Communication process and models

Journalism and Mass Communication · Communication theory. The idea in plain words, the rules to remember, the mistake to avoid and a worked example, written and checked by Mega Lecture.

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The idea

Communication is the sharing of meaning between people through symbols. A sender forms an idea and encodes it into a message. The message travels through a channel to a receiver, who decodes it. The receiver's reply is feedback, and anything that distorts the message on the way is noise.

Scholars drew models to show this process. The early models (Lasswell, Shannon and Weaver) are linear: the message moves one way. Later models (Schramm, Osgood and Schramm) are circular: both sides send and receive. Berlo's model lists the factors inside each element.

In mass communication the audience is large, scattered and mostly unknown to the sender, so feedback is delayed and indirect.

Rules to remember

Elements: sender (source), message, channel, receiver, feedback, noise. Encoding is done by the sender, decoding by the receiver.
Noise can be physical (static, a bad line) or semantic (words the receiver does not understand).
Lasswell (1948): Who says what, in which channel, to whom, with what effect? These give control, content, media, audience and effects analysis.
Shannon and Weaver (1949): source, transmitter, channel, receiver, destination, with a noise source. It came from telephone engineering and is criticised as one-way.
Schramm (1954): people communicate only where their fields of experience overlap.
Osgood and Schramm: a circular model in which each party is encoder, interpreter and decoder.
Berlo (1960): SMCR, that is Source, Message, Channel, Receiver. Skills, attitudes, knowledge, social system and culture affect both source and receiver.

Common mistake

Students mix up the models. Link each name to one phrase: Lasswell is the five questions, Shannon and Weaver is noise, Schramm is the field of experience, Berlo is SMCR.

Worked example

A researcher counts how many front-page stories in three dailies deal with crime. Which part of Lasswell's formula is being studied?

Lasswell's five questions are: who, says what, in which channel, to whom, with what effect.
Counting the subjects of stories looks at the message itself, so it answers 'says what'.
The study of 'says what' is called content analysis. 'Who' would be control analysis and 'to whom' audience analysis.

Answer: Content analysis (the 'says what' part of the formula).

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