COMMUNICATION

Nature and Elements of

Communication
Introductory Activity

■Write all the “communication” that

has done from waking up in the
morning until arrival in class.
What is communication?

■ Connects us as human beings. Society cannot function

without communication, whether it is face to face
conversation across a dinner table or video conferencing
across international boundaries.
■ Involves a transaction: a person wants to talk to someone
because that person needs something.
■ An intricate process of sharing ideas, thoughts, and
information.
The best way to understand
communication is to see it
graphically.
Communication Models

■Aristotlelian Model
■Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver
■Wilbur Schramm
■Eugene White
■The first and earliest model is that
of Aristotle (5BC), who was a
teacher of Rhetoric and even put
up an academy to produce good
speakers.
The Three Settings in Aristotle’s time
■ Legal Setting: meant the courts where ordinary
people defended themselves.

■ Deliberative Setting: meant the political assemblies,

the highest of which the Roman Senate.

■ Ceremonial Setting: meant the celebrations held when

they won a war, when they lost a leader or had a new
one, and when they welcomed a visiting leader from
another kingdom or country. Such occasions called for
speeches of welcome, poems of tribute or of eulogies,
and poems of lament.
■ Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver ( 1948 )
which gave us the concept of “noise”. This is
often called the Telephone Model because it is
based on the experience of having the
message interfered with by “noise” from the
telephone switchboard back in 1940s.
Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver
■ Wilbur Schramm, who is considered the Father
of Mass Communication. He came up with five
models, but the Schramm Model (1995) are
concerned with the concept that explains why
communication breakdown occurs. Schramm
asserts that communication can take place if
and only if there is no overlap between the Field
of Experience of the Speaker and the Field of
Experience of the Listener.
What is the Field of Experience?
■ It is everything that makes a person unique-
everything he/she has ever learned, watched, seen,
heard, read, and studied.

■ In other words, it is everything a person has ever

experienced or not experienced, done or not done.

■ In fact, this is practically everything that has

happened to his/her life.
■ It is the Field of Experience that is used to
interpret the Message and create a Response. It
is also the Field of Experience of the Listener that
needs to overlap with the Speaker’s Field of
Experience, which can only happen when the two
fields have commonalities.
■ Eugene White (1960), who tells us that
communication is circular and continuous,
without beginning or end. That is why he
made a cyclical model. He also points out
that although we can assume that
communication begins with thinking,
communication can actually be observed
from any point in the circle.
Activity: Worksheet