Origins of Communication Theory: Early Greece

Aristotle (385-322 B.C.) and his teacher Plato (427-347 B.C.) were the most central
figures in early communication study. Both regarded communication as an art or craft to be
practiced , and as an area of study. As Aristotle noted in the opening paragraph of his
classicwork on rhetoric;

To a certain extent all men [and women] attempt to discuss statements and to maintain them, at
random or through practice and from acquired habit Both ways being possible, the subject can
plainly be handled systematically, for it is possible to inquire the reason why some speakers
succeed through practice and others spontaneously; and everyone will at once agree that such
inquiry is the function of science.

Aristotle saw communication as the means through which citizens participated in

democracy. He described communication in terms of an orator or speaker constructing an
argument to be presented in a speech to hearers—an audience as depicted in Figure 3.1. The
speaker's goal was to inspire a positive image of himself or herself and to encourage the
members of the audience to be receptive to the message. As Aristotle wrote

[R]hetoric exists to affect the giving of decisions... the orator must not only try to make the
argument of his [or her] speech demonstrative and worthy of belief; he [or she] must also make
his own character look right and put his hearers, who are to decide, in the right
frame of mind. (Emphasis added)

For Aristotle, communication was primarily a verbal activity through which speakers
tried to persuade-- to achieve their own purposes with a listener through skillful construction of
an argument and delivery of a speech.

Many scholars consider Aristotle to be the greatest theorist of rhetorical communication.

His classic work, The Rhetoric, was written about 330 B.C. and contains three books
emphasizing the speaker, the audience, and the speech.
Book I focuses on the means of persuasion, which Aristotle argues are ethos (the nature
of the source), pathos (the emotion of the audience), and logos (the nature of the message
presented by the source to the audience). He claims that proof is the essential element for a
successful persuasive speech. He differentiates three contexts for speaking deliberative speaking
before the government forensic speaking in a court of law. and epideictic speaking on ceremonial
occasions.
Book II examines the nature of the audience and how the speaker can evoke an audience's
emotions. Aristotle argues that demographic factors of an audience (such as age and social class)
will influence how they perceive a message.
The final book deals with style and stresses clarity as an important component of an
effective message. Aristotle emphasizes how a message is constructed and gives little attention to
delivery.
 McCroskey identifies three essential elements in Aristotle's theory of rhetoric: all
arguments must be based on probabilities (what an audience believes to be true) since absolute
verifiable truth is not possible in most cases; audience adaptation (understanding what is likely to
persuade someone) is the key to an effective message; and amorality (his theory can be used for
both worthy or unworthy ends).
Plato, in his writings, outlined what he thought would be necessary for the study of
rhetoric to contribute to a broader explanation of human behavior. He believed that the field
would need to include the study of the nature of words, the study of the nature of human beings
and their ways of approaching life, the study of the nature of order, and the study of the
instruments by which human beings are affected. Thus, although much of the earliest interest in
what we now call communication focused on public speaking, it was recognized that in order to
understand fully how persuasion operated it would be necessary to develop a broader and more
comprehensive theory.

The Twentieth Century

As the field of communication emerged as a discipline in its own right in the 1940s,
1950s, and 1960s, the influence of ideas advanced by early Greek scholars and extended in
subsequent writings was still very much in evidence. The ways of thinking about the nature of
communication began to change as the field developed, and this evolution was evident in the
models of the process that were published and popularized. Among the most influential of these
models were those of Harold Lasswell, Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, Wilbur Schramm,
Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld, and Bruce Westley and Malcolm Maclean. Each of these
scholars offered perspectives on the nature of communication that built on the earliest concepts
of the phenomenon.

Lasswell's View of Communication

One of the most often cited characterizations of communication was advanced by
political scientist Harold Lasswell in 1948 as an outgrowth of his work in the area of political
propaganda. Lasswell provided a general view of communication that extended well beyond the
boundaries of political science. He said that the communication process could best be explained
by the simple statement:

"Who says what to whom in what channel with what effect."

Lasswell's view of communication, as had Aristotle's some two thousand years earlier,
emphasized the elements of speaker, message, and audience, but used different terminology.
Both scholars viewed communication as a one-way process in which one individual influenced
others through messages.
Lasswell offered a broadened definition of channel that inclueded mass media along with
speech as part of the communication process. His approach also provided a more generalized
view of the goal or effect of communication than did the Aristotelian perspective. Lasswell's
work suggested that there could be a variety of outcomes or effect of communication, such as to
inform, to entertain, to aggravate, as well as to persuade.
Shannon and Weaver's Model
About a year after the introduction of the Lasswell perspective, Claude Shannon
published the results of research he had undertaken for Bell Telephone to study the engineering
problems of signal transmission. The results of his study provided the basis for what came to be
known as the Shannon and Weaver model of communication.
Shannon and Weaver described the communication process in this way:

Communication include(s) all the procedures by which one mind may affect another.
This, of course, involves not only written and oral speech, but also music, the pictorial arts, the
theatre, the ballet, and in fact all human behavior.

