Week 2 Lecture Response: Communication and its models

In week two, we defined communication and identified some of the basic models.  According to professor Stockwell, “Communication is any process that transfers, transmits or makes information known to other people.”  Approximately two and a half thousand years ago, Aristotle defined communication in terms of the speaker producing a message that is heard by the listener.  Here, Aristotle implies that communication is simplistic, face to face, and has a common background. 

It is no surprise, however, that today’s society has adopted more complicated sources of communication, which calls for a more complex model to explain such transfers and transmissions.  The Shannon and Weaver model of communication explains such a notion in its entirety.  This model embodies the concepts of information source, message, transmitter, signal, channel, noise, receiver, information destination, probability of error, encoding, decoding, information rate and channel capacity.  It suggests that, “The speaker produces an effect on the transmitter which sends a message (which is degraded by the noise of the transmission process) that is intercepted by the receiver which converts it into an effect that is heard by the listener.”

This model does not allow for the difference in codes through the use of metaphors, so instead, the Shannon and Weaver model proposes two other aspects of the communication process: intersubjectivity and intertextuality.  Intersubjectivity is when the listener interprets the message and changes it as they send it along.  Here, communication is between people and they always want to argue about things, interpreting them in the light of their own experience.  Meanwhile, the active audience produces feedback.  With intertextuality, no message is ever complete.  Moreover, any message gains its meaning from all the other messages that person has previously received and sent.

As each decade passes, new communication technologies are becoming more and more interactive, which only emphasizes this ongoing problem of interpretation.  This makes me wonder: In the next couple of decades, will it be time to formulate a new and improved model of communication due to the increased complexity of the way we communicate?    

"Shannon and Weaver Model of Communication."Communication Theory. N.p., n.d. Web. 6 Aug 2012. <http://communicationtheory.org/shannon-and-weaver-model-of-communication/>.