there are various models of communication theoretical approaches and we are going to unpack three of the main ones you see in most textbooks the transmission model of communication the transactional model of communication and the constitutive model of communication [Music] so first the transmission model of communication in 1948 Shannon and Weaver published an article explaining this model they were working at Bell Telephone laboratories at the time so their approach really shows that technological angle on their thoughts in other words they envisioned a sender or source of information who encodes a message let's say into language for example then transmits that message through a channel of some sort the message is then decoded on the other end and received by a receiver so it's very reminiscent of the phone system so for example let's say I send my wife a voicemail and it says I'd like to buy a car the message goes through the communication system and it arrives in her voicemail box and as soon as she listens to it the message has been sent and received noise however is another part of this model noise might interfere with the message at any point along the way maybe in the decoding and the receiving of the message it would say the message is garbled or doesn't make sense on the other end because something's wrong there's some static on the line so to speak then that might complicate the communication process according to this model communication has successfully occurred when a message has been sent and received so in that way it's a linear or one-way model a lot of people use the pipeline as a metaphor to describe it because let's say a pipeline has oil going from one end all the way and flowing down to the other end and communication goes in one direction I like to use the metaphor of the archer the archer has a bow and arrow and when he or she releases that arrow would either hits the target or it doesn't except in this archer metaphor the archers will be blindfolded because according to this model communication has occurred when a message has been sent and received but the archer doesn't necessarily know when he or she's blindfolded if arrow hit the target but as long as it has hit the target and communication has occurred so you'll notice there's no feedback and no nonverbal communication in this model that's considered major weakness to some people in terms of how we understand face-to-face communication it's like a text message and email a voicemail an old-fashioned Telegraph or even a letter in the mail you send it but you don't necessarily know when and if the receiver has actually received the message it goes one way and then as soon as they read that or decode that message then communication has occurred it's also sometimes called the container model of communication because the words according to this model are thought to contain the meaning everything you need to know in other words all the meaning is contained in the words as all the examples here illustrate this model is very useful for explaining how information technology works and how communication works anytime you're sending it through some type of technological communication channel has clear limits though a lot of people criticize it because it doesn't explain the complexities and the human dynamics of face-to-face communication well the next model is the transactional model of communication and it compensates for some of the limitations of Shannon and Weaver's one-way linear model in 1967 Paul Watts Luwak and his colleagues built their model on some previous writings and looked at the interactional features of communication and tried to capture that in their model sometimes called the interaction model right after that a couple years later in 1970 Dean barlen published his work that expressed many of the same ideas with slightly different wording but all these concepts that were coming about in 1967 to 1970 were all aligned and so when combined most textbooks refer to these models and this approach is generally as the transactional view or transactional model of communication it has some key differences from the Shannon and Weaver model this model the transactional model they don't believe that meaning is contained in the words instead they think meaning is in people meaning comes about through the interaction so the communication process is largely about creating shared meaning between and among people you don't start out for example understanding other people we have to work toward that through communication according to this model people are both senders and receivers at the same time so this model integrates nonverbal communication and feedback there's a saying or an axiom that goes with this model you cannot not communicate and that's another way of saying that you're really always sending messages of some sort whether you realize it or not whether you intend to or not when you include things like nonverbal communication or feedback you're always giving off some kind of vibe that the other person is going to be picking up on so instead of an archer or a pipeline as the metaphor this has got much more of a two-way dynamic feel to it and so I prefer the metaphor of a dance where you're dancing with a partner where each communicator is learning the steps from the other person as they go simultaneously and when it's done they have reached some similar understanding some similar meaning for what they are trying to do in that dance and a lot of conversations are like that there's a back-and-forth there's a simultaneousness to it where you're figuring out what you mean as you go along so once again if I say I'd like to buy a car and let's assume I am face to face this time in the conversation with my wife we would have a back and forth discussion about what exactly that meant and what kind of car was i picturing and what kind of car might she be picturing and hopefully if it goes well at the end of that conversation we have reached some sense of shared meaning a type of meaning agreement about what we mean when we say we'd like to buy a car this model has some other features that add on to the Shannon and Weaver Foundation for example context shapes the way we process this communication in every way for in a work setting versus a private one-on-one setting if we're in a big crowd of people all those contextual features are going to shape and influence the communication process according to the transactional model we also arrive at these interactions with what we call a field of experience each communicator has attitudes beliefs values and psychological influences that shape and form the interpretation of our messages we look at the nonverbal and verbal cues and because of all those attitudes and beliefs we are making sense of them are interpreting them in certain ways for me this shows how the decoding of messages as Shannon and Weaver called it is much more sophisticated and layered than simply figuring out what the words mean you're reading the signals very carefully and understanding things from a certain point of view you're filtering everything you hear and see through your field of experience according to this model there's also content and relationship dynamics at play in a conversation so there's content that we're exchanging that information we're sharing back and forth but our communication also has relationship dynamics to it as well our tone of voice our pace our looking at the other person we're all looking for certain cues in a conversation we all see ourselves a certain way and we all see the other person a certain way and so we can read between the lines and it's not just the content is also that relationship dynamic that gets established so most people agree that the transactional model of communication is much better at capturing the face-to-face realities of human relationships and it makes up for a lot of the shortfalls of the Shannon and Weaver model the third model we'll look at is the constitutive model or the constitutive theory of communication in 1999 Robert Craig wrote an article in the journal called communication theory where he explained that communication is constitutive in other words communication creates it produces our social world Robert Craig sees communication as the driving force in our lives and our relationships Craig talks about how communication is the central activity in our lives that creates all other social forces in society he states communication is no secondary phenomenon that can be explained by antecedent psychological sociological cultural or economic factors rather communication itself is the primary constitutive social process that explains all of these factors Manning in 2014 had much the same view he said the communication is not a mere tool for expressing social reality but also a means of creating it this reminds me of something that Karl Weick said a couple of decades earlier 1979 when he wrote his book about organizing he said the word organization was too static of a term to describe what's happening in our workplaces instead he favoured the term organizing because he thought it captured that activity that went into creating establishing and maintaining our workplaces the concrete buildings and the brands that we all know didn't already exist they are the result of ongoing communication in fact if we stopped interacting if we stopped communicating stopped picking up the phone stopped going to meetings stopped making agreements life and organization would grind to a complete halt so in the same way Robert Craig says the economics the social structures the psychological features of our social world were established in the first place by communication processes so communication constituted or formed our society our relationships and our lives so these three models the transmission model the transactional model and the constitutive theory of communication all have their own emphases they all shed light on different aspects and take a different view of communication a better understanding of these three models especially in the ways they compare and contrast will help you understand the readings that you're doing and the other kinds of research that you are exploring