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Chapter 1:Thinking about Communication: Definitions, Models, and Ethics
West, Introducing Communication Theory, 6e
Chapter 1
Thinking about Communication: Definitions,
Models, and Ethics
Chapter Outline
I. Introduction
• In the most fundamental way, communication depends on people’s ability to understand
one another.
o In 2016, the National Safety Management Society reports that industrial safety is
contingent on the ability of employees and management to communicate clearly and
to avoid jargon when possible.
o Health care, too, is focusing more on the value of communication.
o In the classroom, researchers have concluded that affirming feedback/student
confirmation positively affects student learning.
o With respect to social networking sites such as Facebook, individuals in romantic
relationships report using communication (technology) as a way to check up on
“status updates” on an individual’s wall—from commitment to fidelity.
• As a student of communication, one is uniquely positioned to determine one’s potential for
effective communication.
o To do so, however, one must have a basic understanding of the communication
process and of communication theory functions in one’s life.
o One needs to be able to talk effectively, for instance, to a number of very different
types of people during an average day: teachers, ministers, salespeople, family
members, friends, automobile mechanics, and health care providers.
o One needs to understand the whys and hows of one’s conversations with others.
II. Defining Communication
• Defining communication can be challenging.
o Katherine Miller (2005) underscores this dilemma, stating that “conceptualizations of
communication have been abundant and have changed substantially over the years.”
o There are many ways to interpret and define communication—a result of the
complexity and richness of the communication discipline.
• Communication is a social process in which individuals employ symbols to establish and
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Chapter 1:Thinking about Communication: Definitions, Models, and Ethics
West, Introducing Communication Theory, 6e
interpret meaning in their environment.
o It is believed that communication is a social process.
▪ When interpreting communication as social, it is suggested that it involves
people and interactions, whether face-to-face or online.
▪ When communication is social, it involves people who come to an interaction
with various intentions, motivations, and abilities.
o Communication is a process means that it is ongoing and unending. Communication
is also dynamic, complex, and continually changing.
▪ Individuals past communications with people have been stored in their minds
and have affected their conversations with them.
▪ The process nature of communication also means that much can happen from
the beginning of a conversation to the end.
▪ Individual and cultural changes affect communication.
▪ C. Arthur VanLear (1996) argues that because the communication process is so
dynamic, researchers and theorists can look for patterns over time.
▪ Frank Dance (1967) depicts the communication process by using a spiral or
helix.
o A third term associated with our definition of communication is symbols. A symbol
is an arbitrary label or representation of phenomena.
▪ Words are symbols for concepts and things.
▪ Labels may be ambiguous, may be both verbal and nonverbal, and may occur
in face-to-face and mediated communication.
o Symbols are usually agreed on within a group but may not be understood outside of
the group.
▪ There are both concrete symbols (the symbol represents an object) and
abstract symbols (the symbol stands for a thought or idea).
o Meaning is what people extract from a message. In communication episodes,
messages can have more than one meaning and even multiple layers of meaning.
• Without sharing some meanings, people would all have a difficult time speaking the same
language or interpreting the same event.
• Clearly, not all meaning is shared, and people do not always know what others mean. In
these situations, people must be able to explain, repeat, and clarify.
o The final key term in the definition of communication is environment. Environment
is the situation or context in which communication occurs.
• The environment includes a number of elements, including time, place, historical period,
relationship, and a speaker’s and listener’s cultural backgrounds.
• One can understand the influence of environments by thinking about one’s beliefs and
values pertaining to socially significant topics such as marriage equality, physician-assisted
suicide, and immigration into the United States.
• The environment can also be mediated. By that, it means that communication takes place
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with technological assistance.
o At one point or another, everyone has communicated in a mediated environment,
namely through email, chat rooms, or social networking sites.
o These mediated environments influence the communication between two people in
that people in electronic relationships are not able to observe each other’s eye
behavior, listen to vocal characteristics, or watch body movement.
III. Models of Understanding: Communication as Action, Interaction, and Transaction
• Communication theorists create models, or simplified representations of complex
interrelationships among elements in the communication process, which allow people to
visually understand a sometimes complex process.
• Models help us weave together the basic elements of the communication process.
o There are many communication models, but the three most prominent ones are
discussed here.
A. Communication as Action: The Linear Model
• In 1949, Claude Shannon, a Bell Laboratories scientist and professor at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Warren Weaver, a consultant on projects at
the Sloan Foundation, described communication as a linear process.
o They were concerned with radio and telephone technology and wanted to develop
a model that could explain how information passed through various channels.
o The result was the conceptualization of the linear model of communication.
o This approach to human communication comprises several key elements.
