Lecture 4, Communication theory - notes

Laswells maxim

• who - the communicator
• what - the tools of communication
• to who - the recipient 

communication is either transmissional or constitutive (with limitations)

Shannon + weaver bell example

   - a model designed for telephone, but can be applied elsewhere..

The 'noise' is something that effects communication e.g., if I were an agency with an advertising billboard communicating my message to my audience, and someone graffiti's over it, this would be considered noise.

 7 TYPES OF COMMUNICATION

Cybernetic 

                -Spawned from a book by Weiner 1948

• semiotics - study of 'signs'
• semantics - what a thing means
• syntactics  - how one sign relates to another
• pragmatics - how these signs effect change

This theory is a language (like medicine has it's own language)

It is useful when analysing anything visual

BARTHES

Semiotic pasta example

- red, white and green to show authenticity, even though it was produced in France. etc..

Road signs example

- taught what these mean, not instinctive. 

- they are meaningless without cultural structures to give them meaning.

Phenomenological 

                      -phenomenon - appearance of an object in someone's perception

• Actual lived experience as a basis for future opinions and thoughts
• Father/daughter relationship?
• Hermeneutic circle
• experience interpretation cycle...

Rhetoric 

              -persuasion tactics

• exaggeration - convinces us by making the situation seem more extreme
• use of linguistic 'cleverness'...
• personification - helps us relate by making it personally relevant
• Propaganda

                 cons - not complex enough

                           - forgets the 'receiver'

• Needs to be used in conjunction with something else
• Rhetoric can be applied to an image

Metaphor

                -remembering by making associations 

Trash can example ( power point slide fairly self explanatory)

Sociopsychology

                      - science, physical factors

• cognitive - processing
• biological 
• behavioural - how people react in certain situations

Image and text are interpretted totally differently

Sociocultural

                   - how the world shapes us

• how social context effects communication
• student, asian, etc...

Critical theory

              - unpicking the power structure.