ARHIVELE OLTENIEI - Universitatea din Craiova

COMMUNICATION AND COMMUNIONCARMEN POPESCUModern linguistics argues that any statement is also an action, aperformance. Speech Act Theory teaches us “how to do things with words” 1 . Welive in a world of communication: there has been an amazing development,recently, of the science of communication. One of the most influential of earlylinear models of communication belongs to Shannon-Weaver, a mathematicalmodel from 1949. “Later Shannon introduced a mechanism in the receiver whichcorrected the differences between the transmitted and received signal; thismonitoring or correcting mechanism was the forerunner of the now widely usedconcept of feedback (information which a communicator gains from others inresponse to his own verbal behavior).” 2This theoretical model, sometimes called “the transmission model”, isunder much criticism. “Shannon and Weaver's highly mechanistic model ofcommunication can be seen as being based on a transport metaphor. (...)Withinthe broad scope of transport I tend to see the model primarily as employing apostal metaphor. It is as if communication consisted of a sender sending a packetof information to a receiver, whereas I would insist that communication is aboutmeaning rather than information. One appalling consequence of the postalmetaphor for communication is the current reference to 'delivering thecurriculum' in schools, as a consequence of which teachers are treated as postalworkers. But the influence of the transmission model is widespread in our dailyspeech when we talk of 'conveying meaning', 'getting the idea across','transferring information', and so on. We have to be very alert indeed to avoid1 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, Oxford University Press, 1975, second edition.2 http://www.shkaminski.com/Classes/Handouts/Communication%20Models.htm.ARHIVELE OLTENIEI, Serie nouă, nr. 21, 20076, p. 165–176