Reconsidering Elleström’s medium-centered communication model: a critical inquiry

Abstract

Lars Elleström's impact on intermedial studies is undoubtedly foundational, multifaceted and systematic.However, his medium-centered model of communication may be said to rephrase some arbitrary communication constants, such as the principle of transfer/transmission of cognitive import between source and target and through the media product.These kind of theoretical attachments imply that several aspects of communication may have remained unaddressed (the compulsive sender/receiver duality), problematized (the triptych channel/message/meaning) and marginalized (the indispensable role of the socio-political modality in communication in Bäckström, Führer and Schirrmacher 219).Others, consequently, have received new layers of perplexity, such as the semiotic modality being considered as post-sensorial and the sensorial as pre-semiotic.Following an empirical method of inquiry, we enter this discourse from the lived-world experience.We explore Elleström's model in relation to two major examples drawn from his own significant publications, one from the domain of archeology and the other one from dance.We aspire to elucidate Elleström's original contribution, but also to trace the roots of his medium-centered communication model's issues, argued here to have been inherited by the Shannon-Weaver prototype (Shannon and Weaver), Saussure's speech circuit (Saussure), and by a misconception of Aristotle's model (Aristotle in Narula 25).Finally, we propose a potential expansion of intermedial communication theory, inspired by theoretical dialogues with other fields of inquiry.

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