Shannon & Weaver Model

The movement of information was once seen as the transport of goods or people, them came about the desire to increase the speed and effect of messages. The theory that messages could travel through space seemed ideal. Shannon & Weaver perfected this idea with a model of human communciation. As Gage notes people needed to learn how to become more effective communicators on both the sending and receiving side.

Writing always had to be transported to the reader, so in written communication the transport of letters, books and newspapers supported the thought of the transport of meaning from writer to reader. The engineers working for Bell Telephone Labs, reduced communication to a process of 'transmitting information' it identified various parts of the process. As Imbar, I too wonder how is it possible to put a mathematical equation to the English language. The transmission model clearly fixes and separates the roles of 'sender' and 'receiver'. But communication between two people involves simultaneous 'sending' and 'receiving' (not only talking, but also body language and so on). The communication model is set up as a linear, one-way model, ascribing a secondary role to the 'receiver', who is seen as absorbing information. But communication is not a one-way street. Although, the important point here is that, meaning-making is not central in transmission models.

It is widely assumed that meaning is contained in the 'message' rather than in its interpretation. But there is no single, fixed meaning in any message. In this model, even the nature of the content almost seems irrelevant. Transmission models of communication reduce human communication to the transmission of messages, whereas, a linguists say, that there is more to communication than this. People who study language, believe in phatic communication, which is a way of maintaining relationships. Some will also argue the chain model implies a commonsense understanding of communication in general, but also for specific forms of communication such as speaking and listening, writing and reading, watching television and so on. In education, it represents a similar model of teaching and learning. It reflects the notion that meanings exist and are awaiting to be decoded by the receiver. This may sound true, but it still has a mechanical quality about it that reminds me if an instruction manual diagram, that teaches me what part goes where. In all these contexts, such a model underestimates the creativity of the act of interpretation.

However, you will find no single, widely-accepted constructivist model of communication in a form like that of Shannon and Weaver's block and arrow diagram. This is partly because those who approach communication from the constructivist perspective often attempt to produce a formal model of communication. The message here is that, it is up to ones interpretation whether Shannon and Weaver's model has a much wider application to human communication than a purely technical one.