Introduction to Communication

According to Wikipedia, "communication is a process of transferring information from one entity to another", and it is a continuous process. The term communication and audience is very closely related to each other. The study of audience poses a challenge to the SMR process model of communication, because the development of mass communication technologies together with different social contexts and institutions have influenced the concept of audiences to change over time.

The transmission model of Shannon and Weaver (1949) is a one-way process which is concerned with the transfer of message from the sender to the receiver in a straightforward manner (Wood, 2006). This process model is consisted of several elements; Source, channel, message, receiver and effect (McQuail, 1997). The source encodes a message such as spoken language through a transmission channel such as air, and the receiver decodes it according to individual's different perceptions. Then an effect takes place. An example is a conversation, where an encoder is the mouth, a source is the sound waves and a decoder is the ear.

The SMR process model is a one-way communication process which assumes that the intended message is received exactly the same by everyone, and is only concerned with the way how audiences receive the media text. However these are the limitations of this model due to cultural context and institution.

First, different cultural contexts such as cultural difference, cultural literacy and language influence audiences to interpret an intended meaning of message in different way (Schirato & Yell, 1996). For example, if two people with different levels of cultural literacy communicate, a person with lower level of cultural literacy may fail to understand.