Thursday, July 7, 2011

"I'm not asking you who's on second base!"


To demonstrate the communication process, there was no other option than the classic skit, 'Who's on first?'. In this skit, the man on the right is trying to learn the nicknames of the players on a baseball team, and the man on the left is trying to inform him. However, the nicknames of the teammates consist of things like 'Who', 'What', and 'I don't know', resulting in some major confusion between the two!

In this particular case, the sender would be the man on the left, who is trying to inform the other man about the nicknames. The receiver would be the man on the right, who is trying to learn the names. The message would be the nicknames of each of the teammates on the baseball team, and the context is technically in a comedy skit from a movie, though it could also just plain be that they're on stage, and the man on the right is interrupting a show to ask his question. The vital aspect of this particular conversation would be the receiver, because he is clearly decoding the symbols that the sender is using to send the message. The sender encoded the phrases 'Who', 'What', and 'I Don't Know' as names for the teammates. However, the receiver decoded the message with the only knowledge he has of these words, which is their dictionary definitions. The receiver then incorrectly interprets that the sender has no idea what the names of the teammates are.

This happens in a surprisingly large amount of conversations. The sender attaches a different meaning to a symbol than the receiver does, so when the message is sent, the receiver interprets the message completely differently than the sender intended. It just goes to show that communication will always be an imperfect process.

1 comment:

  1. I believe that this is an effective example of the communication model because it shows a continuous exchange between the sender and receiver. Also, it shows just how encoding and decoding can be influenced and interfered.

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