Shannon–Weaver model

The Shannon–Weaver model is one of the first and most influential models of communication. It was initially published in the 1948 paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication and explains communication in terms of five basic components: a source, a transmitter, a channel, a receiver, and a destination. The source produces the original message. The transmitter translates the message into a signal, which is sent using a channel. The receiver translates the signal back into the original message and makes it available to the destination. For a landline phone call, the person calling is the source. They use the telephone as a transmitter, which produces an electric signal that is sent through the wire as a channel. The person receiving the call is the destination and their telephone is the receiver.

Shannon and Weaver distinguish three types of problems of communication: technical, semantic, and effectiveness problems. They focus on the technical level, which concerns the problem of how to use a signal to accurately reproduce a message from one location to another location. The difficulty in this regard is that noise may distort the signal. They discuss redundancy as a solution to this problem: if the original message is redundant then the distortions can be detected, which makes it possible to reconstruct the source's original intention.

The Shannon–Weaver model of communication has been very influential in various fields, including communication theory and information theory. Many later theorists have built their own models on its insights. However, it is often criticized based on the claim that it oversimplifies communication. One common objection is that communication should not be understood as a one-way process but as a dynamic interaction of messages going back and forth between both participants. Another criticism rejects the idea that the message exists prior to the communication and argues instead that the encoding is itself a creative process that creates the content.