The Evolution of Communication Theory |
ABSTRACT In Ruben and Stewart's account of "the evolution of communication theory," the "standard" model of communication was forged in the 1960s featuring six components in a one-directional pattern from source → signal→ channel → message → noise → to receiver. For the most part, this model was indistinguishable from information processing models. Over the years, two additional components were added: feedback (emphasizing two-directional communication), and fields of experience. Channel was expanded into a concept of media. These changes reflect the socio-economic conditions of the time. There is a puzzling gap in Ruben and Stewart's account of theoretical developments from the 1970s to 2000. They characterize this period as one in which new fields were studied—group, organizational, political, international, and intercultural but do not identify changes in the theory of communication. |
the development of Communication Theory
Ruben and Stewart follow their discussion of the evolution of the "field" of communication study with a chapter on "The Evolution of Communication Theory" (Ruben & Stewart, 34-53). In it, they chart this evolution by looking at the models of communication proposed by influential communication scholars:
| 330BC | Aristotle's rhetorical model (one way) |
| 1948 | Harold Lasswell's rhetorical/media model (one way) |
| 1949 | Claude Shannon & Warren Weaver's machine oriented model (one way) |
| 1954 | Wilber Schramm's interactive model (one way) |
| 1955 | Elihu Katz & Paul Lazarsfeld's mass media model (one way) |
| 1955 | Bruce Westley & Malcom S. MacLean's signal processing model (feedback) |
| 1967 | Frank Dance's helical-spiral model (diachronic exchange process) |
| 1967 | Paul Watzlawick, Jane Beavin, & Don Jackson's turn-taking model (two way) |
| 1968 | Lee Thayer's dynamic process model (circular) |
| 2003 | DeVito's interactive model (feedback, two way) |
Aristotle's Model of Communication
Ruben and Stewart begin the evolution of models of communication with Aristotle, featuring his Rhetoric as the starting point of communication theory. They leave out an influential Neo-Aristotlean model of communication, namely Kenneth Burke's. Adapting Aristotle's rhetorical model by using his account of change (persuasion being a change in an audience), Burke proposed five components of "symbolic action," a term framed by his "rhetoric of communication."
Burke's emphasis on language as symbolic action had more of an impact on the rhetorical analyses of literary texts than on the rhetorical practices of speech. However, Burke's model, a composite of the ideas of Aristotle, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Freud—who are the most prominent among a host of other thinkers which, except in its non-dialogical structure, anticipates the standard model of communication propounded by DeVito.
agency (instrumental cause) ↓ |
||
agent → (efficient cause) |
act → (formal cause) |
purpose (final cause) |
↑ |
Lasswell's Model of Communication
The begriming of the theory of communication is considered to be Harold Lasswell's "The Structure and Function of Communication in Society." The model of communication Lasswell proposed has five components:
Who |
What (message) → |
Channel (medium) → |
Whom (audience) → |
Effect |
The rhetorical influence is rather obvious in the names of the components with the exception of "channel" or "medium" which reflects a mass media orientation (Lasswell was a political scientist researching political propaganda). He follows Aristotle's Rhetoric in this model, adding channel or medium. Lasswell, Aristotle, and Burke view communication as an "object" they are observing. Lasswell observed messages in the mass media; Aristotle observed orators; and Burke, texts.
Ruben and Stewart place Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver's model immediately after Lasswell's in the evolution of communication theory since it came a year later. Though their model surely influenced communication scholars of the time, it was developed in Bell Laboratories for a very different purpose than the study of human communication. It concerned machines communicating with each other, though it obviously could be extended to human interactions.
signal |
received |
||||||
↓ |
↓ |
||||||
information source |
→ transmitter |
→ |
channel |
→ |
receiver |
→ |
destination |
message |
message |
||||||
Claude Shannon, who founded the field of information theory, published with Warren Weaver The Mathematical Theory of Communication (U of Illinois P, 1949). This text offered a model of communication that was widely influential. This model fits well with a conception of cognition as information processing and with a conception of the mind as a computing machine.
The influence of this model is apparent in the terms that became standard descriptors of communicative situations: source → signal → message → channel → signal → receiver. Wilbur Schramm employed these concepts in his 1954 "How Communication Works," adding the concepts encoder/decoder, field of experience, and feedback, all consonant with the social science research of the period. Schramm's conception of feedback, for example, parallels Norbert Weiner's view of "feedback" in his The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics's and Society (Ruben & Stewart, 52, fn. 12).
Katz and Lazarsfeld's model inserted "mass media" into the scheme. Westley and MacLean's model attempted to introduce the complexity of the communicative interaction, moving away from a simplistic encode → signal → decode pattern and emphasizing the fact that not only did messages change during a communication but that not all of the multiple signals sent were received. As Ruben and Stewart note, the 1950s was a period of "interdisciplinary" exchanges. Information theory, artificial intelligence, and cybernetics all surfaced in networked institutional settings in the 50s.
The "synthetic" information processing model of the mind emerged from the work in cybernetics, artificial intelligence, experimental psychology, mathematics, linguistics, and information theory and was paralleled by the concurrent and predominant logical model of language. Both were "matched" with computer operating systems. Work in Artificial Intelligence explored the relations between the human mind and computers by writing computer programs that could “think”-- e.g., Shannon’s “Programming a Computer for Playing Chess.”
In 1957 MIT Press published Colin Cherry’s On Human Communication. Cherry’s chapter on the "Evolution of Communication Science—an Historical Review" focuses on "language and codes," "The mathematical Theory of Communication," and "Brains—Real and Artificial." A reviewer regarded the book as "a survey of the newly evolved combined field of cybernetics information theory (linguistics-mathematics-phonetics-psychology-semantics)" (from the cover).
