Shannon and Weaver’s Model of Communication

Shannon and Weaver’s Model of Communication

This model was propagated by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver while on their work at Bell Telephone Laboratories. This model is considered to be one of the earliest influential models in the field of communication and was developed in 1949. It is also called Shannon and Weaver's Mathematical Model or 'Mathematical Theory of Communication whose findings were published by the Illinois Press' (Watson, 1998).

Shannon and Weaver were actually were studying communication that occurred via a telephone. Their aim was to decipher how much of Noise or interference could be tolerated on a telephone line that could lead to the disruption in the communication of the message via the Telephone. In the Model by Shannon and Weaver, The transmitter and the the Receiver are the telephone and teh Telephone lines ( Watson, 1998)

It is said that Claude Shannon was working out on an effective way to transmit electric signals. Gradually, Shannon also introduced a mechanism in the receiver which corrected the differences between the transmitted and the reception signals- It is this mechanism which introduced a corrective technique which gradually led to the concept of feed-back in the long run.

However, the model introduced by Shannon and Weaver is linear in nature. There is a sender, a channel and a receiver. There was no element of feedback entailed, hence it is called linear. Shannon and Weaver also found that ‘static’ interferes while a telephonic conversation occurs. This was gradually developed into the concept of ‘noise’ in communication.

So, Shannon and Weaver Model could be defined as:

• A linear model
• It is a one- way communication. (uni-directional)
• It has a transmitter for encoding and decoding signals send by the sender to the receiver.
• There is static that could interfere during the telephonic conversation called 'Noise'.

Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s Model thus included the following elements

•   A source of information which produced a message (sender)
•  A transmitter which encoded the message into signals for transmission.
•  A channel through which the signals were to be transmitted
•  A receiver that decoded the message from the signals that were transmitted.
•  A destination where the message arrived after the decoding.

Problems with the Mathematical model of Claude Shannon and Warren Weave

•  Being a linear model, there is no feedback. It was the initial stages of a communication model.
• The concept of noise gives rise to the notion of a disturbance in the message. Hence, there is no means to find out if the reception of the message was successful.
•  As there is no feedback, the clarity and the understanding of the decoded message was questionable.
• Situational or contextual noise at that point of time was not taken into concern.
•  It is not known as to how effective the received meaning was and if it lead to an affect in behaviour or action of the recipient.
• The model is only referred today as part of Historical data in one's research on Communication and as stated by Watson (1998) to to highlight all that was lacking.
  

 

Reference:

James Watson, 1998, Media Communication: An Introduction to Theory and Process, Macmillan Education