Announcing: A contribution to the critique of information systems models of human communication

McHoul, A.W. (1983) Announcing: A contribution to the critique of information systems models of human communication. Human Studies: A Journal for Philosophy and the Social Sciences, 6 (3). pp. 279-294.

Abstract

This essay furnishes a critique of the "information systems" conception of human communication. That conception, in its most familiar and skeletal form, treats the utterance as a message and conversational participants as emitters and receivers. In such a model there is assumed to be a chain of events whereby an emitter encodes a preverbal "idea" into the form of a verbal utterance and transmits that message through a medium, whereupon it is picked up and duly decoded by a receiver, the receiver then possessing the preverbal "idea". This "preverbal" domain is most usually considered to be one composed of mental states, pictures, or processes.