Shannon–Weaver model
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.
[6][7] It aims to provide a formal representation of the basic elements and relations involved in the process of communication.
[10] The receiver performs the opposite function of the transmitter: it translates the signal back into a message and makes it available to the destination.
[5][2][10] Shannon and Weaver focus on telephonic conversation as the paradigmatic case of how messages are produced and transmitted through a channel.
[9][10][11] For a regular face-to-face conversation, the person talking is the source, the mouth is the transmitter, the air is the channel transmitting the sound waves, the listener is the destination, and the ear is the receiver.
Shannon and Weaver assumed that the meaning is already contained in the message but many subsequent communication theorists have further problematized this point by including the influence of cultural factors and the context in their models.
Many critics have rejected this aspect of Shannon and Weaver's theory since it seems to equate communication with manipulation or propaganda.
Many later theorists expanded this model by including additional elements in order to take into account other aspects of communication.
[13] Shannon's concepts were also popularized in John Robinson Pierce's Symbols, Signals, and Noise, which introduces the topic to non-specialists.
In this regard, it has been characterized as "inappropriate for analyzing social processes"[16] and as a "misleading misrepresentation of the nature of human communication".
[17] A common objection is based on the fact that it is a linear transmission model: it conceptualizes communication as a one-way process going from a source to a destination.
[9][20] These approaches emphasize the dynamic nature of communication by showing how the process evolves as a multi-directional exchange of messages.
[21][3][20] Another criticism focuses on the fact that Shannon and Weaver understand the message as a form of preexisting information.
A. Richards criticizes this approach for treating the message as a preestablished entity that is merely packaged by the transmitter and later unpackaged by the receiver.
They contrast with constitutive models,[18] which see meanings as "reflexively constructed, maintained, or negotiated in the act of communicating".
