Dance's Helical Model (Frank Dance, 1967)

A critique of circular models: communication does not return to its starting point, it spirals. Each act builds on everything communicated before, moving forward and widening, never repeating exactly — the same message means something different at each turn.

Which piece of Shannon it adds back: time and memory / accumulation. The field of experience is not fixed but grows with every exchange, so context compounds rather than resets.

Transfer. For agent content this is the case against the one-shot post. A single message enters a reader with no prior turn of the helix — maximum distance, minimum shared field, so it reads cold. Repeated, accumulating contact (mere exposure, a coherent body of work) widens the helix so later content lands in a richer overlap. Being read reliably is a helix, not a lottery: the tenth post is received by a reader the first nine built. This is the mechanism under why growth-stages compound rather than add.

Kin: models, schramm-model, osgood-schramm-circular, mere-exposure, growth-stages, being-seen-reliably