Communication Model-Pretty Little Liars

The communication model represents what happens when senders transmit messages and what happens when the receivers receive the messages. The sender chooses symbols, which represent thoughts, and then they encode them. Encoding means finding the right symbols that stand for their cognitive meanings. Once the sender transmits the message, it is the receiver's job to decode the message, or interpret it and find the meanings of the symbols. For my example of the communication model, I picked a clip from Pretty Little Liars. In the beginning of the episode, it shows Spencer, Hanna, Aria, and Emily all standing outside the pawn shop. Just before this meeting of the girls, Spencer went into the shop to buy back her sister's wedding ring. The man at the shop gave Spencer a horseshoe in return instead of the ring. Outside of the shop, Spencer told the other three girls what had just happened. Soon after their discussion, all four of their cell phones started to go off. They all took them out and of course it was a text message from "A". The text message read, "Just my luck, Diamonds are a girls best friend. -A." In this example, the sender would be "A". She wants the girls to know that she is involved with this incident and had something to do with the ring. Spencer, Hanna, Aria, and Emily are all the receivers since they receive the text message from "A". The symbol would be the actual text message that "A" sent to the four girls. Encoding would be "A's" selective use of media to transmit a message to the girls. Seeing the text message that mentions "diamonds are a girls best friend", the girls know that "A" is referring to the wedding ring. The girls had to decode what exactly "A" meant. "A" bought the ring and replaced it with the old horseshoe. One element that I feel that is significant to the effectiveness of this communication model would be the decoding process. The text message that was sent could have been referring to anything. In this case, it was more obvious to the girls since they deal with incidents like this often. Since they were able to decode the message, they know that "A" had something to do with the missing ring and the horseshoe that was left. Decoding is also important in human communication in general because the receiver always needs to be able to interpret the message to find out the meanings of the symbols used by the sender.