Shannon and Weaver’s Model

Shannon was the American Mathematician and Electronic Engineer where Weaver was an American Scientist.

Shannon and Weaver provide a visual mode of communication system in relation to electronic media popularly referred to as Shannon and Weaver model of communication .

the model is also called information theory

It is also known as the “Mathematical Model of communication”. It is one of the most authoritative model of communication and it was published in the 1948 paper

“A Mathematical Theory of Communication”. This model was further developed together with Warren Weaver in their co-authored 1949 book “The Mathematical Theory of Communication”. It is inspired by system theory and cybernetics’.

Shannon developed the theory to improve understanding of communication via telephone and eventually improve the quality of phones. It was later used as a general theory of communication.
This model was the first to introduce the role of Noise in the Communication process. It was the linear model and this model includes:-
(1) An information source, which produces a desired message out of a set of possible messages, written or spoken words, pictures etc.
(2) A Transmitter, which changes this message into signals for transmission.
(3) A channel, which carries signals from the transmitter which transfers to the receiver.
(4) A receiver, a sort of inverse transmitter which transfers the transmitted signals back into a message.
(5) A destination, the last consumer of the message.

*Note- The term Feedback was introduced in 1954 by Nobert Weiner after response to criticism of the Linear nature of the approach.

Problems of communication
Shannon and Weaver faced three basic problems in the study of communication, like (1) Technical (2) Semantic (3) Influential
(1) Technical – Problem related to the accuracy of transferring information from sender to receiver, through signals.

(2) Semantic- Problem occurs when a message is misunderstood or the receiver doesn’t understand the message because the communicator may use difficult words and unknown terminology.

(3) Influential – Problems concerned with the success with which the meanings are conveyed to the receiver and the subsequent desire on his part.

Important concepts in Shannon and Weaver’s Model:-
(1) Information:- It is viewed as a measure of one’s freedom of choice when one selects a message.

(2) Redundancy:- The amount of information that can be eliminated or added in a noiseless channel, so that the message would still have meaning.

(3) Entropy:- The information can be measured by entropy that is one degree of freedom of choice to select a message.

(4)Noise :- Any unwanted sound, distortion that may be added into the channel which are beyond the control of the transmitter or receiver.

Noise is not intended by the source and makes it harder for the receiver to reconstruct the sources intention found in the original message.

(5)Channel Capacity:- The amount of information that can be transmitted per unit of time. Beyond the optimum level of information would lead to errors.

(6) Coding Process:- Whenever we produce or receive a message we use codes. Efficient coding involves best matching the statistical characteristics of the information source and the channel.

From this model we can learn that for reducing the uncertainty and decreasing the effects of noise by considering the capacity of the sender to encode and that of the receiver to decode messages.

Source – Wikipedia

Written by Rajat Ranjan