parts and has been expanded upon by other and the models go on… Wilbur Schram (1954) also indicated that we should also examine the impact that a message has (both desired and undesired) on the target of the message. Between parties, communication includes acts that present knowledge and experiences, give advice and commands, and ask questions. Barnlund (2008) proposed a transactional model of communication.
The basic premise of the transactional model of communication is that individuals are simultaneously engaging in the sending and receiving of messages.
The sender's personal filters and the receiver's personal filters may vary depending upon different regional traditions, cultures, or gender; which may alter the intended meaning of message contents. In the presence of "communication noise" on the transmission channel, reception and decoding of content may be faulty, and thus the ‘speech act’ may not achieve the desired effect.