By Jill Szoo Wilson
No Kings protests. Israel and Palestine peace talks. The Mayoral debate in New York City. And somewhere between those headlines, a viral argument about whether pumpkin spice season begins too early.
What a week!
During a class discussion on the topic of ethical communication, one of my students made an observation that stayed with me:
“Sometimes I walk away from a conversation with one of my friends or family members, and I think they really understood what I was saying. Then, like a week later, I’ll see something they post on social media and realize — whoa — we weren’t even in the same universe. How do you know if someone actually gets what you’re saying?”
There was real frustration in her voice as she grappled intellectually and emotionally with how to translate effective communication skills from the classroom to real-world relationships and conversations that truly matter to her.
Her question strikes at the heart of communication theory itself. Every major model—from Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s early work in information theory to the later transactional and constructivist frameworks—grapples with the same problem she voiced: how does meaning move from one mind to another without distortion? Communication is never just about speaking clearly; it’s about whether understanding travels intact from one mind to another. The first modern attempt to diagram that process came in 1948, when two Bell Labs researchers sought to solve a practical problem—how to transmit information efficiently over telephone lines—and ended up shaping a foundation for how we consider human connection today.
Section I: The Shannon–Weaver Model — Communication as Transmission
When Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver introduced their model of communication in 1948, they weren’t thinking about classrooms or conversations; they were thinking about telephones. Shannon, a mathematician at Bell Labs, was studying how to send messages through electrical circuits with the least amount of interference. His goal was precision: a system in which information could be transmitted, received, and decoded without distortion.
In its simplest form, the Shannon–Weaver Model outlines five key components: a sender, a message, a channel, noise, and a receiver. Later versions added feedback to acknowledge that communication rarely ends at reception; it loops back through response. The model’s simplicity made it foundational for how we understand all forms of message exchange, from radio broadcasts to human dialogue.
Imagine you’re explaining something important to a friend. You form the thought (sender), put it into words (message), speak aloud (channel), and hope it reaches the listener (receiver). Noise—anything from background chatter to the friend’s assumptions or daydreams—can distort what you mean. Feedback, whether a nod or a question, helps you gauge whether your message landed.
Now imagine trying to apologize to someone you care about after a painful misunderstanding. You’ve rehearsed the conversation for days, turning phrases over in your mind, searching for the language that might soften what was said. When the moment finally comes, you speak from the heart, but your voice trembles. You mean to say “I’m sorry,” yet what they hear is “I’m still defending myself.” You reach out, and somehow they retreat. The words are correct, but the meaning collapses somewhere between intent and reception.
The Shannon–Weaver Model helps us see the anatomy of that collapse. The “noise” isn’t external static or interference, but the invisible internal weight of emotion, memory, and assumption. Even when a message is spoken clearly, those unseen forces can bend it out of shape. The model reminds us that successful communication isn’t about flawless delivery but about whether understanding survives the distance between two people.
The model is practical but limited: it shows how messages move, not how meaning emerges. Shannon and Weaver understood communication as a linear transfer of data; humans experience it as something far more collaborative — a process of interpretation, empathy, and response.
This distinction is important because even a perfectly transmitted message can still fail to communicate meaning. As my student asked, “How do you know if someone actually gets what you’re saying?” According to Shannon and Weaver, you’d simply confirm that the message was received and decoded. But real understanding, as anyone who has been misunderstood knows, is not that simple. It requires shared context, empathy, and attention to nuance. These are elements that don’t fit neatly into a circuit diagram.
The Shannon–Weaver Model gives us a starting point: communication as transmission. Yet it leaves us asking what happens beyond transmission, where ideas meet perception. To explore that terrain, we turn to one of the most enduring frameworks in contemporary communication: Barnlund’s Transactional Model.
Section II: Barnlund’s Transactional Model — Communication as Co-Creation
By the 1970s, communication theorist Dean Barnlund proposed a shift so profound that it still reshapes how we teach the subject today. Where Shannon and Weaver treated communication as a line of transmission, Barnlund imagined something circular, alive, and reciprocal. He argued that the exchange itself was not an assembly line of words moving from one mind to another but a living process that creates a shared narrative between people.
