Linear Models and Interactive Models

The linear models of communication are a one-way process where one person acts on another person. There are five questions that make up the sequence of communication. Noise was later added to describe the loss of messages in the process of communicating from point to another. The interactive models of communication are where listeners give feedback in the process of communication. When communicator’s fields of experience overlap, the better the message will be received and understood. Wood asserts that the interactive models are an improvement upon the linear models, but both still describe communication as a sequential process. This means that one person is a sender of messages and the other person is the receiver. However, communication is an ongoing process, both sending and receiving messages among communicators even when we think we aren’t. It is an interactive process, not a single sequence of actions.

When I first read about the linear models of communication, I automatically thought of the game “Telephone.” I remember playing this in elementary school and the message never came out remotely like what it started as. Only the first person was the sender of the message. Everyone after this was simply repeating what message they thought they had received. By the end of the sequence, there was so much “noise” that the message became shortened and misinterpreted.