For Cherry “information” was a set of “logical instructions to select” signs or signals; and a “code” was a “set of unambiguous rules, whereby messages are converted from one representation to another.” [It is worth noting that Cherry locates the "observer" who produces "theory" apart from the communication. This position is considered "objective" but it brackets out cognition except as a computational probability ("signals x transmitted with probabilities p(x)." The arrows come from the situation to the observer suggesting that he is drawing directly from the data.]
Watzlawick, Beavin, and Jackson's Model
One of the figures associated with cybernetics was the anthropologist/psychologist Gregory Bateson. Dedicated to him, Pragmatics of Human Communication (1967) by Paul Watzlawick, Janet Beavin, and Don Jackson introduced communication scholars to what might be called "systems theory"—Bateson being hard to pigeonhole. They viewed communication as an interactional system structured by psychological, social, cognitive, and cultural components. They not only described the dialogical aspects of communication but also its modes, its pathologies, its paradoxes, and its failures. Ruben and Stewart focus on their conception of "punctuation" and describe their contribution to models of communication as a "give and take of messages between individuals" (45). In doing so, they bracket out the cognitive dimension of the co-author's research.
Communication studies at the turn of the 21st century, judging from its textbooks, retains the model of communication solidified in the 60s (leaving out Watzalick, Beavin, and Jackson's views). Ruben and Stewart identify DeVito's model as representative of "communication theory in the twenty-first century" (46-48). This seems quite justifiable since DeVito is the author of countless textbooks in the field and the models presented in competitive textbooks differ only in minor details.
This representative model of communication has eight components:
- sender or addressor or encoder
- receiver or addressee or decoder
- message or text or signal
- channel or medium
- code or sign system [implied by encoding & decoding]
- context or field of experience
- feedback loops or dialogue
- noise or Interference
It is derived from the "information processing" models of the 1960s developed in information theory, AI, and cybernetics. It differs from the earlier rhetorical model by amplification, adding to its linear predecessor feedback, medium, and noise. A ninth component is sometimes added, "effect," to restore the rhetorical dimension to the conception of communication implied by the standard model and a critical feature of Lasswell's model that focused early communication research stemming from the work done during WWII (see The Field of Communication").
challenges to the Standard Model
The information processing model—identified in this entry as the "standard" model—has been dominant in cognitive science as well as communication studies. But recently, owing to discoveries in neuroscience, cognitive linguistics, and sociology this model has been challenged. Since the information processing model of the mind has influenced the study of communication, challenges to it are relevant to communication researchers. However, they were not taken up by communication scholars (see Is There Communication without Cognition?).
Accordingly, Ruben and Stewart's account of the evolution of communication theory leaps from 1970 to 2003, a period they had earlier described as one of "specialization," the standard model of communication having been established in the 60s. They note that
The expansion and diversification of communication study was reflected in college and university curricula. A number of new departments of communication were formed throughout the 1970s, and some programs in speech changed their names to speech communication or communication. The same was true in some journalism departments, where the shift was from journalism to mass communication, communication, or communications. (27).
It worth noting that the seminal work of Lakoff and Johnson, Langacker, Fauconnier and the seminal discoveries in neuroscience occurred during the 1980s and 1990s. In their Wet Minds: The New Cognitive Neuroscience, first published in 1992, the authors' initial paragraph reads:
The 1990s were declared by the Congress of the United State of America to be the "Decade of the Brain." In this book we attempt to convey a sense of why this declaration is appropriate. We are finally "cracking the code," and beginning to understand how the brain works and—a more enigmatic question—how it gives rise to the mind. This endeavor has transcended the usual disciplinary boundaries, and has begun to succeed in part because of the contributions of cognitive psychologists and specialists in anticlerical intelligence in addition to those of neuroscientists. (ix)
The question arises: how is it that the study of communication—which has its theoretical origins in the same model of the mind that cognitive scientists had—in the 1980s and 1990s expanded its "fields" of study without attending to theoretical developments in cognitive science?
Ruben and Stewart offer a possible answer when they write that:
During the 1980s and 1990s, there was an increasingly interest in information communicated via messages as an economic good or commodity—something that can be bought and sold—and in the technologies by which this commodity is created, distributed, stored, retrieved, and used. In the United States communication and information companies have emerged as some of our largest businesses. Communication and information became central in the telecommunication, publishing, Internet, and computer industries, as well as in banking, insurance, leisure and travel, and research. (28)
Implicit in these statements is the likely hood that communication studies in the 1980s and 1990s followed in the wake of socioeconomic trends.
Part of this historical scenario involves new and converging media ("the most obvious change during this period was the growth of the Internet" 28).
Is it the case that during the last third of the 20th century communication studies followed the socioeconomic turns of events of that time by changing its curricular priorities from interpersonal communication to group, political, international, intercultural, and mass communication? If so, what happened in communication studies during this period probably explains why so few present-day communication scholars are associated with cognitive science though the two fields initially drew from the same research models. This is an issue that needs to be researched.
jjs
Notes:
Burke delineated his "pentad" model of symbolic action in his Grammar of Motives.His idiosyncratic terminology does not readily correspond to other models of communication. On close examination, it is clear that his conception of rhetoric concerns the underlying causes of the effect of texts on their interpreters. Hence his rhetoric is about communication.
Accounts of the "computational" model of the mind can be found in Pamela McCorduck's Machines Who Think and George Johnson's Machinery of the Mind.
See the discussion of David Downing's "knowledge contract" in "The Field of Communication," particularly footnote 3
A possible consequence of a shift away from the personal dimensions of communication to the technologies of communication is a widening research divide between the two. Where such a split might lead, is "anyone's guess."
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last revised:
September 4, 2007
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