Interpersonal Communication- A Mindful Approach to Relationships, 2020a

understand how real-world communication interactions occur. The goal of creating models is three-fold:
1. to facilitate understanding by eliminating unnecessary components,
2. to aid in decision making by simulating “what if” scenarios, and
3. to explain, control, and predict events on the basis of past observations. 20
Over the next few paragraphs, we’re going to examine three different types of models that
communication scholars have proposed to help us understand interpersonal interactions: action,
interactional, and transactional.
In this section, we will be discussing different models to understand interpersonal communication. The
purpose of using models is to provide visual representations of interpersonal communication and to offer
a better understanding of how various scholars have conceptualized it over time. The first type of model
we’ll be exploring are , or communication models that view communication as a onedirectional
transmission of information from a source or sender to some destination or receiver.
Shannon and Weaver were both engineers for the Bell Telephone Labs. Their job was to make sure that
all the telephone cables and radio waves were operating at full capacity. They developed the Shannon-
Encode
Message
Transmission
Channel
Reception
Decode
Message
Source
NOISE
Receiver
Figure 2.4 Shannon-Weaver Model
Feedback
Weaver model, which is also known as the linear communication model (Weaver & Shannon, 1963). 21
As indicated by its name, the scholars believed that communication occurred in a linear fashion, where a
sender encodes a message through a channel to a receiver, who will decode the message. Feedback is not
immediate. Examples of linear communication were newspapers, radio, and television.
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