Part 1 - Development Communication: Applied Communication at the Grassroots

Dr. Abe V. Rotor
Afro-Asian Institute, Tel-Aviv, Israel
(From the Lectures of Dr. Chanoch Jacobsen, Professors Shimon Zuckerman, Shulamit Elfassy, Michel Isaak, and Gershon Tabor)

“A genuine meeting of minds may result if both parties in interest will concede to the other side the honor of believing, at least as an initial assumption, that its point of view is not merely vicious or silly.”

- George H. Sabine

The four basic elements in every communication process

The communication source, the person whose ideas or meanings are to be transferred to another person.
communication receiver, the person/s to whom the ideas or meaning are to be transferred.
message which can be transferred from the source to the receiver.
the message has to travel through a channel or medium in order to successfully make the passage from source to receiver.

The six steps or stages in the process

Stage 1: Creation
The person as the communication source conceives of an idea which he wants to transmit to someone else. Clear yourself about what you want to communicate. Only when the source knows clearly what he wants to communicate is it likely that the receiver will understand him.

Stage 2: Encoding
Meanings and ideas are structures of the mind. Encode your ideas into symbols which you are sure will be correctly understood by the receiver.

Stage 3: Transmission
An idea or meaning which has been encoded into symbols is called a message. The word symbols have to be either spoken, or written and displayed; the gestures have to be shown; the music has to be performed, and so on with other symbols.

Stage 4: Reception
Environmental conditions have a direct bearing on fidelity. But beyond that, fidelity depends on which and how many of the receiver’s five senses are activated to receive the message: seeing, hearing, touching, tasting or smelling. (The fidelity of our senses is in this order.)

Stage 5: Decoding
The receiver, having received the encoded message, must now decode it in order to comprehend its meaning. One can not decode a message whose symbols one does not recognize. It does happen that we receive messages which seem incomprehensible to us, as when someone speaks to us in language we do not know. In such cases we usually try to communicate to the source that we do not understand him

Stage 6: Assimilation (final stage in the simple one-way communication process)

In order to “ make sense” of the decoded message, to understand it, the receiver must relate it to what he already knows and assimilate it within the total information available to him. The more life experience a person has had, the more likely it is that his store of knowledge will contain elements with which he can make sense out of a new ideas and meanings.

To summarize, the communication process involves four basic elements and six stages.
The four elements are: 1.) The source, 2.) The receiver, 3.) The message, and 4.) The channel.

The six stages of the process are: 1.) Creation, 2.) Encoding 3.) Transmission, 4.) Reception, 5.) Decoding, 6.) Assimilation

At the core of all extension work lies the process of communication. Indeed, the very term “extension work” was chosen by its originators to convey the idea of communication lines extending beyond the boundaries of the universities to include the rural population in the surrounding countryside, and urban marginal communities.

All extension workers, however diverse their specific fields of expertise maybe, must be highly skilled communicators, because they stand and work at a crucial intersection of a widespread communication network. This network encompasses the rural population, the various service centers in towns and cities such as markets, supplies, experiment stations, educational facilities, and local as well as governmental agencies. ~