▪ A source, or transmitter of a message, sends a message to a receiver, the
recipient of the message.
▪ The receiver is the person who makes sense out of the message.
▪ All of this communication takes place in a channel, which is the pathway to
communication.
▪ Channels frequently correspond to the visual, tactile, olfactory, and auditory
senses.
• Communication involves noise, which is anything not intended by the informational
source. There are four types of noise.
o First, semantic noise pertains to the slang, jargon, or specialized language used by
individuals or groups.
o Physical, or external, noise exists outside of the receiver.
o Psychological noise refers to a communicator’s prejudices, biases, and
predispositions toward another or the message.
o Physiological noise refers to the biological influences on the communication
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process. Physiological noise, then, exists if you or a speaker is ill, fatigued, or
hungry.
• Although this view of the communication process was highly respected many years ago,
the approach is very limited for several reasons.
o First, the model presumes that there is only one message in the communication
process.
o Second, communication does not have a definable beginning and ending.
• To suggest that communication is simply one person speaking to another oversimplifies
the complex communication process. Listeners are not so passive.
B. Communication as Interaction: The Interactional Model
• Wilbur Schramm (1954), proposed that in communication process people should also
examine the relationship between a sender and a receiver.
• He conceptualized the interactional model of communication, which emphasizes the
two-way communication process between communicators.
o Communication goes in two directions: from sender to receiver and from receiver
to sender.
o This circular process suggests that communication is ongoing.
• A person can perform the role of either sender or receiver during an interaction, but not
both roles simultaneously.
• One element essential to the interactional model of communication is feedback, or the
response to a message.
o Feedback may be verbal or nonverbal, intentional or unintentional.
o Feedback helps communicators to know whether or not their message is being
received and the extent to which meaning is achieved.
• A final feature of the interactional model is a person’s field of experience, or how a
person’s culture and experiences influence his or her ability to communicate with
another.
o Each person brings a unique field of experience to each communication episode,
and these experiences frequently influence the communication between people.
• Like the linear view, the interactional model has been criticized.
o The interactional model suggests that one person acts as sender while the other
acts as receiver in a communication encounter.
o The prevailing criticism of the interactional model pertains to the issue of
feedback.
▪ The interactional view assumes two people speaking and listening, but not at
the same time.
▪ What occurs when a person sends a nonverbal message during an
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interaction?
▪ Smiling, frowning, or simply moving away from the conversation during an
interaction between two people happens all the time.
▪ These criticisms and contradictions inspired development of a third model
of communication.
C. Communication as Transaction: The Transactional Model
• The transactional model of communication underscores the simultaneous sending and
receiving of messages in a communication episode.
o Communication is transactional means that the process is cooperative; the sender
and the receiver are mutually responsible for the effect and the effectiveness of
communication.
• In the transactional model, people build shared meaning.
o What people say during a transaction is greatly influenced by their past
experience.
o Transactional communication requires people to recognize the influence of one
message on another.
o One message builds on the previous message; therefore, there is an
interdependency between and among the components of communication.
• The transactional model presumes that as people simultaneously send and receive
messages, they attend to both verbal and nonverbal elements of a message.
o In a sense, communicators negotiate meaning.
o The two people are actively involved in a communication encounter.
• In the transactional model, the fields of experience exist, but overlap occurs.
o For communication to take place, individuals must build shared meaning.
o The transactional model requires each of them to understand and incorporate the
other’s field of experience into his or her life.
IV. Communication Models of the Future
• As people move further into the 21st century, one must ask if these models are sufficient to
examine human communication.
• The proliferation of new social networking sites (SNS), for example, and their influence
upon communication demand that communication models integrate technological
discussions.
• Second, this integration must necessarily be thoughtful, given the plethora of SNS.
• Traffic to SNS has grown exponentially over the past few years with about 75 percent of
online adults using social networking—up from 7 percent in 2005.
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Chapter 1:Thinking about Communication: Definitions, Models, and Ethics
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• The diversity of these sites—from Facebook to LinkedIn to Instagram—suggests that no
simple model will be possible.
V. Ethics and Communication
• Ethics is the perceived rightness or wrongness of an action or behavior.
• Ethics is a type of moral decision making (May, 2013), and determining what is right or
wrong is influenced by society’s rules and laws.
o Because ethical standards tend to shift according to historical period, the
environment, the conversation, and the people involved, ethics can be difficult to
understand.
