Communication is "an apparent answer to the painful divisions between self and other, private and public, and inner thought and outer world." As this definition indicates, communication is difficult to define in a consistent manner, because it is commonly used to refer to a wide range of different behaviors, or to limit what can be included in the category of communication. John Peters argues the difficulty of defining communication emerges from the fact that communication is both a universal phenomenon and a specific discipline of institutional academic study.
Persuasion or persuasion arts is an umbrella term of influence. Persuasion can attempt to influence a person's beliefs, attitudes, intentions, motivations, or behaviors.
A communication theory is a proposed description of communication phenomena, the relationships among them, a storyline describing these relationships, and an argument for these three elements. Communication theory provides a way of talking about and analyzing key events, processes, and commitments that together form communication. Theory can be seen as a way to map the world and make it navigable; communication theory gives us tools to answer empirical, conceptual, or practical communication questions.
The hypodermic needle model is a model of communication suggesting that an intended message is directly received and wholly accepted by the receiver. The model was originally rooted in 1930s behaviourism and largely considered obsolete for a long time, but big data analytics-based mass customisation has led to a modern revival of the basic idea.
The two-step flow of communication model says that most people form their opinions under the influence of opinion leaders, who in turn are influenced by the mass media. In contrast to the one-step flow of the hypodermic needle model or magic bullet theory, which holds that people are directly influenced by mass media, according to the two-step flow model, ideas flow from mass media to opinion leaders, and from them to a wider population. Opinion leaders pass on their own interpretation of information in addition to the actual media content.
Uses and gratifications theory (UGT) is an approach to understanding why and how people actively seek out specific media to satisfy specific needs. UGT is an audience-centered approach to understanding mass communication. Diverging from other media effect theories that question "what does media do to people?", UGT focuses on "what do people do with media?" It postulates that media is a highly available product and the audiences are the consumers of the same product.
Stuart Henry McPhail Hall (1932–2014) was a Jamaican-born British Marxist sociologist, cultural theorist, and political activist. Hall, along with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, was one of the founding figures of the school of thought that is now known as British Cultural Studies or the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies.
Marketing Communications refers to the use of different marketing channels and tools in combination. Marketing communication channels focus on any way a business communicates a message to its desired market, or the market in general. Marketing communication tools include advertising, personal selling, direct marketing, sponsorship, communication, public relations, social media and promotion.
In media studies, mass communication, media psychology, communication theory, and sociology, media influence and media effects are topics relating to mass media and media culture's effects on individual or an audience's thoughts, attitudes, and behavior. Whether it is written, televised, or spoken, mass media reaches a large audience. Mass media's role and effect in shaping modern culture are central issues for study of culture.
Audience theory offers explanations of how people encounter media, how they use it, and how it affects them. Although the concept of an audience predates media, most audience theory is concerned with people’s relationship to various forms of media. There is no single theory of audience, but a range of explanatory frameworks. These can be rooted in the social sciences, rhetoric, literary theory, cultural studies, communication studies and network science depending on the phenomena they seek to explain. Audience theories can also be pitched at different levels of analysis ranging from individuals to large masses or networks of people.
Media system dependency theory (MSD), or simply media dependency, was developed by Sandra Ball-Rokeach and Melvin Defleur in 1976. The theory is grounded in classical sociological literature positing that media and their audiences should be studied in the context of larger social systems.
Communicology is the scholarly and academic study of how we create and use messages to affect our social environment. Communicology is an academic discipline that distinguishes itself from the broader field of human communication with its exclusive use of scientific methods to study communicative phenomena. The goals of these scientific methods are to create and extend theory-based knowledge about the processes and outcomes of communication. Practitioners in the communicology discipline employ empirical and deductive research methods, such as cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys, experiments, meta-analyses, and content analyses, to test theoretically-derived hypotheses. Correlational and causal relationships between communication variables are tested in these studies.
The Encoding/decoding model of communication was first developed by cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall in 1973. Titled 'Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse', Hall's essay offers a theoretical approach of how media messages are produced, disseminated, and interpreted. Hall proposed that audience members can play an active role in decoding messages as they rely on their own social contexts, and might be capable of changing messages themselves through collective action.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to communication:
Also known as reception analysis, audience reception theory has come to be widely used as a way of characterizing the wave of audience research which occurred within communications and cultural studies during the 1980s and 1990s. On the whole, this work has adopted a "culturalist" perspective, has tended to use qualitative methods of research and has tended to be concerned, one way or another, with exploring the active choices, uses and interpretations made of media materials, by their consumers. Can also be known as reception theory, in which producers encode with a desired response, then the audience decode.
In social psychology, the Yale attitude change approach is the study of the conditions under which people are most likely to change their attitudes in response to persuasive messages. This approach to persuasive communications was first studied by Carl Hovland and his colleagues at Yale University during World War II. The basic model of this approach can be described as "who said what to whom": the source of the communication, the nature of the communication and the nature of the audience. According to this approach, many factors affect each component of a persuasive communication. The credibility and attractiveness of the communicator (source), the quality and sincerity of the message, and the attention, intelligence and age of the audience can influence an audience's attitude change with a persuasive communication. Independent variables include the source, message, medium and audience, with the dependent variable the effect of the persuasion.
Models of communication are conceptual models used to explain the human communication process. The first major model for communication was developed in 1948 by Claude Shannon and published with an introduction by Warren Weaver for Bell Laboratories. Following the basic concept, communication is the process of sending and receiving messages or transferring information from one part (sender) to another (receiver).
Aberrant decoding or aberrant reading is a concept used in fields such as communication and media studies, semiotics, and journalism about how messages can be interpreted differently from what was intended by their sender. The concept was proposed by Umberto Eco in an article published first in 1965 in Italian and in 1972 in English.
The sender-message-channel-receiver (SMCR) model of communication is an expansion of the Shannon-Weaver model of communication. David Berlo created this model, which separated Shannon and Weaver's linear model into clear parts, in 1960. It has been expanded upon by other scholars. Berlo described factors affecting the individual components in the communication making the communication more efficient.
Suggestion theory is the term that was used in the early part of the 20th century to describe how persuasion worked as a phenomenon of human collective behavior. Because a distinctive function of public communication is to advance social consensus, many scholars of the 19th and 20th century sought to understand the role of human communication in the process of social influence. Writing in 1904, Roy Park recognized suggestion theory as the “suggestive influence exerted by people on each other.” To understand suggestion, Park focused on studies of collective behavior like rallies and crowds. noting that "when two or more people come in contact... a 'circular process' of mutual suggestibility gets triggered" However, scholars used different terms, including imitation, sympathy, reciprocal suggestion and prestige suggestion to describe the role of human communication in consensus formation. During the 1920s and 1930s, rising interest in the nature of propaganda accelerated interest in suggestion theory, which drew upon ideas from the emerging field of psychoanalysis. Yet, by the 1960s, suggestion theory had become a "lost doctrine" as it was effectively marginalized by scholars aiming to establish communication scholarship as a new discipline. Instead of emphasizing how humans engage in reciprocal suggestion to influence each other's attitudes and behavior, communication scholars critiqued studies of propaganda and persuasion, and emphasized the idea that media had only limited effects on individuals in society. Focus on rational argumentation replaced examination of popular suggestibility, propaganda, and persuasion.
