Visual Language: The Berlo Model Reading Response

Berlo's model was by far more interesting to me. There were many details not included in "A Communication Primer".


The model starts with listings of elements beneath the 4 main parts of Sender, Message, Channel, Receiver.

Sender: Communication skills, knowledge, social system, culture, attitudes

Message: Elements + structure, content, treatment, code

Channel: Seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting

Receiver: Communication skills, knowledge, social system, culture, attitudes


Sender and Receiver both share the same qualities because they are essentially the same, especially when feedback becomes part of the scenario. We are all sending and receiving data constantly. The schematic still focuses on the relationship between a 1 on 1 sending receiving situation rather than a mass of people.

In the section under Sender, which also applies to receiver, Particularly thought the section on communication skills was the most important. The other 4 seemed new to me though, and they were interesting reads. The knowledge of the content that is being sent or received is completely imperative. If I were to receive an essay written by a scholar on a subject I wasn't familiar with, the terminology and level of writing would soar over my head, creating noise and distance between me and the message. The same can be said for social systems. With each generation comes a new barrage of slang terms. These words become noise between that generation and other generations without understanding of these terms. The writing style also fits in here. If I were to read The Divine Comedy, the writing style and wording particular to that time period are going to become a barrier between me and the content I'm interested in.  Attitudes also become a big deal. If the receiver has no interest in the message being sent to him, such as spam mail in our inboxes, then the end result will be far from what the sender originally intended for that person to receive. The most interesting point however was his mentioning of touch used in social communication between the British and the French. Touch in that situation becomes an additional level beyond spoken word and even body language. With multiple channels conveying information, the message can be both more concrete and easily understood, or distorted by misunderstanding of the channel and it's intentions behind it.


The Message section explained the importance of encoding. In the encoding process, the sender must consider which code will be used, how it will be encoded (in order), and with what means. If using images, icons, symbols, or anything based in a worldwide acceptance of meaning, the sender has to consider with what extra information and contexts that message will bring to different cultures. Hierarchy also plays a major role. The elements that become placed in front of the others by aesthetic techniques or subject matter are going to come across to the viewer in the same way, assuming that the receiver has the same level of interest in the elements.


The Channel is a very broad section. The fact alone that he classified channel in terms of our senses limits this down exponentially. I loved that. Rather than rooting channel in what is currently available to us, such as television, computers, verbal language, writing and books, music, etc., the senses keep this nearly limitless amount of possibilities as a simple and timeless experience. Rather than you experiencing the message through email or what's on your screen, you receive the message through sight of the information on the screen, which is being encoded to you through the eye.

Visual Language: A Communications Primer Response

So, starting off the next project, we have started studying communication, and the process of broadcasting information. This video on laughingsquid.com is a 1953 instructional film for IBM, explaining this process and the noise that interfeers with this transmision.
http://laughingsquid.com/a-communications-primer-1953-by-ray-charles-eames/

In todays world  communication is sent in infinite ways, be it by computer, music, television, by mouth, by body language, by icons and symbols, or even the signals your brain intercepts and decodes when interacting with any of these communications. This video did a great job of bringing this complex process into a simple diagrammatic experience.

Using this diagram, explains the information transfer process in a nutshell.

1. The Sender has information
2. The Sender encodes the information
3. The Sender transmits or sends the information
4. Various noise, be it audio, visual, physical, mental interfere and alter the information
5. The Receiver gets the information
6. The Information is decoded
7. The Receiver then attempts to understand the information

However, it leaves out a major aspect of the broadcasting process. The feedback.  In a game of telephone, it's crucial that the beginning sender gets feedback, or return information from their receiver. This allows for mutual understanding unless the noise is so great that the feedback is also distorted. With feedback, a person can attempt to fix the noise, or the connection, and can correct any mistakes made in the encoding process that may have become noise itself. 

The simplicity of this diagram also leaves out many aspects of our decoding and encoding process. All aspects of our lives such as politics, culture, social constructs, etc. effect how we send and receive information. In the film the narrator mentions if you speak chinese to him and he can't speak or understand chinese, then he can't understand the message. Well beyond that, there is a further level of understanding. Through the process of understanding the chinese, there is a barrier or translation that must be overcome. A word in one language might have other meanings or contextual information that comes with it that the receiver misses out on. If you watch a Japanese move that has English subtitles or has been swapped with English dialogue, there is information lost in that transition of Japanese culture and linguistics to the English dialect. This can be said of any communication of differing culture or mode of communication that hasn't reached a worldwide agreement of meaning.