A New Model of the Communication Process

Existing models of the communication process don't provide a reasonable basis for
understanding such effects. Indeed, there are many things that we routinely teach undergraduates
in introductory communication courses that are missing from, or outright inconsistent with, these
models. Consider that:

 we now routinely teach students that "receivers" of messages really "consume" messages.
People usually have a rich menu of potential messages to choose from and they select the
messages they want to hear in much the same way that diners select entrees from a
restaurant menu. We teach students that most "noise" is generated within the listener, that
we engage messages through "selective attention", that one of the most important things
we can do to improve our communication is to learn how to listen, that mass media
audiences have choices, and that we need to be "literate" in our media choices, even in
(and perhaps especially in) our choice of television messages. Yet all of these models
suggest an "injection model" in which message reception is automatic.
 we spend a large portion of our introductory courses teaching students about language,
including written, verbal, and non-verbal languages, yet language is all but ignored in
these models (the use of the term in Figure 5 is not the usual practice in depictions of the
transactive model).
 we spend large portions of our introductory courses teaching students about the
importance of perception, attribution, and relationships to our interpretation of messages;
of the importance of communication to the perceptions that others have of us, the
perceptions we have of ourselves, and the creation and maintenence of the relationships
we have with others. These models say nothing about the role of perception and
relationshp to the way we interpret messages or our willingness to consume messages
from different people.
 we spend large portions of our introductory courses teaching students about the socially
constructed aspects of languages, messages, and media use. Intercultural communication
presumes both social construction and the presumption that people schooled in one set of
conventions will almost certainly violate the expectations of people schooled in a
different set of expectations. Discussions of the effects of media on culture presume that
communication within the same medium may be very different in different cultures, but
that the effects of the medium on various cultures will be more uniform. Existing general
models provide little in the way of a platform from which these effects can be discussed.
 when we use these models in teaching courses in both interpersonal and mass
communication; in teaching students about very different kinds of media. With the
exception of the Shannon model, we tend to use these models selectively in describing
those media, and without any strong indication of where the medium begins or ends;
without any indication of how media interrelate with languages, messages, or the people
who create and consume messages.without addressing the ways in which they are . while
these media describe, in a generalized way, media,

The ecological model of communication, shown in Figure 6, attempts to provide a platform on

which these issues can be explored. It asserts that communication occurs in the intersection of
four fundamental constructs: communication between people (creators and consumers) is
mediated by messages which are created using language within media; consumed from media
and interpreted using language.This model is, in many ways, a more detailed elaboration of
Lasswell's (1948) classic outline of the study of communication: "Who ... says what ... in which
channel ... to whom ... with what effect". In the ecological model , the "who" are the creators of
messages, the "says what" are the messages, the "in which channel" is elaborated into languages
(which are the content of channels) and media (which channels are a component of), the "to
whom" are the consumers of messages, and the effects are found in various relationships
between the primitives, including relationships, perspectives, attributions, interpretations, and the
continuing evolution of languages and media.

Figure 6: A Ecological Model of the Communication Process