Communication as a Cycle

Pioneering Communication Researcher Harold Lasswell famously described the process of communication in these simple terms: who says what to whom through what channel with what effect. In this presentation, Dr. Sunny explains the basic components of the communication process, including noise or barriers to understanding. You are the who; your message is the what; the audience is the whom; the channel is airwaves that take your message to the listeners’ ears; and the effect is how people respond to your message. Noise is any barrier in the model. Three common types of noise include physical interruptions, internal noise like negative self-talk for the speaker, and rhetorical noise, meaning we used language our audience does not understand. This is the basic model we will use for the remainder of the course as we create presentations and critique presentations.