Sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld and his colleagues investigated the role of the media in political campaigns and the

voting
process during the 1940s.

Limited effects/Two-step flow

• Two-step Flow - the term used by Katz and Lazarsfeld to describe their observation that media messages
flow from the media to opinion leaders to the rest of the audience.

• The important point is that their research demonstrated that media effects are mediated by the pattern of
our social contacts. They concluded that the media have limited effects.

• In the first step, the media influence opinion leaders, in the second step these opinion leaders influence
others with whom they have direct contact in groups.

Opinion leaders

• Lazarsfeld and his colleagues found that people are strongly affected by group affiliations by personal
contact, and by information from opinion leaders.

• Opinion leaders tend to be better informed than the ordinary people, they tend to be from elite segments of
society, and generally have a relatively high status.
 Reinforcement

• Lazarsfeld and colleagues discovered that political campaigns

seem to have relatively little impact on people,

and that their basic effect seems to be that of reinforcing

beliefs that people already hold.

Reinforcement in the media occurs when something

is strengthened; for instance, a specific point of view.

Reinforcement occurs because:

• People tend to be selective in what they watch and read.
• They prefer to pay attention to messages that are congruent with what they already believe.
To summarize: The ‘two-step flow theory’ suggests that mass communication reaches and affects people
in a two-step process. First, the media influence opinion leaders, second, the opinion leaders influence
others.
Lesson 3 part 1
Models of Communication
• The terms model and theory are often used interchangeably. But they are not the same thing.
• A model is a representation of a phenomenon.
• A theory is an explanation of a phenomenon.
• A model is a highly abstract representation of what goes on in the real world. It is abstract because
it must be able to cover a large number of different possibilities.
• We use models because they enable to us to understand complicated matters by separating them
into their components and seeing how they function.
• Simplifying definitions: Models
• A model of a communication process is “a consciously simplified description in graphic form of a
piece of reality.”
• Models are meant to provide “images of wholes”.
Aristotle’s communication model
o Aristotle proposed the earliest communication model some 2300 years back.
o It is a simple and linear model.

• Aristotle’s model included five essential elements of communication:

1. the speaker,
2. the speech or message,
3. the audience,
4. the occasion and
5. the effect.
 • Aristotle advises the speaker on constructing a speech for different audience on different occasions
and for different effects.
• This model is actually more applicable to public speaking than interpersonal communication.
SMR model
The traditional communication model pictures the communication process in terms of a linear relation
where an intentional sender (S) encodes a message (M) that is transmitted through a certain channel and
finally reaches the receiver (R), who decodes the message and acts upon it.

• SMR model conceives communication as merely a question of message exchange.

• The sender, for example, is seen as the origin or originator of the message.
• Yet, the sender is herself/himself an end-product of communication and cannot be its origin.
How is the SMR model criticized?
• The subject is constructed in and through communication.
• That is to say, the subject is the end-product of communication.
• If the subject is the end-product of communication, it cannot be the origin of it (as in the
communication models).
Lasswell’s model (1948)

The political scientist, Harold Lasswell, tells us that in studying communication we should consider the
elements in the graphic above.
Harold Lasswell’s famous 5W formula of 1948 asks a number of simple questions that may be applied to
any communication act:
• Who? Says What? In which channel? To whom? With what effect?
Who? Communicator
• Lasswell was primarily concerned with mass communication. In every form of communication,
though, there must be someone (or something) that communicates.
• Many communication specialists refer to the communicator as source or transmitter or sender of
the message
• Control analysis
• Because of the application of Lasswell's Formula to the media, his question Who? has come to be
associated mainly with control analysis:
For example, if we take a newspaper as example all of the below questions can be asked related with the
question who.
• who owns this newspaper?
• what are their aims?
• what are their political allegiances?
• do they attempt to set the editorial policy?
• are they subject to any kind of legal constraints?
• how does the editor decide what to put in the paper?
Says what? Content
• Being concerned with the mass media, Lasswell was particularly concerned with the messages
present in the media. This relates to an area of study known as content research.
• Typically, content research is applied to questions of representation, for example:
• how are women represented in the tabloid press? or:
• how are people of color represented on television? or:
• how is our society represented to us in the movies?
Content research can be done in the form of
1. quantitative research which would involve counting the number of occurrences of a particular
representation (for example, the housewife and mother who does not work outside the home) or
2. qualitative research which does not involve any counting or numbers. Qualitative content analysis
focus on the symbolic, discursive, framing or narrative dimensions of media texts.
In which channel? – Medium
• The channel is what carries the message. If I speak to you my words are carried via the channel of
air waves, the radio news is carried by both air waves and radio waves.
Channel-Medium
• This use of the word 'channel' is similar to the use of the word medium when we talk about
communication. The words are sometimes used interchangeably.
To whom? Receiver
• Receiver refers to the audiences or the readers.
• To answer how people, respond to certain kinds of mass-produced messages audience research, or
audience analysis, is conducted.
• Audience research, or audience analysis, is a systematic means for collecting and reporting
objective, reliable information about the audience.
• Audience refers to people who listen, watch or read.
• Audience constitute the target group for the communicator.
• They are at the receiving end of a message.
With what effect? Effect research
• Lasswell’s model do not deal with the matter of effects directly, but directing our attention to
audiences and to society in general, it implicitly takes the matter of effects into consideration.
• How is Lasswell’s 5W model criticized?
• According to McQuail and Windahl (1993) (In their Communication models: For the study of mass
communication) Lasswell’s inclusion of effects in his model is problematic:
• The Lasswell Formula shows a typical trait of early communication models:
• It assumed that the communicator has some intention of influencing the receiver and, hence, that
communication should be treated mainly as a persuasive process.
• It is also assumed that messages always have effects. Models such as this have contributed to the
tendency to exaggerate the effects of mass communication.
• Lasswell did not consider the matter of feedback; his model is unidirectional, going from someone
who says something to someone who receives a message and is affected by it.
Shannon and Weaver’s communication models
• Shannon–Weaver model is known as the “mother of all models” because of its wide popularity.
• The model is also known as ‘information model’ or the ‘mathematical theory’ because Shannon was
an American mathematician.
• Shannon–Weaver model argues that communication can be broken down into 6 key concepts:
sender, encoder, channel, noise, decoder, and receiver.
•

