Models of communication

Professor Cowell:           

Okay everybody. In this lecture we’ll be looking at the models of communication. Now a model, of course, is a visual representation of something; sometimes a visual representation of an abstract process – like in this case.

And models can help us do a couple of things: one – especially if you’re a visual learner, it might help you to understand something by putting a picture to it. We can talk on and on and on about the way that communication works, but if we show you a picture, that might click into our brains a little bit better than just a lecture without a picture might.  The other thing that we can do is we can use the model to analyze, to assess our own communication experiences.

‘So as we go through these models, one thing that you can do with them is think about a conversation or a speech – some kind of communication event that you were a part of and start plugging in real life details of that event into the model. Especially with the third model that we’ll look at, the Competent Communication Model. Now you may discover that using that model is going to help you to think of some things that were having an impact on your conversation or that shaped the conversation in ways, that at the time, you didn’t understand – but the model will help to show you all those different factors and how they impacted the way that overall event went.

Today we’ll be looking at three models of communication and we’ll look at them in chronological order from the oldest one to the most recent one. There are many more models than these, but these are the three basic ones. The three that you really need to be familiar with and of course the three that are covered in our text book and most of this will be straight out of Real Communication: An Introduction which is written by Dan O’Hair and Mary Wiemann, although when we get to noise and how noise is treated in the models, I’ll go a little more in depth than they do for certain key details.

So the first model is what we call the Linear Model of Communication. We call it the linear model because it moves in a line. You might think of this model as being similar to shooting an arrow into a target; that the sender has the arrow – which is the message, releases the message and hopefully it hits the target and has the impact that the sender desired. Here’s what the linear model looks like: You have a sender who is encoding the message, the receiver who is decoding the message, and along the way at any step in the process you have the possibility of noise.

Let’s look at the sender first. When we say that the sender is encoding the message, really all we mean by that is that the sender takes the thoughts that are in his or her head and puts them into symbols – typically the symbols are words – either written or spoken words, and so he or she chooses what words best fit that idea that is in their brain. So we take our ideas and we intentionally out them into symbols, into words. This happens so quickly and so automatically for those of us who have mastered a language that you don’t really think about the fact that you’re encoding a message unless maybe you’re working in a language that you’re not completely familiar with yet, and then you really notice and struggle with that process – what are the right words, what are the best words that I know to put my thought into?

So when we say encoding, this isn’t a James Bond or a spy movie type of encoding where the idea is to keep other people from understanding, all we mean is that we’re choosing words. And when we say ‘code’ what we really mean is that set of symbols that at least two people understand; so one can encode it and the other can decode it. Things like the English language, the Spanish language, American Sign Language. Maybe even things like smoke signals or the hobo codes that hobos used to scratch near train depots back in the 20’s. If it’s a symbol, a word, or a picture that another person understands, then you have a code.

So the sender encodes his or her message, puts it into words, and it’s received by the receiver who hears it or who picks up the page and reads it. And the receiver decodes the message; takes the symbols and puts them back into a thought just now inside the receiver’s brain.

The message is sent, as we said, via a CODE through a CHANNEL – and the channel is basically any pathway that the code takes to go from the sender to the receiver; so in the case of anybody listening to this, the code is the internet. Internet videos. YouTube – that’s the channel. If you were in a classroom face to face, the just spoken words, the airwaves that carry the words could be the channel. Other channels are things like text messages, email, Facebook status updates, books, magazines, satellite radio, TV signals – anything capable of carrying the symbols, the words, from one person to another is a channel.

And at each step in the process you have the possibility of noise. Noise is anything that interferes with the message being properly understood and encoded. You can have noise where the sender is, you can have noise along the channel – something like a static-y cell phone line, dropped calls. Or you can have noise where the receiver is, and there are two different kinds of noise: There’s external noise and there’s internal noise.

External noise is simple. External noise is what almost all of us are thinking of when we say the word ‘noise’ in our day to day conversations. A loud drum beat, your neighbor’s teenaged son practicing his trombone, a low jet flying overhead. Anything that makes it difficult to hear what the other person is saying counts as external noise; its noise outside of you that you actually physically hear with your ears.

