Exam 1 Study Guide | Introduction to Communication Inquiry | COMM 250, Study notes of Communication

Download Exam 1 Study Guide | Introduction to Communication Inquiry | COMM 250 and more Study notes Communication in PDF only on Docsity! Comm 250 Exam 1 Study Guide Chapter 1- What is Communication?  There is not just one clear cut definition of communication. The definition that the book uses is o A social process in which individuals employ symbols to establish and interpret meaning in their environment.  Social: Communication involves people and interactions  Process: Communication is on-going and unending  Symbol: An arbitrary label given to a phenomenon.  Concrete Symbols: Symbols representing an object  Abstract Symbols: Symbols representing an idea/thought.  Meaning: What people extract from a message  Environment: The situation or context in which communication occurs.  Palo Alto Team (Early 1950’s) o A group of scholars who believed that a person “cannot not communicate”  Behavior is synonymous with communication, and therefore a person is constantly communicating because they cant escape behavior.  Models of Communication: Linear, Interactional, Transactional o A model is a simplified representation of the communication process.  Linear Model  Invented by Claude Shannon, Bell Laboratories scientist/professor and MIT and Warren Weaver, consultant on projects at the Sloan Foundation.  A one-way view of communication that assumes a message is sent by a source to a receiver through a channel.  Source: Transmitter of a message  Message: Words, sounds, actions, or gestures in an interaction.  Receiver: Recipient of a message  Channel: pathway to communication  Noise: Distortion in channel not intended by the source o Semantic Noise: Linguistic influences on reception of message (slang, jargon not understood by receiver) o Physical Noise: Bodily influences on reception of message (a jackhammer keeps you from hearing) o Psychological Noise: cognitive influences on reception of message (your biases and predispositions towards the message) o Physiological Noise: biological influences on reception of message (if you don’t feel well, you might not pay attention to the message)  Interactional Model  Invented by Wilbur Schramm (1954)  A view of communication as the sharing of meaning with feedback that links the source and receiver.  Feedback: communication given to the source by the receiver to indicate understanding/meaning.  Field of Experience: overlap of sender’s and receiver’s culture, experiences, and heredity in communication.  Transactional Model  Invented by Barnlund (1970)  A view of communication as the simultaneous sending and receiving of messages.  Each message has an influence on another message. One message builds on the previous message, and therefore there is an interdependency between and among the components of communication. Chapter 2- Framing our Past and Present  Scholarly organizations in Communication o The National Communication Association (name changed in 1997).  Pioneers in Communications o Wilbur Schramm (Social Scientific Research)