Communication as Signal Transmission: When Meaning Becomes a Telegraph

One of the most pervasive metaphors borrowed from engineering is Shannon’s model of communication. In popular science and psychology alike, communication is often portrayed as the transmission of signals through a noisy channel: messages are encoded, sent, decoded, and (hopefully) received intact.

The metaphor is deceptively neat. It works perfectly for telegraphs, modems, and network protocols. But it becomes disastrous when applied to meaning. Human and animal communication is not just about signals; it is about construal, context, and relational interpretation. Reducing meaning to encoding and decoding treats thoughts, intentions, and social nuance as if they were parcels in the postal system.

From a relational ontology standpoint, the flaw is clear. Meaning is not transmitted; it is actualised in context. Words, gestures, and signals do not carry fixed content; they participate in the unfolding of relationships and social alignment. Treating communication as signal transmission erases relational grounding, misrepresenting both the complexity and the contingency of meaning-making.

Parody illustrates the absurdity. If communication truly worked like a telegraph, misunderstandings could be solved with stronger Wi-Fi, emoji punctuation, or simply “resending the email of love.” Diplomatic crises could be avoided by better compression algorithms, and poetry would be reduced to error-corrected ASCII.

The takeaway is subtle but important: metaphors shape not only understanding but action. By imagining communication as transmission, we risk designing social systems and technologies around a misleading ontology, one that privileges channels over context, signals over relational actualisation, and code over construal.