ABSTRACT
Despite communication being at least as old as the human race formal theorisations about communication as such are a relatively recent (twentieth-century) phenomenon. Working for Bell Laboratories in the 1940s Claude Shannon was attempting to solve technical problems in telecommunications. Rather than approaching these problems technologically he chose to approach them theoretically. He did this by devising what was essentially a problem-solving model. Shannon first published a technical paper on his mathematical theory of communication (as he entitled it) in 1948 and, together with Warren Weaver, published an expanded version of this theory in book form in 1949. Fundamental to A Mathematical Theory of Communication was Shannon’s coining of the term ‘bit’, the essential unit of information which represents a clear cut digital differentiation: yes or no; on or off. (He created the term bit by contracting the two words ‘binary’ and ‘digit’.) Laying out the foundations for what became Information Theory Shannon identified the channel of communication and proposed that it could have its bit value calculated. In this way Shannon’s elegant theory led to real material practice, without which we would lack compact discs, web pages, and digital radio and television. The mathematical dimensions of Shannon and Weaver’s theory were largely ignored by early communication theorists in favour of the adoption of a general diagrammatic model of the process of communication. Here McQuail and Windahl offer a succinct introduction to this fundamental building block of the process school of communication.
Johnson and Klare (1961) say in their review of communication models:
Of all single contributions to the widespread interest in models today, Shannon’s is the most important. For the technical side of communication research, Shannon’s mathematical formulations were the stimulus to much of the later effort in this area.
We will not discuss here the mathematical aspects of Shannon’s work. Let us just note that he worked for the Bell Telephone Laboratory and that his theories and models primarily applied to its particular field of communication, involving questions such as: Which kind of communication channel can bring through the maximum amount of signals? How much of a transmitted signal will be destroyed by noise while travelling from transmitter to receiver?
These are questions mostly dealt with within the field of information theory. Nevertheless the graphical model, made by Shannon and his co-worker Warren Weaver (1949) has been used analogically by behavioural and linguistic scientists. Technological problems differ of course from human ones, but it is easy to find the traces of the Shannon–Weaver model in a number of later models of human communication.
Communication is here described as a linear, one-way process. The model states five functions to be performed and notes one dysfunctional factor, noise. Graphically, it may be presented as Shannon and Weaver’s ‘mathematical model’ describes communication as a linear, one-way process (Shannon and Weaver 1949). https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315015675/226b3f40-5b37-44b5-af78-bdb6d3feb3fe/content/fig11_1_B.tif" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
First in the process is the information source, producing a message or a chain of messages to be communicated. In the next step, the message is formed into signals by a transmitter. The signals should be adapted to the channel leading to the receiver. The function of the receiver is the opposite of that of the transmitter. The receiver constructs the message from the signal. The received message then reaches the destination. The signal is vulnerable in so far as it may be disturbed by noise, interference which may occur, for example, when there are many signals in the same channel at the same time. This may result in a difference between transmitted and received signal, which, in its turn, may mean that the message produced by the source and then reconstructed by the receiver and having reached the destination do not have the same meaning. The inability on the part of communicators to realize that a sent and a received message are not always identical, is a common reason why communication fails.
(McQuail and Windahl 1993: 16–17)