The communication process according to Shannon and Weaver’s model:

• First in the process is the information source, producing a message or a chain of messages to be
communication.
• In the next step, the message is formed into signals by a transmitter.
• The signals should be adapted to the channel leading to the receiver.
• The receiver reconstructs the message from the signal.
• The received message then reaches the destination.
• The signal is vulnerable in so far as it may be disturbed by noise, interference which may occur - (a
dysfunction of communication )
•
For example, when there are many signals in the same channel at the same time.
• This may result in a difference between transmitted and received signal, which, in its turn, may
mean that the message produced by the sources and that reconstructed by the receiver and having
reached the destination do not have the same meaning.
• The final step in the Shannon Weaver model is 'feedback'. But actually, the 'feedback' step was not
originally proposed by Shannon and Weaver in 1948.

• Shannon and Weaver original model did not include feedback and has been criticized for that.
• In 1950, Norbert Wiener added the “Feedback” in Shannon and Model.
• Apart from lack of feedback the model has been criticized for its linearity.
• ('Linear' means that the messages are only going one way).

Shannon–Weaver model sees communication as a linear, one-way process similar to other early models of
communication. According to such linear models:
• messages are sent from a sender to the receiver in a unidirectional, one-way fashion and,
• the roles of sender and receiver are clearly distinguished.
• The concept of noise was found to be very useful for communication scholars. Later, the concept
was adapted and used in a way broader way to mean anything that distorts communication.
Noise: Anything that interferes with accurate transmission or reception of a message.
• Types of noise.
• Physical noise: Any stimuli outside of a sender or a receiver that interfere with the transmission or
reception of a message. Also called external noise.
• Physiological noise refers to biological influences on message reception. Examples of this type of
noise are articulation problems, hearing or visual impairments, and the physical well-being of a
speaker (that is, whether he or she is able to deliver a message).
• Psychological noise (or internal noise). Examples of psychological noise would include something
like daydreaming or your thoughts being elsewhere when someone is speaking to you. Also refers
to a communicator's biases, prejudices, and feelings toward a person or a message.
• Semantic noise. Occurs when senders and receivers apply different meanings to the same message.
For example, when the sender uses jargon, technical language and other words and phrases that
are not familiar and not understood by the receiver.

Osgood–Schramm’s circular model

• Wilbur Schramm, together with his colleague Osgood, developed one of the best-known models of
communication in 1954.
•
Osgood and Schramm circular model - slide 11 comm 212 models of communication lesson 3 part 2
• The model is not linear but circular. As Wilbur Schramm stated:
“In fact, it is misleading to think of the communication process as starting somewhere and ending
somewhere. It is really endless.”
• This approach meant a clear break with the traditional linear/one-way picture of communication.
• The Osgood and Schramm circular model emphasizes the circular nature of communication.
• The participants swap between the roles of source/encoder and receiver/decoder.
• Osgood and Schramm circular model deals with feedback. The model focuses on the individuals
involved in the communication process.
• In this model we see that message senders also are message receivers.
•
Encoding/Decoding
• Encoding means putting information into a form that can understood and sending a message.
• Decoding refers to receiving the encoded message and interpreting it.

Some differences between Shannon–Weaver and Schramm–Osgood models

• Shannon–Weaver model is linear, Osgood–Schramm model is circular.
• Shannon–Weaver's interest is primarily directed to the channels mediating between the senders
and receivers; Schramm and Osgood devote their discussion to the behavior of the main actors in
the communication process.