Posts Tagged “Communication Noise”

Communicators grapple with noise in their message every day. We spend years honing our communication skills – everything from improving our writing to developing creative, cutting edge designs – to eliminate as much noise as possible and get our messages read. But we often feel we’re working in vain when our messages, carefully crafted for simplicity and clarity, are completely misunderstood because of noise.

Communication noise has been defined as “anything that interferes with” the message being received as intended, and it is deeply rooted in the transmission model of communication: a sender sends a message and a receiver receives it. It arose from the application of Claude Shannon’s A Mathematical Theory of Information, which he developed in the 1940s to enhance the encryption of military messages. For Shannon, noise was a positive because it meant a message couldn’t be read easily.

Since then, Shannon’s theory and the idea of noise have been applied to many different human communication disciplines, including marketing and advertising. But the definition for noise is largely insufficient, is opposite of the meaning Shannon had placed on it, and reflects the problematic assumptions inherent in the transmission model of communication: that human communication is nothing more than a sender encoding his ideas into words or pictures and a receiver interpreting them.

As a graduate student, noise became of particular interest to me. I found that my general observations of family and friends showed very different and inconsistent reactions to messages, particularly television ads. This led me to take a look at the idea of noise and to build my master’s thesis around the subject.

I’ll share my thoughts and findings from my thesis work in future posts. because, if we ever are going to combat noise in our communication programs, I feel we need to rethink the definition of noise.