A breakdown of communication: the process model and cybernetics

Claude Shannon: father of information age

In today's class we were introduced to Shannon and Weaver's model, which contributes a lot to the communication devices, in Shannon and Weaver's case, is for the telephone. However, in today's era, everything around us that we usually take for granted, this model can be viewed as the the core, or even, the 'mother' to every communication devices we have today.

To take instant messaging for example, the Information Source is person A sending perhaps a picture message; and the Transmitter is the cellphone; the Channel might be the satellite; Receiver is person B's cellphone; and finally Destination is person B.

In between, Noise is anything added to a signal between transmission and and reception. For instant, in the picture message, person A wanted to send a picture of himself, but ended up with a car as background, which, might confuses or distort person B's attention: is person A trying to tell him about A; or the car? (IMO)
Anything that might lead to distraction or confusion to the receiver is consider 'noise'.

This can be in any form of medium, even a piece of paper, when an writer(Information source) has too much information exploded on a piece of paper via their pen(Transmitter), while reading through the book(Channel), browsing through each page(transmitter), the reader(Receiver) will be confused by the message the writer is trying to get across.

To add, there is more to the whole transmitter -> Receiver thing, such as the feedback loop. Feedback is fundamental as it is used to further increase the quality of the transmitter, or to reduce the noise, in order for the receiver to get a clearer reading of the information being sent across.

Like the example below:

Customer acquisition and retention is a significant expense for any company. Losing an important channel of communication with a customer can result in lost revenue. Take control with Feedback Loops and know what channels of communication your customers prefer.

Feedback Loops are systems that Twelve Horses sets up with ISPs to track whether their messages are being marked as Spam. Once this integration is complete Twelve Horses continually monitors any of these notifications. If an email is marked as Spam, Twelve Horses will automatically unsubscribe that address from the list, providing the sender with a considerable reduction in time, effort and money.

(Whitelisting & Feedback Loops - Improve Email Delivery)