Communication Theory

Abstract

The text at hand presents an introductory view of the various theories of communication that have been developed until today, and that are useful for students of the first years of Audiovisual Communication, Journalism, and Advertising studies. First, we review the basic aspects of interpersonal communication, next we address the characteristics and complexity of media communication. We introduce, thus, the historical role that mass media have had in contemporary culture and later analyze in detail the different theoretical paradigms about media communication that have been developed until the present time. This way, we carry out a review of the different theories of communication from a historical and contrastive perspective to finally analyze the different aspects related to the production, circulation and reception of communicative contents in the framework of the current multimedia and contemporary digital environment.