STUDY TASK 1: COMMUNICATION

For our task we were assigned to use Shannon & Weaver's model of the communication process, to analyse one piece of visual communication. 
Refer to the associated concepts of channel capacity, noise, redundancy and entropy and try to cover questions such as

What are the main communicative functions of redundancy?
What are the ways in which convention can be said to facilitate understanding?
How does your chosen piece of visual communication that breaks or extend specific conventions?
How does this effect the desire to communicate or the intended audience?

I looked at an article from the Daily Mail "The Carnage goes on: Now Liverpool city centre is the scene of drunken bad behaviour as hundreds of students take part in controversial pub crawl" to see how the shannon and weaver model applied.

The information source is the Daily Mail, who target the general public, mostly middle-class people in their twenties and thirties, although people of older ages also buy it as it carries important stories as well. 

The transmitter who encodes this message is the editor of the newspaper website who uses images and text in a certain context and tone of voice to signal this message through a channel.

This photo from the story without the content of the article or header would be hard to decode alone, it simply looks like students having a good night out in the city. However with the language used in the article like bad behaviour, controversial and carnage the message is made redundant about how the audience would receive it, by building a negative context for them to relate to. Stereotypically as a audience their a pre conceived notions about students like, causing trouble on nights out through fights, drunken behaviour and loosing all sense of their respect. Stories like this have been shown in other new stories and general media and has become desensitsed to a general audience as it's highly predictable. The Daily Mail is biasly working with generic stereotypes to make the message clear and understood. 

The chanel in which it is recieved is the newspapers website, the online media allows for the story to be updated and commented on which suggests it's for an active target audience. The category in which the article falls under is 'news' which gives it a sense of urgency and concern for it's target market to read.

The reciever is the audience who read and decode the article, which can be any of the listed above. The twenty  year old target market might find this article nostalgic or relatable in a funny sense due to the candid images. Compares to the middle class thirty year olds that might find this offensive and a outrage.

The destination is the target audiences perception which could be received that students are careless when it comes to drinking on nights out. This is not only shown through the use of language but through the generic stereotypes in the images, which anchors the message.

Reviewing the models different stages has allowed me to identify the steps in making a message in clear in a design or article. Also finding were problems can occur in the model such as noise, technical, semantic and effectiveness has allowed me to analyse and find solutions on how to solve them, which is very useful. Communication is a priority in graphic design and if it's not clear the piece lacks in meaning.