• Why study ethics?
o Ethics permeates all walks of life and cuts across gender, race, class, sexual identity,
and spiritual/religious affiliation.
o Ethics is part of virtually every decision one makes.
o Ethics is what prompts a society toward higher levels of integrity and truth.
o Ethical issues surface whenever messages potentially influence others.
A. Business and Industry
• Perhaps no cultural institution has been under more ethical suspicions of late than
“corporate America.”
• Unethical behavior in corporations has reached proportions never before seen.
• Because a corporation is usually obsessed about its reputation (Carroll, 2015),
companies have tried to hide costs, use creative accounting practices, commit account–
ing fraud, and a plethora of other ethical breaches.
• With the advent of Corporate Ethics Statements, congressional legislation requiring
public accountability, improved transparent accounting practices, and increased
accountability to stockholders, most businesses have begun to improve their ethical
standing.
B. Religion and Faith
• Both Eastern and Western civilizations have stressed ethics in their moral traditions.
• According to Taoism, no one exists in isolation, and, therefore, empathy and insight will
lead to truth.
• For the Buddhist, being moral requires that one use words that elicit peace and avoid
gossip, self-promotion, anger, argument, and lying.
• From a Western perspective, many ethical issues derive from early Greek civilization.
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• Aristotle first articulated the principle of the Golden Mean.
• Christianity is founded on the principle of good example—that is, live according to
God’s laws and set an example for others.
• Some believe that such moral standards are not uniquely religious.
• Despite efforts to retain ethicality, religious institutions have had a number of ethical
challenges over the years.
o Many religious bodies are now developing clear ethical statements on appropriate
behavior and clarifying the consequences of ethical violations.
C. Entertainment
• A circular argument surfaces with respect to Hollywood: Does Hollywood reflect
society or does Hollywood shape society?
• Many viewpoints are raised in these arguments, but three seem to dominate.
o Hollywood has a responsibility to show the moral side of an immoral society.
o A second opinion is that Hollywood should create more nonviolent and nonsexual
films so that all family members can watch a movie.
o A third school of thought is that Hollywood is in show business, and therefore
making money is what moviemaking is all about.
D. Higher Education
• Colleges and universities across the United States teach introductory courses in ethics,
and these are required courses in many schools.
• Despite this interest, many schools have lost their own moral compass.
o Despite the fact that colleges and universities are required to report campus crime
via the Jeanne Clery Act (named after a Lehigh University student who was
murdered in 1986), some campuses fear the bad publicity. As a result, crime is
“contextualized.”
o On a logistic level, another ethical decision arises when schools are required to
identify the enrollment patterns for legislative and financial support.
E. Medicine
• A fourth institution concerned with ethics and communication is the medical
community.
• Medical decisions can become publicly debated far from the hospital bedside.
• Late-term abortions, human cloning, drug-enhanced athletes, medicinal marijuana,
executed prisoners organ use, and physician-assisted suicide are all topics that
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Chapter 1:Thinking about Communication: Definitions, Models, and Ethics
West, Introducing Communication Theory, 6e
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Education.
demonstrate the interrelationship among ethics, politics, and medicine.
F. Politics
• It is difficult to disentangle the topic of ethics from politics.
• The scandals associated with politics relate to lobbyists, campaign financing, infidelity,
deception, conflicts of interest, cover-ups, bribery, conspiracy, and tax evasion.
• The ethical problems associated with politics may never go away, despite efforts to
establish ethics commissions and oversight advisory boards in state and national
governments.
o Though people wish to be optimistic in thinking that they are cultivating a new
generation of political leaders who are ethical beings, there are those who are not
as hopeful.
o With nonprofit organizations such as Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) and
the Government Accountability Project—groups that expose ethical shortcomings
in the government and its leaders—and with aptly named Government offices
such as the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, there may be cause for increased
confidence in the future.
G. Technology
• Armed with a copy of the First Amendment, proponents of free speech say the Internet,
for example, should not be censored.
• Free speech advocates stress that what is considered inappropriate can vary
tremendously from one person to another, and consequently, censorship is arbitrary.
o Consider, for instance, the U.S. Supreme Court decision protecting “virtual” child
pornography on the Internet.
o Social networking sites such as Facebook, with over 1 billion global users, are
prone to ethical problems.
• As the United States is clearly more reliant on technology than ever before, ethical
issues will continue to arise.
o Lying about one’s identity online, downloading copyrighted material, inviting
young people into violent and hate-filled websites, and watching executions on
the Internet are all examples of potential technological ethics dilemmas.
