Communication Theories

We might say that communication consists of transmitting information from one person to another. In fact, many scholars of communication take this as a working definition, and use Lasswell's maxim, "who says what to whom in what channel with what effect," as a means of circumscribing the field of communication theory.

A simple communication model with a sender transferring a message containing information to a receiver. Like the picture as the following.

Source: Wikipedia

From the article, communicatin theories can be helpful in studying new media, we can find that according to the uses and gratification theory, people are active media consumers and thus they choose certain media based on the gratifications they sought and obtained. Then, their key questions were what gratifications are related to internet addition. If one is addicted to the Internet because of “killing time,” intervention should be targeted at providing him or her with alternative ways of “killing time.” Here, the author is trying to use communication theories to analyse the new media phenomenon.

In this age, we use Internet as our main channel to communicate with each other. I remember there is one day my internet is dead, and then I felt so boring and nervous. Maybe I will miss some important mails or maybe someone is waitting for me on the instant message , so I keep worrying about everything could be happened. Since then, I start to realize how do I rely on the internet.