Communication theory

[4][5][6] Prominent historical and modern foundational communication theorists include Kurt Lewin, Harold Lasswell, Paul Lazarsfeld, Carl Hovland, James Carey, Elihu Katz, Kenneth Burke, John Dewey, Jurgen Habermas, Marshall McLuhan, Theodor Adorno, Antonio Gramsci, Jean-Luc Nancy, Robert E. Park, George Herbert Mead, Joseph Walther, Claude Shannon,Stuart Hall and Harold Innis–although some of these theorists may not explicitly associate themselves with communication as a discipline or field of study.

In the Linear Model, communication works in one direction: a sender encodes some message and sends it through a channel for a receiver to decode.

The Transactional Model assumes that information is sent and received simultaneously through a noisy channel, and further considers a frame of reference or experience each person brings to the interaction.

Interpretive empirical epistemology or interpretivism seeks to develop subjective insight and understanding of communication phenomena through the grounded study of local interactions.

[1] Theories characteristic of a post-positivist epistemology may originate from a wide range of perspectives, including pragmatist, behaviorist, cognitivist, structuralist, or functionalist.

[14][13] Although post-positivist work may be qualitative or quantitative, statistical analysis is a common form of evidence and scholars taking this approach often seek to develop results that can be reproduced by others.

A rhetorical epistemology lays out a formal, logical, and global view of phenomena with particular concern for persuasion through speech.

Communication theories associated with this epistemology include deconstructionism, cultural Marxism, third-wave feminism, and resistance studies.

[16] There is no valid reason for studying people as an aggregation of specific individuals that have their social experience unified and cancelled out with the means of allowing only the attributes of socio-economic status, age and sex, representative of them except by assuming that the audience is a mass.

Alan Turing in 1940 used similar ideas as part of the statistical analysis of the breaking of the German second world war Enigma ciphers.

In 1951, Shannon made his fundamental contribution to natural language processing and computational linguistics with his article "Prediction and Entropy of Printed English" (1951), providing a clear quantifiable link between cultural practice and probabilistic cognition.

[24] However, theories in organizational communication retain a distinct identity through their critical perspective toward power and attention to the needs and interests of workers, rather than privileging the will of management.

Theories in this domain explore dynamics such as micro and macro level phenomena, structure versus agency, the local versus the global, and communication problems which emerge due to gaps of space and time, sharing some kinship with sociological and anthropological perspectives but distinguished by keen attention to communication as constructed and constitutive.

CMC scholars inquire as to what may be lost and what may be gained when we shift many of our formerly unmediated and entrained practices (that is, activities that were necessarily conducted in a synchronized, ordered, dependent fashion) into mediated and disentrained modes.

[31] Adaptation/exploitation theories consider how people may creatively expand or make use of the limitations in CMC systems, including social information processing theory (SIP) and the idea of the hyperpersonal (when people make use of the limitations of the mediated channel to create a selective view of themselves with their communication partner, developing an impression that exceeds reality).

[35][36] Critical social theory in communication, while sharing some traditions with rhetoric, is explicitly oriented toward "articulating, questioning, and transcending presuppositions that are judged to be untrue, dishonest, or unjust."[26](p.

[37] Critical theories have their roots in the Frankfurt School, which brought together anti-establishment thinkers alarmed by the rise of Nazism and propaganda, including the work of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno.

[38] Modern critical perspectives often engage with emergent social movements such as post-colonialism and queer theory, seeking to be reflective and emancipatory.

[39] One of the influential bodies of theory in this area comes from the work of Stuart Hall, who questioned traditional assumptions about the monolithic functioning of mass communication with his Encoding/Decoding Model of Communication and offered significant expansions of theories of discourse, semiotics, and power through media criticism and explorations of linguistic codes and cultural identity.

This approach is often adopted by critical theorists who believe that the role of communication theory is to identify oppression and produce social change.