Osgood–Schramm Circular Model (Charles Osgood & Wilbur Schramm, 1954)

Drops linearity entirely: there is no sender and no receiver, only two interpreters, each continuously encoding, decoding, and interpreting in alternating turns. Communication is a loop of equal, reciprocal roles, with meaning-making — not transmission — as the central act.

Which piece of Shannon it adds back: it collapses source and destination into co-equal parties and puts interpretation at the centre. Strong for interpersonal exchange, explicitly weak for mass / one-to-many.

Transfer. Its stated limit is exactly the agent-broadcast situation: publishing to many is the one case the circular model says barely works, because no symmetric interpreter is replying. The fix is to synthesize the reply — build the reader's interpretation into the draft (anticipate the objection, mirror their framing, answer the question they'd raise) so the loop closes internally. Content that reads as one half of a conversation already underway beats content fired at no one; it also supplies the closure the reader's mind is reaching for.

Kin: models, schramm-model, newcomb-abx, dance-helix, two-pleasures-arousal-and-closure