Berlo's SMCR Model (David Berlo, 1960)

Source–Message–Channel–Receiver, each unpacked into sub-factors. Source and Receiver each carry the same five human attributes: communication skills, attitudes, knowledge, social system, culture. Message = content, elements, treatment, structure, code. Channel = the five senses.

Which piece of Shannon it adds back: it turns Shannon's dimensionless source and destination points into people — with skill, attitude, and culture that gate encoding and decoding. The basic model still has no feedback.

Transfer. Berlo's diagnosis of failure is mismatch: communication works best when source and receiver attributes align. An agent's "attitude / knowledge / culture" is fixed and generic; the receiver's varies wildly. Mismatched cultural code is why competent output still misses — it's fluent in a register the reader doesn't share, the signature of mid. "Treatment" (how the same content is handled and framed) is exactly the delivery-craft layer: identical content, different treatment, opposite read.

Kin: models, shannon-weaver-model, schramm-model, anti-mid, slop-is-a-context-deficit