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Models of Communication | 91

current it carries and the transmitter and the receiver are the telephone
handsets. In conversation the mouth is the transmitter, the signal is the
sound wave, and which pass through the channel of the air, and ear is the
receiver (John Fiske 1982).
This model was given its definitive formulation in 1949 by Claude
Shannon and Warren Weaver. As the diagram above indicates, this communi-
cation model comprises four elements. A source of information with a greater
or lesser number of messages to communicate; a transmitter or sender with the
capacity to transform a message into a signal; a receiver which decodes
the signal in order to retrieve the initial message, and finally, the destina-
tion, a person or thing for whom the message in intended. Communication,
according to this model, follows a simple left to right process. The information
source (say speaker), selects a desired message from all the possible messages.
The message is sent through a transmitter (microphone) and is changed into
signals. The signals are received by a receiver (say earphone), changed back
into a message and given to the destination or a listener. In the process of
transmission certain distortions are added to the signal which is not part
of the message and these will be called noise.
The basis of all contemporary Western theories of communication—
Shannon-Weaver model stresses the idea of inside and outside and assumes
that communication is a lineal matching rather than making. The source of
information changes the message into the signal which is actually sent over
the communication channel from the transmitter to the receiver. In the case
of telephony the channel is a wire, the signal a varying electrical current on
this wire, the transmitter in the set of devices (telephone transmitter, etc.),
which change the sound pressure of the voice into the varying electric current.
In oral speech, the information source is brain; the transmitter is the voice
mechanism producing the varying sound pressure (the signal) which is
transmitted through the air (the channel). In radio the channel is simply
space, and the signal is the electromagnetic wave, which is transmitted. The
receiver is a sort of inverse transmitter, changing the transmitted signal back
into a message and handing this message on to the destination.
During the process of transmission certain things are added to the signal,
which were not intended by the sender. These additions are distortion of
sounds as in telephone, or static in radios, or errors in transmission in teleg-
raphy or facsimile etc. Such changes in transmission signals are called noise.

comments on shannon and Weaver’s Model by Brent

Bell Telephone Laboratories conducted the research to study the engineering
problems of signal transmission. In their book Mathematical Theory of
Communication Shannon and Weaver described the nature of communica-
tion process—‘communication will be used here in a very broad sense to

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