The above postcards are from www.postsecret.com and ”PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.”-text quoted from website.
I selected these 3 postcards to show the linear model of communication. These postcards show secrets from people, and are published on the PostSecret website. Most people write in to “say” something to someone, whom they didn’t get a chance to, or simply to “say” a secret that they need to get out of their chest. Readers like us, are passive targets as receivers of this messages. The senders of this message, in this case the message is the secret, send their messages through a channel, in this case it’s the postcard, and we, as receivers passively read it but do not respond to it. Even though this is one of the earliest form of communication, it is still very valid today, based on the example I illustrated.
To elaborate, let me talk about the first postcard. The sender of the message, let’s call him/her X for convenience sake, wishes to “tell” her dog something. Instead of doing so directly, X writes a postcard, using it as the channel/medium, to convey the message. She writes the message, “Everyone says I saved your life. The truth is, you saved mine.” Conventionally, the receiver of the message would be the target of the message. However, we, as readers, received the message too. In fact, the targeted receiver is not the receiver. We, as outsiders, are the receivers instead. Knowing that her dog can’t read, he can’t be the passive receiver of the message. This is a twist to the usual linear model of communication. Hence, it can’t be said that it is an accurate representation of the model.
However, the next postcard is a more accurate representation of the model. In the second one, the father of the baby, wishes to tell the public a secret he has kept to himself all these while. He, of course, does not expect a response/reply to his message. So the father, as the sender, writes a message, “After my son was born, I secretly wished he would die so I could have my life back. Now I would give my life so he could live. I never knew I could love someone so much.” He uses the postcard and internet(because PostSecret publishes the postcards it receives on the website weekly) as the channel/medium to convey his message to the public, who are the passive receivers. This model of communication is illustrated successfully in this example, and shows that the linear model of communication is never too old to be obsolete.
In the 3rd postcard, the sender, perhaps the wife of a soldier, “hopes” that her husband will read the message, as he is the intended target of the message. She, like the rest of senders, conveys her message, “Sometimes I let it go to message on purpose. I can’t bear the sadness in your voice. Come home safe,” through postcard and internet, letting it be the medium for transmission. If her husband reads the message and knows it is his wife who sent it to him, he completes the linear model of communication by being the receiver. However, he definitely would respond to it. Hence, the interactive model of communication comes into play here. The linear model of communication is broken as there is feedback. The soldier would decide to call his wife to tell her that he got the message and he loves her. That is a response to the message that she sent him. The linear model of communication is insufficient to describe this form of communication as the receiver is no longer passive. It is also important to take note of the noise that would be present in the communication. The soldier might have been in Iraq fighting a war, and reception would definitely not be very good. So he calls his wife, hoping to say something romantic. But, because of poor network, he keeps getting cut off and sometimes his voice becomes muffled. His wife hears what he’s saying, but not in the way he intended it to be. Instead of it being romantic, it ends up being frustrating because half of the time, she can’t hear him. Noise is an extremely important element here as it changes the message altogether.
Here’s something to think about: If the receiver is not the intended receiver, can the communication still fit into the model?
