Communication Theory

"Who says what to whom in what channel with what effect"

- Contemporary technology - medium over message?

Conditions of communication theory

- Cybernetic or Information Theory (Transmissional)

- Semiotics, The Phenomenological Tradition, Rhetorical, Socio-Pyschological, Socio-Cultural, Critical (Constitutive)

- Transmissional send & receive process, perceptions of message

- Constitutive process of production, communication limitations shaped by medium/social context of medium

- Factors that effect process of sending and receiving - Shannon & Weaver Bell diagram

- Noise - different meaning in different contexts, factors causing limits on communication reception.

- Cybernetic model of advertising communication, hyper-extension of Shannon & Weaver Bell model

- "Cybernetics: Control and communication in the animal & machine" (Weiner, 1948)

- Systems Theory feedback, control loops, analysis of complex systems of communication

- Semiotics -semantics : stands for? means?

-syntactics : sign relations

-pragmatics : effect of signs

- Denotation & Connotation

- Using semiotics to analyse an image

- Signified 'Italianicity' would not work in Italy, scene implies return from market: signified freshness, net implies 'caught' food also signifying freshness of product. Tri-coloured (green, red and white) again, 'Italianicity'. Portrait - person to person communication?

- signs are meaningless without first haven been given meaning

- Phenomenology 'Meaning' - lived experience

- perception of 'reality'

- appearance of an object in ones perception

- language = vehicle for meaning

- social value

- interpretation & reinterpretation through past experience

- hermeneutic circle interpreters go back and forth between experience and assigned meaning

- the process of interpretation is central

- Rhetoric a series of linguistic devices, pictures without context are meaningless - application of rhetoric, gives meaning/message to an empty sign.

- ie. Hyperbole, Irony, Personification

- Metaphor a language that directly compares seemingly unrelated subjects or activities, creates associations.

- The Sociopsychological Tradition study of individual as social being, Behavioral, Cognitive, Biological.

- The Sociocultural Tradition social 'coding', definitions in social structure/context. Context is seen as being crucial to forms and meanings of communication.

- Critical Communication Theory synthesis of philosophy and social science, political agenda/ideology in news.