COMMUNICATION THEORY

Use Shannon & Weaver's model of the communication process to write a 300-400 word analysis of a work of Graphic Design. Comment on the ways in which the piece of Graphic Design attempts to communicate to a specific audience, using techniques of redundancy, entropy or noise.

Look at Fiske, J. (2002) 'An Introduction To Communication Studies' if you are struggling.

Shannon and Weaver identify 3 levels of problems in communication:

Level A: Technical problems: How accurately can the symbols of communication be transmitted.

Level B: Semantic problems: How precisely do the transmitted symbols convey the desired meaning?

Level C: Effectiveness problems: How effectively does the received meaning effect conduct in the desired way?

The source is the 'decision maker'- out of all the possibilities, it selects one message to send, which is then changed by the 'transmitter' into a 'signal' and passed through a 'channel' to a 'receiver'.

For example, with a stop sign, the source would be STOP. Other messages it has is, red, octagonal, a warning..

There maybe some noise that is added between the transmission and reception, which makes the message unclear, or difficult to decode. Noise can occur in the channel, the audience, the sender or the message itself. This makes the desired information limited, for instance, the sign may be miss read if the receiver is colour blind or can't read.. however, the simplicity and octagonal shape would then be seen and understood.

Other noise, such as the radio and other cars on the road may confuse the information, or passengers.