Communication Models

Think about all the different ways you communicate each day. You text your best friend, saying you’re finished with work and are ready to be picked up. You present awards at your soccer team’s end-of-season banquet, acting more animated when you see people’s attention start to wander. You spend the evening with your brother, reliving and retelling stories from your childhood.

But how does the communication process differ in each scenario? Sometimes you create messages and send them to receivers (like your text message). Other times you present messages to recipients, and they indicate their understanding and interest (like the audience members at the soccer banquet). Or you may mutually create meanings with others, with no one serving as “sender” or “receiver” (like you and your brother sharing family stories). These scenarios reflect three different ways of viewing the communication process: the linear model, the interactive model, and the transactional model.

As you continue reading about these models, keep a few things in mind. First, communication scholars developed these models to examine and describe how communication works. Second, the models represent a historical evolution of scholarly thought, from a relatively simple depiction of communication as a linear process (the linear model) to one that views communication as a complicated process that is mutually crafted (the transactional model). Finally, each model doesn’t necessarily represent a good or a bad way of thinking about communication. Instead, each offers a different way of identifying the important elements affecting the communication process.

Linear Communication Model. The linear model was the first formal model of communication and was created more than sixty years ago by engineers at Bell Labs to explain how information is transmitted across telephone lines (Shannon & Weaver, 1949). According to the linear communication model, communication is an activity in which information flows in one direction, from a start point to an end point. The linear model contains several components. In addition to a message and a channel, there is a sender (or senders)—the individual who generates the information to be communicated, packages it into a message, and chooses one or more channels for sending it. The person (or people) for whom a message is intended is the receiver. The transmission of the message is often affected by noise distractions that change how the message is received. Noise may originate outside the communicators—such as lagging or pixelation during Skype. Or it can come from the communicators themselves, such as when distracting thoughts cause senders’ or receivers’ attention to drift. (See Figure 1.1.)

Figure 1.1: FIGURE 1.1 LINEAR MODEL OF COMMUNICATION
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Kira Kuznetsova/Shutterstock

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Although the linear model was conceived more than six decades ago, it still accurately illustrates the broad range of communication forms you experience every day. For example, much of your online communication—including tweets, texts, e-mails, and wall posts—reflects this model. Certain public-speaking contexts may also fit, especially those in which you present prepared scripts to audience members who are expected to sit quietly and listen without responding to or challenging you. But the linear model doesn’t accurately explain other communication forms, such as face-to-face conversation. For example, when you converse with a friend face-to-face, you may speak in partial sentences and rely on the other person to mentally fill in the missing information. The linear model doesn’t account for the back-and-forth flow of such encounters.

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Interactive Communication Model. The interactive communication model also views communication as a process involving senders and receivers. However, according to this model, communication is influenced by two additional factors: feedback and fields of experience (Schramm, 1954). Feedback consists of the verbal and nonverbal messages coming from recipients in response to messages. For example, by nodding and saying “Uh-huh” or “That’s right,” recipients let senders know they’ve received and understood messages. Feedback also lets receivers indicate their approval or disapproval of messages. Fields of experience consist of the beliefs, attitudes, values, and experiences that each participant brings to a communication event. People with similar fields of experience are more likely to understand each other than are individuals with dissimilar fields of experience. (See Figure 1.2.)

Figure 1.2: FIGURE 1.2 INTERACTIVE MODEL OF COMMUNICATION
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Kira Kuznetsova/Shutterstock

Like the linear model, the interactive model accurately describes a range of communication forms that you experience. For example, while giving a speech in class, you may notice the reactions of your classmates—such as fidgeting or lack of eye contact—and then modify your message on the spot as needed to capture their attention and get your message across. Classroom instruction, group presentations, and weekly team meetings among coworkers are often viewed as interactive.

Also like the linear model, the interactive model presents communication as a process in which there is a clearly designated and active sender and a receiver. But it overlooks the active role that receivers often play in constructing the meaning of communication events, as well as instances in which people jointly create meaning. At a family reunion, for example, your uncle starts droning on as usual about “kids these days.” You and your sister glance at each other and immediately understand the meaning of your shared look. If you were to put words to this meaning, you would both be saying, “Here he goes again.” But neither of you is the sender or the receiver in this instance; instead, you collaboratively create communication meaning. The transactional communication model can help explain such encounters.

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Transactional Communication Model. The transactional communication model views communication as multidirectional; that is, participants mutually influence one another’s communication behavior (Miller & Steinberg, 1975). According to this model, there aren’t senders or receivers. Instead, participants constantly exchange verbal and nonverbal messages and feedback to collaboratively create meanings. (See Figure 1.3.) This may be something as simple as a shared look, as in the preceding example with your sister and your uncle. It may be an animated and intense conversation between you and a friend, in which the meanings exchanged go way beyond the words that are said. It may even involve people jointly creating acts of communication. Sociologist Jurgen Streek (1980), in discussing the transactional nature of communication, describes a classroom roll call he once observed. The teacher asked, “Now, where is . . .” and before she could complete her query, a student chimed in “Ernesto?” knowing just who the teacher was seeking. Such instances illustrate how we often build communication collaboratively rather than simply receiving or sending messages.

Figure 1.3: FIGURE 1.3 TRANSACTIONAL MODEL OF COMMUNICATION
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Kira Kuznetsova/Shutterstock

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The transactional communication model intuitively captures encounters that seem interpersonal in nature. These include instances such as you and your romantic partner having a phone conversation in which the words seem secondary to the feelings being conveyed, as well as conversations with close friends, in which a few key words or looks instantly convey a wealth of shared information (we discuss interpersonal communication in more detail in Chapters 9 and 10). But the transactional model doesn’t fit certain types of online communication, such as tweets, texts, e-mails, and wall posts, in which senders and receivers are more clearly designated; those types of communication are better described as either linear or interactive.