Shannon–Weaver model

The Shannon–Weaver model is one of the earliest models of communication. It was initially published by Claude Shannon in his 1948 paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication". It aims to provide a formal representation of the basic elements and relations involved in the process of communication. The model consists of five basic components: a source, a transmitter, a channel, a receiver, and a destination. For a regular face-to-face conversation, the person talking is the source, the mouth is the transmitter, the air is the channel transmitting the sound waves, the listener is the destination, and the ear is the receiver. In the case of a landline phone call, the source is the person calling, the transmitter is their telephone, the channel is the wire, the receiver is another telephone and the destination is the person using the second telephone. To apply this model accurately to real-life cases, some of the components may have to be repeated. For the telephone call, for example, the mouth is also a transmitter before the telephone itself as a second transmitter. == Problems of communication ==

Shannon and Weaver identify and address problems in the study of communication at three basic levels: technical, semantic, and effectiveness problems (referred to as levels A, B, and C). Shannon and Weaver hold that models of communication should provide good responses to all three problems, ideally by showing how to make communication more accurate and efficient. The prime focus of their model is the technical level, which concerns the issue of how to accurately reproduce a message from one location to another location. For this problem, it is not relevant what meaning the message carries. By contrast, it is only relevant that the message can be distinguished from different possible messages that could have been sent instead of it. Semantic problems go beyond the symbols themselves and ask how they convey meaning. Shannon and Weaver assumed that the meaning is already contained in the message but many subsequent communication theorists have further problematized this point by including the influence of cultural factors and the context in their models. The effectiveness problem is based on the idea that the person sending the message has some goal in mind concerning how the person receiving the message is going to react. In this regard, effectivity means that the reaction matches the speaker's goal.The problem of effectivity concerns the question of how to achieve this. Many critics have rejected this aspect of Shannon and Weaver's theory since it seems to equate communication with manipulation or propaganda. Noise and redundancy To solve the technical problem at level A, it is necessary for the receiver to reconstruct the original message from the signal. However, various forms of noise can interfere and distort it. Noise is not intended by the source and makes it harder for the receiver to reconstruct the source's intention found in the original message. Crackling sounds during a telephone call or snow on a television screen are examples of noise. One way to solve this problem is to make the information in the message partially redundant. This way, distortions can often be identified and the original meaning can be reconstructed. A very basic form of redundancy is to repeat the same message several times. But redundancy can take various other forms as well. For example, the English language is redundant in the sense that many possible combinations of letters are meaningless. So the term "comming" does not have a distinct meaning. For this reason, it can be identified as a misspelling of the term "coming", thus revealing the source's original intention. Redundancy makes it easier to detect distortions but its drawback is that messages carry less information. == Influence and criticism ==

The Shannon–Weaver model of communication has been influential, inspiring subsequent work in the field of communication studies. It has been widely adopted in various other fields, including information theory, organizational analysis, and psychology. Many later theorists expanded this model by including additional elements in order to take into account other aspects of communication. For example, Wilbur Schramm includes a feedback loop to understand communication as an interactive process and George Gerbner emphasizes the relation between communication and the reality to which the communication refers. Some of these models, like Gerbner's, are equally universal in that they apply to any form of communication. Others apply to more specific areas. For example, Lasswell's model and Westley and MacLean's model are specifically formulated for mass media. Shannon's concepts were also popularized in John Robinson Pierce's Symbols, Signals, and Noise, which introduces the topic to non-specialists. Many criticisms of the Shannon–Weaver model focus on its simplicity by pointing out that it leaves out vital aspects of communication. In this regard, it has been characterized as "inappropriate for analyzing social processes" and as a "misleading misrepresentation of the nature of human communication". A common objection is based on the fact that it is a linear transmission model: it conceptualizes communication as a one-way process going from a source to a destination. Against this approach, it is argued that communication is usually more interactive with messages and feedback going back and forth between the participants. This approach is implemented by non-linear transmission models, also termed interaction models. They include Wilbur Schramm's model, Frank Dance's helical-spiral model, a circular model developed by Lee Thayer, and the "sawtooth" model due to Paul Watzlawick, Janet Beavin, and Don Jackson. These approaches emphasize the dynamic nature of communication by showing how the process evolves as a multi-directional exchange of messages. == References ==