The Shannon and Weaver concept represented an important expansion of the idea of
communication from the act of speaking or writing in a public setting or through mass media, to
activities such as music, art, ballet and the theater—in fact, all human behavior.
Like Lasswell, Shannon and Weaver saw communication in terms of a one-way process by
which a message was sent from a source through a channel to a receiver. Their model was
somewhat more detailed, however, because Shannon and Weaver made several distinctions that
the other models had not. Specifically, they differentiated between a signal and a message, an
information source and a transmitter, and a receiver and destination. They described the
workings of the model as follows:

The information source selects a desired message out of a set of possible messages... The
selected message may consist of written or spoken words, or of pictures, music, etc.....The
transmitter changes the message into the signal which is actually sent over the communication
channel from the transmitter to the receiver.

If one considers the example of a dramatic series carried by cable television, the channel
is the cable; the signal is the varying electrical current carried by the cable; the information
source is the performers, their backdrop, and so on; the transmitter is the set of devices (camera,
audio and video amplification system, and so on) that converts the visual and vocal images of the
performers into electrical current.
In this example, the receiver is the television set and cable converter equipment. The
receiver's purpose is to change the signal back into a message that can be received and
interpreted at the destination (a cable viewer, in this case).
Shannon and Weaver introduced the term noise as the label for any distortion that
interferes with the transmission of a signal from the source to the destination. In our example, an
illustration of noise would be electrical interference, leading to audio or video distortion, in the
cable line. They also advanced the concept of correction channel, which they regarded as a
means of overcoming problems created by noise. The correction channel was operated by an
observer who compared the initial signal that was sent with that received; when the two didn't
match, additional signals would be transmitted to correct the error.

Schramm's Models
In an article published in 1954 entitled, "How Communication Works " Wilbur Schramm
provided several additional models of communication, including the one shown in Figure 3.4
Describing the model, Schramm said
A source may be an individual (speaking, writing, drawing, gesturing) or a
communication organization (like a newspaper, publishing house, television station or motion
picture studio). The message may be in the form of ink on paper, sound waves in the air,
impulses in electric current, a wave of the hand, a flag in the air, or any other signal capable of
being interpreted meaningfully. The destination may be an individual listening, watching, or
reading; a member of a group, such as a discussion group, a lecture audience, a football crowd,
or a mob; or an individual member of a particular group we call the mass audience, such as the
reader of a newspaper or a viewer of television.

Schramm saw communication as a purposeful effort to establish a commonness between

a source and receiver, noting that the word communication comes from the Latin communis,
which means common:
What happens when the source tries to build up this commonness with [the] intended
receiver? First, the source encodes [a] message. That is, he [or she] takes the information or
feeling he [or she] wants to share and puts it into a form that can be transmitted. The pictures in
our heads can't be transmitted until they are coded.... Once coded and sent, a message is quite
free of its sender..., And there is good reason .. for the sender to wonder whether [the] receiver
will really be in tune with him [or her], whether the message will be interpreted without
distortion, whether the picture in the head of the receiver will bear any resemblance to that in the
head of the sender.

Schramm also introduced the concept of field of experience, which be thought to be

essential to determining whether a message would be received at the destination in the manner
intended by the source. He contended that without common fields of experience—a common
language, common backgrounds, a common culture, and so forth—there was little chance for a
message to be understood. In this respect his work significantly expanded the thinking of
Shannon and Weaver.
Schramm suggested the importance of feedback as a means of overcoming the problem
of noise. He said that feedback "tells us how our messages are being interpreted.... An
experienced communicator is attentive to feedback and constantly modifying [the] messages in
light of what he [or she] observes in or hears from [the] Audience."
The Schramm view of communication was more elaborate than many others developed
during this period and added new elements in describing the process. In addition to
reemphasizing the elements of source, message, and destination, it suggested the importance of
interpretation and the role of field of experience. Where as other models had acknowledged that
the receiver might be either a single person or a large audience, this model suggested that a
source could also be one individual or many.

Katz and Lazarsfeld's Model

In 1955, political scientist Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld presented a two-step flow concept of
communication in their book Personal Influences. The model was based on earlier research in
which they found that information presented in the mass media did not reach and have an impact
on individuals as previous views of communication seemed to suggest.