Classifications on the basis of Levels, Intraperosnal, Interpersonal, Group, Public and Mass Communication

On the basis of Level

Intra-personal Communication

It is the most basic form of communication. It occurs when an individual sends and receive message internally. We spent most of our time thinking and our thought process is nothing but intra personal communication where one person sending message and the same person receive them. Because intrapersonal communication is centered in the self, you are the sender and the receiver.  The message is made up of your thoughts and feelings and the channel is your brain, which processes what you are thinking and feeling. There is also feedback because you talk to yourself, you discard certain ideals and replace them with others.

Interpersonal Communication

Interpersonal communication is the process of sending and receiving message between two persons. Interpersonal communication could be verbal or non verbal. This is universal form of communication between two people. It is an ideal and effective communication because one can easily get immediate feedback.

To better understand the concept of interpersonal communication, one needs to compare it to other forms of communication. In so doing, one would examine how many people are involved, how physically close they are to one another, how many sensory channels are used, and the feedback provided. Interpersonal communication differs from other forms of communication in that there are few participants involved, the interactants are in close physical proximity to each other, there are many sensory channels used, and feedback is immediate.

Interpersonal communication also called dyadic communication.

Group communication

Communication between two or more than two people are described as group communication. Group communication is an extension of interpersonal communication where more than two individuals are involved in exchange of ideas, skills and interest.

This form of communication occurs among a small number of people for the purpose of solving a problem. The group must be small enough so that each member has a chance to interact with all the other members.

The communication process in group communication is more complex than in interpersonal communication because the group members are made up of several sender-receivers. As a result, there are more chances for confusion. Messages are also more structured in small groups because the group is meeting for a specific purpose.

Mass Communication

Mass communication is the process of delivering ideas, information and attitudes to the sizeable and diversified audience. This is done by using various media vehicles like newspaper, radio, television, magazines, internet and social media networks. It addressed to masses, to an extremely large audience.

Mass Communication represents the creation and sending of a homogeneous message to a large heterogeneous audience through the media.

Stanley Baran defines Mass Communication as the process of creating shared meaning between the mass media and their audience. Also, John Bittner defines Mass Communication as messages communicated through a mass medium to a large number of people.

Mass Communication can also be defined as a device by which a group of people working together transmits information to a large heterogeneous and anonymous audience simultaneously. It is a process by which information originates from the source to the receiver, having been thoroughly filtered and transmitted through a channel (Sambe 2005:29).

Features of Mass Communication

Mass Communication is distinguished from other kinds of communication by a number of features or characteristics. They are:

1. Mass Medium

2. Presence of Gatekeepers

3. Delayed Feedback

4. Limited Sensory Channels

5. Impersonal Vs Personal Communication

1. Mass Medium

For a medium to be regarded as mass in communication it must have acquired fifty million adopters (Kaye & Medoff 2005). Radio, Television, internet etc are examples of media which are regarded as mass media because they can reach out to no fewer than fifty million audience at a time. In mass communication, messages reach far beyond the immediate proximity of the sender and could even get to the uttermost part of the world.

  1. Presence of Gatekeepers

In mass communication, sent messages do not reach the audience in raw form. Messages are usually ‘treated’. The implication of this is that there is usually no guarantee that what the message receivers get is exactly the message sent by the source.

In mass media organizations, the gatekeepers are usually the reporters, sub-editors, editors, producers, writers, etc. The concept of gatekeeper was first coined by Kurt Lewin who describes gatekeepers as individuals or groups of persons who govern the travels of news items in the communication channels.

Gatekeepers could also be defined as any person or formally organized group directly involved in relaying or transferring information from one individual to another through a mass medium. A gatekeeper can be a film producer who cuts a scene from the original script, a network censor who deletes a scene from a prime – time show, a director who determines what segment of film to use in a documentary, a newspaper executive who determines the topic for an editorial, or any other individual in the processing or control of messages disseminated through mass media (Bittner 1989:12).

In actual sense, a gatekeeper does three major functions:

  1. Limiting the information through editing before dissemination.
  2. Expanding the amount of information by injecting additional views or angles.
  3. Reorganizing or reinterpreting the information gathered before disseminating it.

3. Delayed Feedback

Unlike in interpersonal communication where reply/feedback is made almost instantly, the feedback in mass communication is always delayed, say for a day, week or month. Burgoon et al 1978 cited in Folarin 1994 says “Feedback is often limited, delayed and indirect”. Mass Communicators are usually subject to additional feedback in form of criticism in other media, such as a television critic writing a column in a newspaper (Baran 2004:7). In other words, feedback in mass communication is not instant. It is mostly through letters to the editor or telephone calls or personal calls on the media.

Stanley Baran coined the term ‘delayed inferential feedback’ when he said  that television executives do not usually wait for feedbacks on what they must do not to improve programming but only infer using the rating measured by the number of viewers.

  1. Limited Sensory Channels

This feature has to do with the fact that mass medium limits the number of sensory channels upon which audience can draw. In other words, mass communication only enables one to use his or her sense of sight and hearing since one can only see the visual picture and hear the voice of the speaker on the broadcast station. This is unlike in a face- to- face communication where the audience can shake hands or hug the politicians and as such, have no limitation to the sensory channels.

  1. Impersonal and Personal Communication

Unlike in face – to – face communication where communication is personal, participants in mass communication are usually strangers and, hence messages are more impersonal.

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