Audience, Speaker, and Diffusion Obstacles in Communication

Audience Obstacles

• Overview of Audience Obstacles:

  • Communication obstacles frequently originate directly from audiences or organizational publics.
  • Practitioners must understand and navigate systemic, social, cultural, and cognitive barriers that prevent messages from being received, understood, or accepted.

• Key Audience Barriers and Distortions:

  • Social Barriers: Obstacles created by social structures, class differences, and societal divisions.
  • Age Barriers: Generational gaps in communication preferences, technological familiarity, and worldviews.
  • Language or Vocabulary Barriers: Differences in native language, dialect, technical vocabulary, or reading comprehension that hinder clear understanding.
  • Political and Economic Barriers: Ideological divides, financial status, and economic perspectives that distort message interpretation.
  • Race and Ethnic Barriers: Distortions and obstacles that block communication, seen starkly in the gulf between racial and ethnic groups in multicultural American society.
  • Peer Pressure and Group Interpretations: Pressures exerted within social groups where "reality" is shared and collectively interpreted by group members.
  • Audience Absorption Capacity: The often-overlooked barrier regarding an audience's ability or willingness to absorb messages.

• Strategies for Overcoming Audience Obstacles:

  • Addressing Stakeholder Needs: Focus directly on the practical and informational needs of organizational stakeholders.
  • Aligning with Values: Target the personal or cultural values of audience members to make messages resonant and relevant.
  • Providing Specific Calls to Action: Frame communication messages with calls to action that are clear, specific, and feasible for the audience to execute.

Speaker Obstacles

• Defining the Speaker in Public Relations:

  • In public relations communication, the "speaker" or message sender is not solely the PR practitioner or an appointed organizational spokesperson, but also the organization itself.

• The Rhetorical Challenge of Source Credibility:

  • The fundamental rhetorical problem originating from the speaker centers on source credibility.
  • The issue of source credibility is just as applicable in organization-public communication as it is in interpersonal communication.

• Strategies for Overcoming Speaker Obstacles:

  • Reinforcing Organizational Credibility: Deal with obstacles arising from organizational reputation by crafting messages that explicitly explain or reinforce organizational credibility or trustworthiness.
  • Establishing Identification: Establish identification with the organization among target publics by emphasizing what the organization and its target publics have in common.
  • Encouraging Audience Participation: Actively encourage audience participation in the communication process to build engagement and trust.

Diffusion Obstacles

• Factors Governing Idea Transmission and Acceptance:
  • Rate of Flow in Idea Diffusion: The rate of flow in the transmission and acceptance of ideas is controlled by numerous external and systemic factors.
  • Scope of Influencing Factors: These governing factors extend far beyond the individual characteristics of the people involved or the specific subjects being communicated.