Lecture 12 Communication Theory
7th March 2012
Lasswell's maxim: "Who says what to whom in what channel with what effect".
Communication Theory is a new concept which was introduced in the 1940's. The First World War is a good example of failure of communication. There are two very different types of communication theory: Transmission and Constitutive.
- The Information or Cybernetic theory of communication, Shannon and Weaver Bell Laboratories (1949).
- Systems theory, links other theories together. Advantage is that you can switch between frames of reference. The Phenomenological tradition, the process of knowing through direct experience. The process of interpretation is central. Communication seen as an extension of the nervous system.
A simple communication model with a sender which transfers a message containing information to a receiver.
Three levels of potential communication problems
Technical - accuracy/compatibility. Systems of encoding and decodingCompatibility of systems/need for specialist equipment or knowledge
Semantic - precision of language, How much of the message can be lost without meaning being lost? What language to use?
Effectiveness - does the message effect behaviour.Does the message affect behaviour the way we want it to?What can be done if the required effect fails to happen? There is a little test often carried out with typography, where by you hide either the bottom half of the text or the top half of a line of text and try to read what it is saying. The top half is usually much easier to read, and this is all to do with how we communicate with one another.
Audiences and Social Class
- National Readership Survey
- Upper Middle Class
- Middle Class
- Skilled Working Class
- Working Class
- Subsidence
- 2001
- Managerial/Professional
- Intermediate occupation
- Small employers
- Lower supervisory and technical
- Semi routine and routine
- Never worked
Semiotics
- Syntactics - the relationships among signs. Part of a larger system referred to as codes.
- Semantics - addresses what a sign stands for.
- Pragmatics - studies the practical use and effects of signs.
According to Wikipedia
Communication is deeply rooted in human behaviors and societies. It is difficult to think of social or behavioral events from which communication is absent. Indeed, communication applies to shared behaviors and properties of any collection of things, whether they are human or not.
Communication is deeply rooted in human behaviors and societies. It is difficult to think of social or behavioral events from which communication is absent. Indeed, communication applies to shared behaviors and properties of any collection of things, whether they are human or not.
Theoris and Models Many suggest that there is no such thing as a successful body of communication theory, but that we have been relatively more successful in generating models of communication. A model, according to a seminal 1952 article by Karl Deutsch ("On Communication Models in the Social Sciences"), is "a structure of symbols and operating rules which is supposed to match a set of relevant points in an existing structure or process." In other words, it is a simplified representation or template of a process that can be used to help understand the nature of communication in a social setting
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