Shared understanding - shared knowledge
The Origin
We begin by looking more closely at a model that is widely recognized as one of the most important seeds from which communication theory has sprung. It is a clear example of the process school insofar as communication is seen as the transmission of messages; Shannon and Weaver's "Mathematical Theory of Communication". The model was developed already during the Second World War at Bell Telephone Laboratories in the USA and the model was intended to develop a way of using the communication channels in the most efficient way possible. To them, these channels consisted of telephone cables and radio waves. They presented a theory that enabled them to tackle the problems of sending a maximum amount of information through a given channel and to measure the capacity of each channel to transmit information. Shannon and Weaver's basic communication model presents communication as a simple, linear process. Later in the material, we show several variants based on this model.
Shannon och Weavers ”Mathematical Theory and Communication”
It is the simplicity of this process that has attracted most followers, and its linear, process-related nature has attracted many critics.
Explanation of the included concept of the communication model
The source of information is seen as the decision maker, the one who decides which message to send, or rather selects one of a set of possible messages. The selected message is then converted by the transmitter into a signal transmitted through the channel to the receiver. For a telephone, the channel is a wire, the signal an electric current in it, and the transmitter and receiver are the telephones themselves (fixed or mobile, there is no difference). During a call, my mouth is the transmitter, the signal consists of the sound waves that pass through the air channel (in a vacuum we cannot talk) and your ear is the receiver.
Additional communication models
A variant of the above model is the following, which I have used in some of my own studies of communication contexts in marketing. I have also used it in analyzes of communication between users and software / Internet solutions, where it has been important to be able to analyze the communication object's original design and content in the message and how it has finally been interpreted by the recipient groups. Here the communicator selects a specific message which he transmits in a specific channel. The communicator then checks if the purpose was achieved, and if not, starts the process again, whenever possible. In this way, this model can be used well when it comes to creating different types of review processes, which is important when it comes to information exchange in communication, such as in the development of the company's or a campaign's website.
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