H. Some Final Thoughts
• Public discourse requires responsibility (Torcello, 2016).
• Organizations are especially prone to ethical dilemmas.
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• There is an ethical dimension to listening as well. As listeners (or readers) people have a
responsibility to give a fair hearing to the ideas of others.
• Rob Anderson and Veronica Ross (2002) point out six important ethical strategies to
consider when reading communication theory:
o Remain open to being persuaded by the statements of others.
o Remain willing to try out new ideas that may be seen by others as mistakes, and
invite others to experiment also.
o Accept that multiple perspectives on reality are held as valid by different people,
especially in different cultural contexts.
o Attempt to test any tentatively held knowledge.
o Live with ambiguity, but become less tolerant of contradiction.
o Evaluate knowledge claims against personal experience and the everyday concrete
pragmatics of what works.
o Delve into the explanation once more to gain a clearer picture of the theorists’
intentions.
VI. The Value of Understanding Communication Theory
A. Understanding Communication Theory Cultivates Critical Thinking Skills
• As one reads and reflects on the theories in this book, he or she will be required to think
critically about several issues.
o Learning how to apply the theory to your own life, recognizing the research
potential of the theory, and understanding how a particular theory evolved will be
among your responsibilities in this course.
• In addition, understanding communication can aid in one’s skill set.
B. Understanding Communication Theory Helps You to Recognize the Breadth and
Depth of Research
• In addition to fostering critical thinking skills, being a student of communication theory
will help appreciate the richness of research across various fields of study.
• Regardless of what a student’s current academic major is, the theories contained in this
book are based on the thinking, writing, and research of intellectually curious men and
women who have drawn on the scholarship of numerous disciplines.
C. Understanding Communication Theory Helps to Make Sense of Personal Life
Experiences
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Chapter 1:Thinking about Communication: Definitions, Models, and Ethics
• Communication theory aids one in understanding people, media, and events and helps
one answer important questions. The following are some examples of this:
o Muted Group Theory explains why men and women speak differently.
o Cultivation Analysis explains how media influences society.
o Media Ecology Theory explains the role of technology in society.
o Expectancy Violations Theory explains how and why one reacts to the nonverbal
behaviors of others.
• People will observe that much of their life and experiences in life will be better
understood because of communication theory.
D. Communication Theory Fosters Self-Awareness
• Learning about communication theory helps develop critical thinking skills, informs a
person about the value of research across different fields of study, and aids one in
understanding the world around them.
• One final reason to study theories of communication pertains to an area that is likely to
be most important in a person’s life—oneself.
o Social Penetration Theory will help people consider the value of self-disclosing in
their relationships.
o Symbolic Interaction Theory will assist a person in thinking about the meaning of
the various symbols surrounding them.
• People will encounter theories that will help them as they try to understand themselves
and their surroundings.
Classroom Activities
1. One Cannot Not Communicate
Objective: To encourage students to examine the characteristics of communication and the
communication process
Materials: None
Directions:
1. Divide the class into small groups for a debate.
2. Have half of each group argue the negative of the following statement: One cannot
communicate. Have the other half the affirmative of the statement.
3. Remind students to examine the following points in their debates:
• The definition of communication
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Chapter 1:Thinking about Communication: Definitions, Models, and Ethics
West, Introducing Communication Theory, 6e
• The various elements of the communication process
• Intentionality
2. Is Communication Linear, Interactional, or Transactional?
Objective: To examine the strengths and weaknesses of several models of communication
Materials: None
Directions:
1. Divide the class into small groups for a discussion.
2. Have students discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the linear model of
communication, the interactional model of communication, and the transactional
model of communication. Which of these three models do they prefer? Can they
create a model of communication that better conceptualizes the communication
process?
3. Allow class time for the groups to share their ideas with the class.
3. Building an Ethical Communication Style
Objective: To have students examine their own communication ethics
Materials: None
Directions:
1. Have students list “wrongs” and “rights” that they see as moral absolutes (e.g., it is
3. Once students have shared their lists, lead a class discussion about how they relate to
communication and communication theory.
4. Ethical Difficulties in Various Contexts
Objective: To have students examine ethical dilemmas in various contexts and consider the
role of communication in preventing or addressing them
Materials: None
Directions:
West, Introducing Communication Theory, 6e
1. Divide the class into small groups, and assign each group one of the contexts
2. Ask each group to make a list of ethical dilemmas that have arisen or could arise in
this particular context. Ask students to use original examples.
3. As a class, discuss how communication may be used to prevent or address these
dilemmas.