Communication — Nature, Types, Barriers & Mass Media

The standard chain is: sender → encoding → message → channel → decoding → receiver → feedback, with noise able to attack any link and context surrounding the whole. Learning it as a chain matters, because most exam questions name one link and ask what happens if it fails.

1. Sender / source / communicator — the person or organisation with an idea. The sender’s communication skills, attitudes, knowledge and social-cultural position all shape what is sent.
2. Encoding — converting the idea into transmittable symbols: words, numbers, gestures, images. Poor encoding, not poor thinking, is the commonest failure in a classroom.
3. Message — the encoded content, with four aspects examiners like: content, code, treatment and structure.
4. Channel / medium — the route the message travels: air, print, telephone, screen, or one of the five senses in Berlo’s account.
5. Decoding — the receiver’s interpretation. Meaning is assigned here, which is why the same message decodes differently for different receivers.
6. Receiver / audience — one person, a group, or a mass audience. The overlap between sender’s and receiver’s field of experience decides how much can be shared at all.
7. Feedback — the receiver’s response travelling back, which converts a one-way signal into communication. It may be immediate (a raised hand), delayed (a letter to the editor), verbal or non-verbal.
8. Noise — anything that distorts. Channel noise is physical interference; semantic noise is distortion inside meaning, such as jargon or an ambiguous word. Exam questions love the second because candidates forget it exists.

Five models are asked again and again. Do not memorise their diagrams; memorise three facts each — who, what the components are, and what the model is criticised for. Almost every question in this area is really a question about the criticism.

Verbal communication uses words — spoken or written; non-verbal uses everything else. The examiner’s standard point is that when the two conflict, receivers usually believe the non-verbal channel, because it is harder to fake. A teacher who says "any questions?" while packing a bag has communicated "no questions", and the class hears the bag.

Inside any organisation — a university department included — communication flows along two systems at once. The formal system follows the official hierarchy, is recorded, slow and accountable. The informal system, called the grapevine, follows friendship and proximity, is unrecorded, fast, and cannot be abolished; good administrators learn to listen to it rather than ban it.

• Downward communication — from higher to lower levels: orders, policy, syllabus circulars, feedback on performance. Its typical defect is filtering and loss as it descends level by level.
• Upward communication — from lower to higher: suggestions, complaints, reports, student feedback. Its typical defect is distortion by fear — subordinates soften bad news, so the top learns of a problem last.
• Horizontal / lateral communication — between equals: two teachers of the same class, two departments planning a seminar. It builds coordination and is the fastest formal channel.
• Diagonal / crosswise communication — across both level and department, such as an assistant professor writing directly to the examination controller. Efficient but liable to bypass and annoy the line authority.
• One-way vs two-way — a notice board, a printed advertisement and a recorded lecture are one-way; a tutorial, an interview and a telephone call are two-way. Two-way communication is slower but far more accurate, because errors are caught by feedback.
• Grapevine chains (as classified by Keith Davis): single strand (a line of one-to-one telling), gossip (one person tells everybody), probability (random spread), and cluster (a few tell a few selected others) — the cluster chain is regarded as the commonest in organisations.

Classroom communication is the applied heart of this unit, because NET is a teacher-eligibility test. It is planned, purposive, largely verbal, evaluated, and asymmetric — the teacher controls turn-taking, topic and time. Effective classroom communication therefore depends less on eloquence than on deliberately handing some of that control back: asking open questions, waiting after asking, accepting a wrong answer as data, and using pupils’ ideas in the next sentence.

Flanders’ Interaction Analysis (Ned A. Flanders, 1960s) turns that advice into a measurement. An observer codes what is happening in the class every three seconds into one of ten categories: seven for teacher talk, two for pupil talk and one for silence or confusion. The codes are entered into a 10 × 10 matrix and ratios are computed from it — the teacher-talk ratio, the pupil-talk ratio, and above all the indirect-to-direct (I/D) ratio, which compares encouraging behaviour with controlling behaviour.

