Activity 8, page 62: Interpersonal vs. Mass Communication
OK now you should be more familiar with the three models of communication. Today we're going to use terms from those models to discuss some of the major differences between interpersonal and mass communication.
Let’s go back to definitions of interpersonal and mass communication. Do you remember some of the examples? If your mother yells at you for coming home at 4:00 a.m., this is an example of what kind of communication? That’s right. Interpersonal communication is traditionally face-to-face, generally between two people.
Mass communication, on the other hand, is the production and distribution of an identical message to a very large and diverse audience using some sort of technology. Let me repeat that, mass communication is the production and distribution of an identical message to a very large and diverse audience using some sort of technology. It is not face-to-face. The TV show Friends and the publication of a magazine like Newsweek are examples.
With these definitions in mind, let’s compare interpersonal and mass communication in more detail. The models you read about had similar components. Does anyone remember what those were? Yes you’re right, source and receiver, or destination, were two of them. We’ll also talk about message and noise. I am going to go through each component, pointing out similarities and differences between interpersonal and mass communication.
Let's start with the source. In interpersonal communication, the source is an individual like you or me who decides to send a message. Perhaps you want to ask someone to go to lunch or signal to your friend across the room that you’ll call him later. Likewise, in mass communication, there is also always a source. However, instead of an individual, the source is usually a team of people. A professional team. Let's take the cable sports network ESPN. How many people do you think were involved in announcing yesterday’s sports results? There are several ESPN producers, dozens of reporters at each game, the camera crew, and many others.
Another difference is the amount of control the source has. In interpersonal communication, when we speak to another person face-to-face, we have a lot of control over what we want to say and how and when we want to say it, including our tone. On the other hand, in mass communication, such as in the publication of a newspaper, a single person doesn't have total control. At least we hope not. There are reporters and editors. There are printers and distributors. And, of course, the advertisers have more control than we may even think about, but we’ll talk about that in a later chapter. To sum up the idea of control, you should simply understand that there is much less individual control in mass communication than in interpersonal communication.
The next component is the message. In both types of communication, messages are sent to entertain, to inform, or to persuade. Which of the models you read about used the word “encoding”? Yes, you’re right. It was Schramm who showed how in interpersonal communication, the source encodes the message either verbally or nonverbally using words or gestures that he/she knows or hopes the receiver will understand. Therefore, the message is flexible; if the source gets any negative feedback, like someone making a face to show she/he doesn’t understand something, the source can modify the message.
Encoding also takes place in mass communication messages. In this case, the message includes the work of a production team using special effects such as sounds or color, depending on the medium. For example, the message might be encoded in text, like in books, in pictures, like in a billboard, in text and pictures like in magazines, or in moving images with sounds like in films or without sound like in digitized animation on a web page. Unlike interpersonal communication, the message in mass communication is not flexible at all because of the lack of immediate feedback, which we'll talk about later.
OK we still need to talk about the receiver. The big difference between interpersonal communication and mass communication is the level of interaction between the source and the receiver. Since the receiver in interpersonal communication is usually just one person, most likely the source has direct contact with this person. On the other hand, the receivers in mass communication include a large and diverse audience, perhaps millions of people. The source has little or no contact with them because they are spread out geographically perhaps all over the world. Because of the size of the audience they deal with, many media organizations feel that they have to assume their receivers are quite average. This is why newspapers are generally written at the fifth-grade reading level to reach to largest number of readers/receivers.
Before we wrap things up, I’d like to talk about something called noise. Do you remember this concept from the Shannon-Weaver model? Noise can cause messages to be inaccurate. There are two types of noise: physical or semantic. Physical noise is an easy concept to understand. Examples of physical noise include static on your cell phone or a plane flying overhead. Semantic, that’s s-e-m-a-n-t-i-c, noise is something that “gets in the way” of communication such as someone you’re talking to using a gesture that is new or offensive to you. There is no physical noise preventing you from hearing the message, but you can’t decode the message as intended by the source because you’re distracted by the “noise”—the semantic noise—the gestures. Noise can be even more disastrous in mass communication. For example, a satellite dish going out during a storm, a big scratch on your new DVD, a smudged article in USA Today, or a web page that cannot be loaded due to a bad link results in unsuccessful communication.
So now you have more information of the major players in interpersonal and mass communication: source, message, receiver, and noise. You’ll probably become more aware now of how and what you say to your friends today as well as the messages that mass media send to you on a daily basis. And you can certainly expect to find these concepts and terms on the mid-term exam. You'll need to define each term and give an example. So, if you're not sure about these concepts, be sure to make good use of your study group time, make concept cards, and come and see me during my office hours if you have further questions.
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