Concept
feedback
Information that returns to the sender from the receiver (or from a person’s own message); it lets the sender learn how the message was received and adjust it.
Feedback is the most often cited addition of process models, and each author builds it slightly differently. In 1954 Schramm calls it the “return process”: the listener nods, frowns, writes a letter to the editor; and a person also gets feedback from his or her own message by hearing his own voice and seeing what he has written. In 1957 Westley and MacLean mention feedback in quotation marks and show it on three lines: from B to A, from B to C, and from C to A. They distinguish purposive feedback (the letter of an angry reader) from non-purposive feedback (buying behaviour that ends up in a market survey’s data), and they say that in mass communication the line is minimised or delayed. Berlo describes feedback as the source taking the message it encodes back into its own system, with a thermostat example; it is not a box in the book’s first model.
The concept comes from cybernetics. Sapienza and colleagues point to its irony: feedback is often counted as a step beyond “linear transmission”, yet the concept belongs to the same family as information theory and cybernetics.
Example
A speaker who sees the faces in the room blur and adds an example. (Hypothetical example.)