Reference no: EM133452540

Case Study: Think of a message that you've received through more than one channel and then tell, briefly, how the process was different for each. This will allow us to apply the major factors in historical communications theories to actual examples. Here's a general example:

It is generally assumed that it is not good for one to receive the news of the death of a loved one from a mass medium such as the television, radio, or a newspaper. Often, the first reports of a tragedy withhold the name(s) of the deceased until the next of kin can be notified. Analysis of this situation upholds this generally accepted wisdom. Learning of the death of a loved one while watching a news report on television, for example, can be more shocking and can make one more vulnerable to emotions than hearing the sad news in a personal communication. The mass media, including print, broadcast information to the general public. The information is not tailored to the person who will be bereaved. The source is harsh, with no one to soften the blow for the receiver. Learning of a loss through the channel of a mass medium, the receiver is part of a large audience that includes strangers for whom the news is not a personal loss, has less personal meaning. This can make one feel vulnerable. The fact that one's previous communication experience involving mass media has been as a receiver of general news, rather than of a piece of information that has a direct personal effect on the receiver adds to the shock. Also, in that one-way communication situation, the receiver has no one to listen to and respond to one's first reaction to the shocking news, no one to help the receiver sort out the meaning and interpretations, or implications. If the source, on the other hand, is personal, then the receiver's shock and feeling of vulnerability may be lessened. The channel may be telephone or an in-person communication; either way, it is a two-way communication in which there is someone to assist in the process by perhaps softening the blow a bit and by listening to the receiver's first reaction to the meaning and interpretation of the news. Sometimes, even when the receiver has learned of a death from a personal source, through a personal channel, hearing the same piece of information through mass media will cause a second, and different reaction. When a friend told me, in a telephone conversation, that one of our friends from college had died, the personal, two-way communication allowed me to communicate my emotions and receive a response to those emotions. Reading the profile of our friend in The New York Times the next day, I had a different reaction; the impersonal, one-way communication about my friend, through the channel of a mass medium triggered different emotions concerning the same information.

Question: What example can you think of in which the same information was conveyed differently? Such a situation will illustrate the importance of the factors addressed in the theories we've read about.