But then there’s also internal noise and internal noise is all those things that are happening within a person that might make it difficult for that person to completely hear, to concentrate on, to completely understand the message that’s being sent. Think about a time that you were in the lecture hall or a college classroom and there’s an instructor in front of you who’s teaching, maybe doing a pretty good job but for whatever reason on this particular day you’re having a hard time understanding what he’s saying. There’s no other loud noises in the room distracting you, you can hear the words completely fine, but it’s just not sinking in. What are some of those things – those internal noises that would keep those messages from being decoded by you, the listener?

Well in general there are three categories of internal noises that keep those messages from completely penetrating. The first is physiological. Physiological noises have to do with your body; things happening inside, or within your body itself that are distracting to you. The big three are hunger, fatigue, and discomfort. You have a class that runs from 11:00 to 12:15, a lunch time class and you didn’t get a very big breakfast that morning and by 11:30 you are so hungry and your stomach is growling and you’re thinking about how quickly can I get out of here to grab some tacos for lunch and just the thought of tacos has overwhelmed you to the point that it’s hard to concentrate on geometry. That’s physiological noise. If you’re so tired that you’re falling asleep, if you’re uncomfortable, if you have a headache or a toothache, or even just that annoying tag on the back of your shirt collar that’s keeping you from being able to concentrate – alright, all of those are physiological noises.

There’s also psychological noise. Psychological noises are distracting thoughts – whether they’re good thoughts or bad thought, if it’s keeping you from being able to concentrate – you made the mistake of opening up your credit card bill this morning before you went to class and all you can think is “Oh wow, how am I ever going to pay this off? That ski trip is going to be something that stays with me until I’m 75 at this rate.” Or your fiancé finally popped the question last night and you are so busy thinking about your wedding and planning for that and so excited to have that coming up in your life that school just seems a little too boring to focus on this particular day. Psychological noise: distracting thoughts, whether they’re good or they’re bad. Daydreaming could be psychological noise.

The last one is semantic noise. Semantic is a little bit different; whenever you see the word semantic it has to do with meanings of words. Semantic noise is basically when your understanding of a word – when the meaning that you assign to it doesn’t completely match what the sender intended. So, where I grew up, we were on my grandfather’s land and he had some cattle and way back in the fields that my grandfather owned, he had what I grew up calling a tank. And a tank, the way I understand it, is just a small pond that cattle use to drink from and it’s there for them; nothing fancy and I grew up playing in and around the tank; making toy boats and floating them across. But when I talk to a friend of mine who was raised in the city and said I had such a great time when I was a kid, going out and playing in my grandfather’s tank, he had a completely different understanding of what I meant by that. He was an army brat and he was trying to figure out how in the world I had managed to grow up with a grandfather who had acquired a piece of huge military artillery, alright? When I said tank I’m thinking pond. When he hears tank he’s thinking equipment for war. Semantic noise. He understood me perfectly; he was completely comfortable and there were no distracting thought, but the message still didn’t get through just because out meanings didn’t quite match up and it wasn’t for a few minutes later that we understood we were using the same word in completely different ways. Sometimes you’ll be in an argument or you’ll hear two people arguing and one of them will say “this is all just semantics”, and that’s what they mean. I think we really agree but we’re arguing about the way we’re using the words. It’s a semantic argument.

Those are the tree types of internal noise, and again, external noise are actual sounds that you hear that distract you from the message. So, that is the Linear Model. Short and sweet; the sender has a thought, encodes it into words, sends it through a channel to a receiver who decodes it, and at any step along the way there’s the chance that some kind of noise is going to interfere with properly understanding that message that’s been sent.

The second model that we’ll look at is the Interaction Model – called the Interaction Model because you might have already noticed, there’s one huge thing missing from the Linear model which is when does the receiver speak? Does she have anything to say? Is there a return message? Is there a conversation happening here? For most of our communication there is feedback – somebody replies to your blog post, replies to your email, says something back to you in conversation. Very seldom is the linear model adequate to cover communication the way we experience it and the interaction model fixes that.

In the interaction Model everything is basically the same except now we have an arrow going back from the receiver to the sender and this is feedback; this is the return message. If the Linear Model can be compared to shooting an arrow, the interaction model is more like playing tennis – I lob the ball to you, you send it back to me. Or maybe it’s like playing catch: back and forth, back and forth. Everything else is the same in this model except we’ve changed the labels just a little bit. The sender is now also a receiver since he or she will take a turn hearing or receiving the message, and of course, the receiver is now also a sender. If you understand the Linear Model, you understand the Interaction model; it’s just the same except now the conversation is going two ways and, of course, at every step you still have the possibility of noise interfering with understanding.