Page 101 - Effective Communication Soft Skills Strategies For Success by Nitin Bhatnagar, Mamta Bhatnagar

Project Name: Manual for Soft Skills
ACE Pro India Pvt. Ltd.
\\mtpdy01\Womat\Indesign\Bhatnagar-Manual for Soft skills\06-Pagination\06-A-Finals\06-AA-Appl\Bhatnagar_Chapter 05.indd

Models of Communication | 89

Lasswell’s view of communication, as had Aristotle’s some two thousand
years earlier, focused primarily on verbal messages. It also emphasized the
elements of speaker, messages, and audience, but used different terms. Both
men viewed communication as a one-way process in which one individual
influenced others through messages. Lasswell offered a broadened defini-
tion of channel to include mass-media along with verbal speech as a part
of the communication process. His approach also provided a more general-
ized view of the goal or effect of communication than did the Aristotelian
perspective.

shannon and Weaver (1949)
The pre-conception of communication was heavily influenced by the
engineering model of Shannon and Weaver (1949). Communication was
conceived as a linear act of transmission of a message from a source to a
receiver via a signal producing transmitter. A component called ‘noise’
acknowledged the presence of context in the electrical engineering
model.

Message Signal Received Signal Message

Information Transmitter Channel Receiver Destination
Source

Noise Source
Figure 5.6

Shannon and Weaver’s mathematical theory of communication (1949)
is widely accepted as one of the main seeds out of which communication
studies, has grown. It is a clear example of the process school, seeing com-
munication as the transmissions of messages. The work developed during the
Second World War in the Bell telephone laboratories in the US and their main
concern was to work out ways in which channels of communication could be
used most efficiently. For them the main channels were the telephone, cable
and the radio wave. They produced a theory that enabled them to approach
the problem of how to send a maximum amount of information along a
given channel to carry information. This concentration on the channel and
its capacity is appropriate pertaining to their engineering and mathematical
background, but they claim that their theory is widely applicable over the
whole question of human communication.

Bhatnagar_Chapter 05.indd 89 2011-06-23 7:56:06 PM
Modified Date: Thu, Jun 23, 2011 06:22:39 PM Output Date: Thu, Jun 23, 2011 07:56:03 PM
TEMPLATE Page Number: PB