Barnlund’s Transactional Model reimagined this process not as a one-way transfer of information but as a dynamic act of co-creation. Every conversation, he suggested, is an event that exists only in the moment it happens, built, revised, and reshaped by both participants at once. The act of meaning-making is mutual. Each person’s interpretation alters the message itself. In this way, communication becomes less about accuracy and more about emergence.
To help students see what this looks like, I often begin with an exercise that never fails to surprise them. I pair students and ask them to tell a simple story from their weekend. The first partner speaks for thirty seconds while the other listens silently, offering no reaction or feedback. Then they switch. When we debrief, most describe the silence as unsettling, even cold. “I felt like I was boring him or maybe he wasn’t even listening,” one student said. The second round changes everything. This time, listeners can nod, smile, or ask questions. The conversation immediately warms. Laughter enters the room. Meaning deepens. What changed wasn’t the content of the stories but the shared construction of them. Each speaker began shaping their language in response to the listener’s cues. Together, they built a small, co-authored moment of understanding.
If Shannon and Weaver gave us the map of communication, Barnlund taught us how to read the terrain. His model asks us to notice the pauses, gestures, silences, and emotional undercurrents that live beneath language. Meaning, he argued, is not simply sent; it is negotiated, felt, and co-authored.
Where Shannon and Weaver saw a sender and receiver, Barnlund saw communicators engaged in simultaneous exchange. Each person is both sender and receiver at once, continually encoding, decoding, and interpreting within a shared field of experience. Communication, in this view, is about negotiating reality together.
Section III: From Transmission to Transformation — Understanding the Difference
The Shannon-Weaver model teaches how to speak clearly, while Barnlund’s model teaches why clarity is sometimes not enough. One focuses on information; the other on interpretation. One aims for precision; the other for understanding.
Learning Shannon-Weaver fosters autonomy. It helps us become aware of purpose, audience, and structure. Learning Barnlund brings humility. It reminds us that even the most carefully crafted message depends on another person’s frame of meaning. There is comfort in realizing this: sometimes we can speak with care and still not be understood. Our responsibility is to communicate as clearly and honestly as we can, and then to accept the outcome rather than trying to control it. There is strength in understanding that we do not have to be fully understood to be worthy of speaking.
A simple exercise illustrates the difference. Imagine describing an image while someone, turned away, tries to draw it based only on your words. The first attempt, with no questions allowed, is pure Shannon-Weaver transmission. The drawing will likely be efficient but distorted. Now imagine trying again with questions and clarifications. The process slows, but understanding grows. Meaning, like art, becomes clearer when it is co-created.
Think of the miscommunication between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. For most of the novel, each interprets the other through the noise of pride, prejudice, and social expectation. Darcy’s words are technically clear—his first proposal is grammatical perfection—but his tone, timing, and failure to consider Elizabeth’s perspective distort the message beyond recognition. It takes a long series of feedback loops—letters, revelations, and changed behavior—for meaning to realign with intent. Only when both listen with humility rather than defensiveness does understanding emerge. Austen’s scene endures because it dramatizes the very truth Barnlund uncovered: communication becomes transformative only when both parties risk vulnerability and mutual perception.
The shift from transmission to creation mirrors a moral one. To communicate ethically is to recognize that every exchange plants something between people: a seed that can grow into trust or misunderstanding, grace or distance. The philosopher Martin Buber, writing in 1923 in I and Thou, taught that real life unfolds through genuine encounter. “All real living is meeting,” he wrote, describing how we come fully alive when we engage another person not as an object to persuade but as a presence to meet. Every tone of voice and every moment of attention becomes soil for what will take root between us. Our words are seeds, and the spaces we tend together become the garden we live in.
That realization gives us a kind of power that is both humbling and hopeful. It means that everyday choices in conversation — things like listening fully, asking questions, or pausing before reacting — can repair trust where there was once distance. Communication becomes not just a skill but a responsibility: the way we decide, moment by moment, what kind of relationships and communities we will build.
My student’s question still lingers: How do you know if someone actually gets what you’re saying? Understanding grows each time we listen with patience and speak with care. It lives in the meeting itself, in the ongoing work of tending meaning between people. When we stay present to one another, communication becomes the living art of truly meeting another human being.
For more essays by Jill Szoo Wilson on Substack, click here!
Necessary Whispers 