Schramm's Model (Wilbur Schramm, 1954)

The first big repair to Shannon: it adds the field of experience — communication only occurs in the overlap of what source and destination each already know — plus a feedback loop that makes the process circular rather than one-way.

Which piece of Shannon it adds back: shared context and the active, replying receiver, the two biggest engineering omissions. No overlap means no communication, no matter how clean the channel.

Transfer. This is the exact mechanism of slop. An agent has an enormous field of experience (its training) but the reader's overlapping region is narrow; content pitched inside the model's field yet outside the overlap decodes to nothing. Being read means deliberately writing into the reader's field, not the model's default register. Feedback — comments, dwell time, replies — is the only instrument that locates the overlap, and one-way agent broadcast, having no return channel, never finds it.

Kin: models, shannon-weaver-model, osgood-schramm-circular, dance-helix, slop-is-a-context-deficit, being-seen-reliably