The Shannon Weaver Model

The Shannon Weaver Model of Communicate was developed by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver two researchers at Bell Telephone Labs. Originally, "Their goal was to ensure the maximum efficiency of telephone cables and radio waves." In their attempts they developed a mathematical theory of communication which would prove to aid in great advancements in the way information was transferred and made information "measurable for the first time". The Model is broken down into five elements:

An information source, which produces a message.

A transmitter, which encodes the message into signals

A channel, to which signals are adapted for transmission

A receiver, which 'decodes' (reconstructs) the message from the signal.

A destination, where the message arrives.

A sixth element, noise is a dysfunctional factor: any interference with the message travelling along the channel (such as 'static' on the telephone or radio) which may lead to the signal received being different from that sent.

By viewing the transfer of information in this light computer scientist and communication engineers where able to enhance the "capacity of various communication channels in 'bits per second' and it led to very useful work on redundancy in language".

The Shannon Weaver Model can the been seen today all over in the way that information is transferred both manually and digitally. All the usual suspects such as email, text, IM, twitter and anything else you can think of, on a very basic level, follows this transfer protocol. I believe the largest impact of this model was the way it inspirited the "measurement of information" and the effects of that impact us every single time we access a computer.

>http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/short/trans.html#D

>http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Provide_a_detailed_description_the_shannon_weaver_sender-message-receiver_model_of_communication