Group communication sits between interpersonal and mass communication: a small number of people, a shared goal, roles that emerge, and feedback that is immediate but competitive for airtime. Seminars, tutorials, group discussions and committee meetings are its academic forms. Intercultural communication adds the problem that sender and receiver decode with different rules. Edward T. Hall’s distinction between high-context cultures (much meaning carried implicitly by relationship and situation) and low-context cultures (meaning stated explicitly in words) explains a great many failures, as do ethnocentrism — judging another culture by one’s own standards — and stereotyping.

The 7 Cs are the standard checklist for a message, and they are asked both as a list to complete and as a diagnosis to apply. Learn them as repairs: each C names a specific way messages fail.

Two skills matter as much as the seven: active listening and feedback craft. Active listening is not silence but visible work — attending, paraphrasing back ("so your objection is that…"), asking clarifying questions, withholding judgement until the speaker finishes. Good feedback is specific, descriptive, timely, and about behaviour rather than personality: "your third paragraph has no citation" teaches, while "you are careless" only wounds.

Barrier questions are the highest-frequency item in this unit, and they are almost always classification questions: a situation is described and you must name the barrier. So learn the boundary between the categories, not just the list. The decisive question is where does the distortion sit — in the surroundings, in the body, in the mind, in the language, in the culture, or in the structure of the organisation.

Mass communication is communication addressed by an organisation, through a technological medium, to a large, heterogeneous and anonymous audience, in messages that are public, rapid and transient, with feedback that is delayed and limited and content that passes through gatekeepers. Every one of those adjectives is examinable, and together they explain how mass communication differs from a conversation: the source is institutional rather than personal, and the audience cannot answer back in the same channel at the same speed.

• Functions. Lasswell named three functions of communication in society — surveillance of the environment (news), correlation of the parts of society in responding to it (editorial and interpretation), and transmission of the social inheritance (education and socialisation). Charles Wright later added entertainment; many texts add persuasion / mobilisation and cultural promotion.
• Print media — newspapers, magazines, books. Permanent, re-readable, good for detail and analysis, but requires literacy and is slower. India’s first newspaper was Hicky’s Bengal Gazette, 1780; the Press Council of India functions under the Press Council Act, 1978.
• Electronic media — radio and television. Fast, reach the non-literate, high emotional impact, but transient and one-way. All India Radio has borne that name since 1936; Doordarshan’s experimental telecast began in 1959; Prasar Bharati, created by the Prasar Bharati Act, 1990, came into effect in 1997 as the autonomous public broadcaster.
• New media — the internet, web portals, social platforms, streaming, mobile applications. Its defining features are interactivity, convergence, hypertextuality, digitality and virtuality; feedback is immediate, so the sender–receiver distinction largely dissolves and every user becomes a potential publisher.

The media and society questions turn on four named ideas. Agenda setting (McCombs and Shaw, 1972) holds that media may not tell us what to think but do tell us what to think about, by deciding which issues are covered and how prominently. Gatekeeping — a term from Kurt Lewin, applied to news by David Manning White in 1950 — is the selection process by which most available events never become news. Two-step flow (Katz and Lazarsfeld) argues that media influence reaches most people through opinion leaders rather than directly. And the spiral of silence (Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, 1974) explains why people who believe their view is in the minority tend to stop expressing it, making the majority view look larger than it is.

Two policy-facing concepts complete the unit. The digital divide is the gap between those who have access to information technology and those who do not — and it is not only a divide of access to devices and connectivity but also of usage skills and of the benefit obtained, which is why merely distributing hardware does not close it; in India it also runs along rural–urban, gender, income and language lines. Media literacy is the answering competence: the ability to access, analyse, evaluate and create media messages — to ask who made this message, who profits from it, what has been left out, and how the same event is framed elsewhere. For a teacher this is now part of the job, since learners meet more claims on a screen in a day than in a term of lectures.