Sam Petrie
SPE100 Midterm
Paterno
The transactional model of communication has changed my understanding of the process of human communication by opening my eyes to the fact that communication is an ongoing process and that the sender and recipiant of messages must work together in order for the right message to be conveyed, as the giving and recieving of messages is reciprocal (West & Turner, 2006). The idea that communication is reciprocal was a foriegn one to me prior to being introduced to the transacational model.
The majority of people are under the assumption that communication works sort of like playing catch with a baseball. One person throws the ball, the other person catches it and throws the ball back. Communcation is like that to most people: a person sending a message, the other person receiving the message and then the recipiant becomes the sender in order to reply. However if that was the case then during communication, assuming people heard the message, there would be no mis interpretation of what somebody meant to convey to another person. But misinterpretations of what someone said happens all the time, from crying literal meaning to just someone using a word in a different context then someone else is used to hearing. The way that one person or another will interpret the contextual use of a word, generally depends on their field of experience, which is a person's history, culture and heredity, which helps govern how people interpret things during communication (West & Turner, 2006).
Communication is a complicated ongoing process that requires both parties to actively participate in it in order for communication to work out well. Communication draws heavily on the shared parts of people's individual fields of experience. Two people with similar fields of experience are going to be able to communicate better then two people with drastically different fields of experience. For instance, two people who share an involvement in the online poker culture would be able to communicate with each other, all things being equal, better than someone who was involved in that culture and someone who never has been. On a basic level, it is the same sentiment as most people always knew: you'll always find it easier to communicate and have a relationship with those you have things in common with.
This isn't to say that people with very little in common in the field of experiences cannot communicate, but that if that is the case, people need to be ready and willing to revise and clarify things if need be in their communications. This includes asking questions, and doing everything in our power to not be offended at first but instead try to understand what one person meant, assuming we do not understand at first (Wood, 1998).
All in all the transactional model of communication has helped me better understand communication in a way that is more descriptive of how it actually works. No longer do I see miscommunication between two people as one person merely being too stubborn to understand or listen to the person speaking. This is because communication is a reciprocal activity that requires all those involved to actively participate, not one just listen, and one just speak. This realization ties in very well with ideas garnered by myself in SPE104 about people always making and sharing meanings on one level or another.