What is communication?

This book investigates the who, where, and how of communication, but it’s important to also start with the what.

Answering a question like “what is communication?” is much like trying to see and study the air we breathe or the sounds we hear – it’s difficult to define something in which we are embedded or entangled, something that surrounds us so completely. Nevertheless, people have been asking this question – what is communication? – for centuries.

One of the interesting things about our position as communication scholars in the early 21st century is that we can benefit from the deep thinking of researchers who have come before us, although an equally interesting challenge confronts us: how do we adapt this past thinking to suit a world that has changed rapidly and will continue to evolve at breakneck speed?

The transmission model

One of the most enduring models of communication comes from a paper published in 1948 by Claude Shannon. Shannon was an American mathematician and a leading thinker in the field of information theory. He is credited with the first use of the word “bit” (as in binary digit: information stored as a combination of ones and zeroes).

Shannon was also, according to his biography in Encyclopedia Britannica – and the documentary film about his life, The Bit Player – an eccentric man whose interests included juggling while unicycle riding. We can detect some of this playfulness in the nature of his inquiry into communication, which is questioning, persistent, and takes nothing for granted. The very act of wanting to determine how communication works indicates a mind that was not satisfied with existing explanations and that, indeed, saw the very existence of widely held explanations as a provocation to crack things open and bring new knowledge to light.

It’s worth taking a moment to imagine what it would have been like to study communication in the 1930s and 1940s, as the world was first plunged into and then emerged from the largest and most devastating global conflict it had yet seen. Consider the mechanisms and technologies of communication that dominated at the time. Individuals and households relied upon newspapers, radio, and the telephone to stay informed and connected. Radio communication was of crucial importance during the war, but radio signals could be easily intercepted – cryptography consequently became important. It is likely for this reason that early models of communication were particularly concerned with efficacy: getting the message to the right person in the right way.

Given Shannon’s background in mathematics, it is perhaps unsurprising that the paper in which he published his model was called “A mathematical theory of communication” (later elaborated on by Shannon and co-author Warren Weaver in a 1949 book of the same name). With mathematical precision, Shannon broke the process of communication down into the following components: sender (or “source”), message, receiver, and destination. He was particularly interested in the impact of noise: anything that disrupts the signal or confuses the message.

You may well have seen a diagram of his model before – it looks like this:

Image by User:Phlsph7, CC0, from Wikimedia Commons

Looking at this visual representation of Shannon’s model, we can see that communication is being depicted here as a flow of information. Using a radio metaphor, this communicational flow was described by Shannon as a “transmission”, and his model became known as the transmission model of communication.

Is the transmission model still relevant?

Shannon’s paper was itself an extraordinary act of communication: he explained his model in such an influential way that we still use it widely today.

Of course, there has been an acceleration of the production and flow of information that Shannon could not have anticipated. Communication happens at speed in today’s digital world.

This alone should not lead us to discount Shannon’s model; indeed, it makes the model more useful. If we stop and examine these rapid flows of information using a model, we can better see what’s going on behind and around them (and because of them).

But let’s consider some of the complexities of our current (and ever-changing) communication and media landscape that aren’t captured by Shannon’s model.

Much of the criticism of Shannon’s model in the decades since its publication stems from the lack of emphasis placed on the receivers and what they “do” with the messages they encounter. The model depicts communication from the sender’s perspective and is focused on how to achieve the sender’s goal: to reach the receiver in an accurate and error-free way. Later decades of communication research have explored the audience’s practices and motivations in a way that isn’t captured by Shannon’s model – we’ll explore some of this research in Chapter 3.

For now, consider this scenario: you’re playing a video game. Perhaps you’re playing on your phone; perhaps not. Perhaps you’re using your phone to watch a walkthrough video helping you improve your skill in the game while you play on another device. In these situations, can you locate yourself in Shannon’s model? Are you a “receiver” of a “message”?

In his book Cybertext, written in 1997, video game researcher Espen Aarseth asks us to think about this exact scenario, albeit with a more retro example. “When I fire a laser gun in a computer game such as Space Invaders,” he asks, “where, and what, am ‘I’?  Am I the sender or the receiver?  I am certainly part of the medium, so perhaps I am the message” (Aarseth 1997: 162).

Now imagine you post an image of yourself on social media. Can you locate yourself in Shannon’s model now? As with Aarseth’s example, you are the sender, but you are also part of the message, and if somebody responds to your post, you immediately become the receiver. You are, perhaps, all of these things at once – or none of them.

In this way, the simplicity of the transmission model makes it problematic because it neglects aspects of the communication process that are very important today, and it makes assumptions about the sender/receiver relationship that do not fully capture the nuances of our communication practices in a digital world.