1. Definitions of communication & the List
Wide range of definitions.  Nouns: the act/instance (e.g., Her communication was effective); the object/message communicated (a letter, a news announcement, a website).  Verbs: the process (S/he communicates well).

Conceptual "clouds" for communication, message, & noise
Communication concepts  (five main clouds of concepts with time as context)
Message, signal, information
Sender and receiver
Channel, medium
Exchange, impart, give, make known, transmission
Impact, intentionality, change in receiver, creating meaning (sender or receiver)
Time

Issues
Sender and receiver characteristics (e.g., human, sentient, artifact)
Necessity of impact/intention/interpretation

Message concepts
Sign(s) (token and impact/interpretation), language
Idea, theme, information

Noise concepts
Unwanted
Interference, disturbance
Random

Issues:
Noise can be used to hide meaning
Does noise only occur in receiver?

2. Pierce paper:
liklihood of occurrence is not enough to judge effectiveness

Can you describe the grammar for a specific search engine?
Is there a general search grammar?

Meaning in the destination is “constructed” from destination’s local memory
[i.e., meaning is not held in the book, video, website, etc.]

Pierce: communication is adjusting understandings; imparting areas of knowledge or changing views is education

Common interest is more important than a common language
Communication is dependent on communities of interest

Generalize to social systems, add feedback/control (homeostasis), mass media and we have an overview of communication fields

3. Schramm paper

Broad definition of channel -- the way that signs in a message are made available to a receiver.
Audience is active and selective
He later describes a channel as a set of related acts  (p 128)

Some communication factors: number of participants, context, sign system (note the Pool reading gives a much more complete set)

Some factors:  senses affected, feedback levels, receiver control level, message coding type, multiplicative power, message preservation power (persistence)

Attention: Selective
Schramm’s payoff/effort ratio
 Factors: availability, contrast with background, receiver set (bias), estimated usefulness, education/social status.  It is the combinations that matter—not the medium or any single variable.
Attention: Perception
 Need for filtering

Media as social channels
 Influences: focus attention, confer status, content-medium interaction, multiple media better, audience dependent.

Category theory of communication—classify audiences.  Consider your Vic card, website ads, telemarketing, etc.

He provides some data on media usage and preferences (very dated 1940’s-60s)

Some questions to consider:
Is attending to a message a communication act?  (Communication includes both afferent and efferent activity but does it require both?)

How does WWW relate to the media discussed?

What professional and service opportunities exist for information specialists given Schramm’s theory?

4. Readings (these will be discussed beginning Jan 25)
Tannen, D. (1995). The power of talk: Who gets heard and why. (Ahlas)
Rogers, E. M. (1995). Diffusion of Innovations. pp 1-37. (Note: this item is on reserve in the SILS library.) (Ballenger)
Chatman, E. A. (1992). The Information World of Retired Women. Chapter 3, Social Network Theory, p33-41. Barry)

Readings for next week: (these will be discussed beginning Feb 1)
Belkin, N. J. (1980). Anomalous states of knowledge as a basis for information retrieval.  (Bulger)
Chatman, Elfreda. (1996). The impoverished life-world of outsiders.  (Choi)
Taylor, R. S. (1968). Question-negotiation and information seeking in libraries. (Conley-Spencer)

5. The one-minute paper concept
What was the big point you learned in class today?
What is the main, unanswered question you leave class with today?
 

Supplemental Notes for Pierce reading
Distinguish internal (e.g., biological) and external comm, focus on external

We know more about physical communication (technical, chemical) than human communication and it seems reasonable that this knowledge should apply to our understanding of human comm (and thus leads to several models).

Shannon's communication theory model (info source, transmitter, channel, noise, receiver, destination).  Information theory: bits, probability, entropy (reduction in uncertainty), channel capacity (bandwidth).  This addresses the technical problem of communication, not the semantic or effectiveness problems.

Chomsky's transformational grammar (grammar is not statistical/probabilistic but innate rules).  Meaning is not grammar dependent but "receiver" dependent.  What is communicated comes from our own heads rather than the sender---the signals stimulate memory (we overlook misprints/mispeaks, fill details, etc.).  Meaning is in the mind of the beholder (consider implications for information work, reference work, etc.).

Common sense of comm can only take place between people with common interest.  "Communication in everyday use is a process of adjusting understandings and attitudes, of making them congruent or of ascertaining how and where they agree and disagree." P. 36

Human-computer communication presented as a problem.

Communication takes place in communities of interest.

Various communication systems serve us.  Several graphs of growth of different comm forms.
Interactions of communication and society a research problem.

Weiner's cybernetics principle: systems tend to homeostasis (correct for adverse disturbances)--two steps, detection and feedback (correction).

Tightly knit communities have good homeostasis mechanisms.  Controlling comm is a way to avoid homeostasis (e.g., totalitarian).