Communication Theories
Communication Theories:
In this blog entry I will mention some of communication theories.
Most communication theories are based on notions that can be traced thousand of years. At this time, communication was called rhetoric. Aristotle is most often associated with the development of rhetoric as an art. According to Aristotle, every speech has three components. These are the speaker (source), the massage, and the constituency. All of these components are interrelated so that communication process is never linear.
On of the newest and more modern communication theories were founded by Lasswell in 1948. Lasswell described his model where the message goes through a channel to the audience. This was basically an on way communication. The effect causes by the message could be delivering of information, entertainment or just persuasion.
After, Lasswell came up with his model, Shannon and Weaver followed with another theory of communications. This theory had basically two more steps than of Lasswell´s model. This theory considered communication through telephones. The message was injected by a transmitter. This transmitter than transported it to the final address. Furthermore, Shannon and Weaver also considered noise in their model, which wasn’t mention in the model of Lasswell.
After Ahnnon and Weaver developed their model, Schramm started to descrip another model in 1954. His first model had some small modification of Shannon and Weaver’s theory. He mentioned the encoding and decoding aspect of communication. Furthermore, Schramm added the senders´ and receivers´ background to the first model. This was Schramms second model. The individual background of the sender and the receiver influences the way they encode and decode the messages.
Schramms third model he mentioned the concept of feedback to the process of communication. His models and theories are still the basis for most of the communication theories. However, Schramms ideas and models were the reason why he is today seen as the “father of communication theories”.
The next communication theory was developed by Katz and Lazarfeld. They researched the effect of mass media related to a presidential election campaign. This model was a linear communication model. Their result was that the mass media has no significant effect on the decision making of the voters.
The last two models were the Westley- McLean and the Kincaid Convergence Model. The Westley- McLean model tries to explain how the opinion of the public is build. The founders said that occurring events are selected by advocates. These advocates than communicate their opinion to the public via mass media. Than, the public has the choice between several media channels to choose from and can select on of those which fits the best.
The last model is the Kincaids’s Convergence model. In this model communication is a process. The goal is that the discussion leads to a mutual understanding. This model is not a linear model, but it requires several circles of the communication flow. You can say that this model is all about a discussion in groups of people.
Examples:
I really like the feedback component in some of the theories. I think it is very important to get feedback in some situation. Especially, in situation where feedback is very important or essential for further decisions. These situations could be work or school situations. I would say that without any feedback by work, nobody could do his or her job well. You have to know what other thinks about that, and based on this you can make corrections to adjust your solutions to the problem.
I also think that the variety of different communication channels and different mass media channels are very important in today business world. You can choose from several different channels and you get different points of view. This can help to see some situations different and more multifunctional.
Links:
http://stevefournier01.tripod.com/hist/hist-2.html
http://www.nwlink.com/~Donclark/leader/leadcom.html
http://humanresources.about.com/cs/communication/ht/Feedbackimpact.htm
