Gerbner’s model of communication, 1956
variability in the perception of an event by a
communicating agent and also in the way the
message is perceived by a receiver. He speaks
of the essential ‘creative, interactional nature of
the perceptual process’. Equally important is the
stress placed upon the importance of context to
the ‘reading’ of messages, and of the open nature
of human communication.
For Gerbner the relationship between form
and context in the communication process (S
= Signal) is dynamic and interactive. It is also
concerned with access and control, dimensions
which inevitably aff ect the nature and content
of communication messages – their selection,
shaping and distortion. At the level of the mass
media this is obvious, but access and control also
operate at the level of interpersonal communi-
cation – teachers in classrooms, for example;
speakers at public meetings, parents in the home
situation.
Back on the horizontal axis, Gerbner stresses
the importance of availability. A literate
electorate may have the capacity to read all the
facts about a political situation, all the pros and
cons of an industrial dispute, but that capacity
can only operate, and the pros and cons be
properly weighed, if the necessary facts are
made available. What Gerbner’s model does not
do is address itself fully to the problems of how
meaning is generated. Th e form or code of the
message (S) is taken for granted, whereas the‘relates to the content of culture itself – the
nature of knowledge and expertise, how infor-
mation is organized and evaluated, and who
decides’. Traditional formations and taxonomies
fall short of encompassing ‘the sheer volume
and idiosyncrasy of information online’ which
has ‘driven the creation of new tools, such
search engines and tags, that use searchers’
own language rather than the predetermined
controlled vocabulary (search terms or technical
languages) approved by experts, to locate and
retrieve relevant sources’.
Commons knowledge systems are ‘bottom-
up classification schemes for organizing and
categorizing diverse, arcane, local, personal, or
amateur information sources, which often chal-
lenge or critique expert disciplinary taxonomies’.
See facebook; google; narrative; podcast;
twitter; wikipedia; youtube.
★Gerbner’s model of communication,
1956 This is described by Denis McQuail in
Communication, (Longman, 2nd edition, 1993)
as perhaps ‘the most comprehensive attempt yet
to specify all the component stages and activities
of communication’. Below is a modifi ed version
of George Gerbner’s model as presented in
‘Towards a general model of communication’,
in Audio Visual Communication Review, 4. M
is responder to E (event) and may be human
or machine (such as a microphone or camera).
Gerbner’s emphasis is upon the considerable
Gerbner’s model of communication, 1956