Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), humans cannot share thoughts directly. Your communication is in the form of a symbol representing the idea you desire to communicate. Encoding is the process of putting an idea into a symbol. The symbols into which you encode your thoughts vary. You can encode thoughts into words, and you also can encode thoughts into nonspoken symbols. Tobin and Dobard (1999), for example, have shown how messages were encoded in quilts made by slaves.
Message.
The term Message identifies the encoded thought. Encoding is the process, the verb; the message is the resulting object.
Channel.
The term Channel is used technically to refer to the means by which the encoded message is transmitted. Today, you might feel more comfortable using the word media. The channel or medium, then, may be print, electronic, or the light and sound waves of face-to-face communication.
Noise.
The term Noise technically refers to anything that distorts the message the source encodes. Noise can take many forms:
External noise can be the sights, sounds, and other stimuli that draw your attention away from the message.
Internal noise refers to your thoughts and feelings that can interfere with the message.
Semantic noise refers to how alternative meanings of the source’s message symbols can be distracting.
Receiver.
The Receiver is the person who attends to the message. Receivers may be intentional—that is, they may be the people the source desired to communicate with—or they may be any person who comes upon and attends to the message.
Decoding.
Decoding is the opposite of encoding and just as much an active process. The receiver is actively involved in the communication process by assigning meaning to the symbols received.
Receiver Response.
Receiver response refers to anything the receiver does after having attended to and decoded the message. That response can range from doing nothing to taking some action or actions that may or may not be the action desired by the source.
Feedback.
Feedback refers to that portion of the receiver response of which the source has knowledge and to which the source attends and assigns meaning. You as a reader of this text may have many responses, but only when you respond to a survey or send an e-mail to the author does feedback occur. Feedback makes communication a two-way or interactive process.
Context.
The final component of communication is Context. Generally, context can be defined as the environment in which the communication takes place and helps define the communication. If you know the physical context, you can predict with a high degree of accuracy much of the communication. For example, you have certain knowledge and expectations of the communication that occurs within synagogues, mosques, and churches. At times, you intentionally plan a certain physical environment for your communication: You may want to locate your romantic communications in a quiet, dimly lit restaurant or on a secluded beach. The choice of the environment, the context, helps assign the desired meaning to the communicated words.
In social relationships, the relationship between the source and receiver may help define much of the meaning of the communication. Again, if you know the context, you can predict with a high degree of accuracy much of the communication. For example, knowing that a person is being stopped by a police officer for speeding is enough to predict much of the communication. Certain things are likely to be said and done; other things are very unlikely.
Culture is also context. Every culture has its own worldview; its own way of thinking of activity, time, and human nature; its own way of perceiving self; and its own system of social organization. Knowing each of these helps you assign meaning to the symbols.
Not everyone agreed with the Berlo (1960) model. For example, semanticist S. I. Hayakawa (1978) noted that decoding—or listening—seems to give the receiver a subordinate role to the source. When someone speaks, others stop what they are doing to listen. Therefore, it would seem that the source is viewed as more active and as more important in the process. Hayakawa’s observation makes it clear that cultural beliefs affect how the process of communication is defined.
The Berlo model can lead you to think of communication as consisting of an active source and a passive receiver. Speaking may be considered a more noble activity and may demand that others cease other activities to listen. Indeed, in many cultures, listening does place one in a subordinate role to that of the source. In other cultures, where the group’s history and knowledge are told and retold verbally, the role of the listener who accurately remembers is critical. The story is told that the Puritans, believing themselves to have been called to save heathens, preached to the American Indians. The Indians affirmed conversions to Christianity to the delight of the early settlers. Then the Indians told the Puritans the Indian story of creation and asked the settlers to affirm it. The Indian communication style was not to disagree but to listen and affirm. The Puritans were disappointed that communication, in the Western understanding of communication, had failed. In the American Indian understanding of communication, it had not.
Linear and interactive models seem to suggest that communication is an isolated single discrete act independent of events that precede or follow it. Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) (Pearce & Cronen, 1980) views communication as a social process, rather than a tool, in which individuals achieve some degree of mutual understanding and act together to achieve mutual goals. CMM emphasizes patterns of interaction rather than a single communication act and recognizes that interacting parties have influence on each other.
In interactions with others, we assign meanings to others’ communication based on past experiences and past cultural learning. Through continued communication, we create a new shared social reality. In intercultural interactions, communicators seek a cultural independent way of achieving mutual understanding.
The Media of Intercultural Communication
One component of the communication process is the channel, or medium, by which the encoded message is transmitted. In past centuries, written letters carried by human couriers were the dominant media. In the Roman Empire of the 1st century BCE, letters and books were copied and distributed among friends that could reach Britain in 5 weeks and Syria in 7 weeks (Standage, 2013). In the 20th century, electronic mass media became dominant. Through today’s social media, communicators create online communities to instantly share messages and images. The focus in this text is not on the form of media use but rather on how culture is reflected in media use.
Human Couriers and Intermediaries
One early form of intercultural communication still in widespread use today is human couriers. Another person can be used as a medium. You can easily imagine messages
