ABSTRACT
Clearly a useful place to engage in a discussion about the character of communication is with communication models, those packed arrangements of theoretical description. From the moment we meet the model devised by the sociologist Harold Lasswell (usually referred to as the Lasswell Formula) we are engaged in two levels of response. Most straightforwardly we are testing the usefulness (‘the something we can use’ that Peter Barry charged us with finding in Extract 1) of the simplified description in graphic form (model) when applied to a piece of reality (real life communication situations). However we are also exercising, exploring and sometimes challenging, the perspective on communication that the specific model offers, in other words what the model has to add to the discussion ‘what is communication?’
