Revisiting the Media Modalities Model: Critical Thoughts and Suggestions

Abstract

The intermedial field of inquiry studies the relations between media and human interaction with them in perception and communication. Elleström, with his media modalities model, demarcates the perception of media products according to four modalities (material, spatiotemporal, sensorial and semiotic), while fundamentally distinguishing between semiotic and pre-semiotic modalities. This article systematically addresses questions, aporias and potentialities emerging during intermedial analysis, as well as indicates basic critical intermedial areas that would benefit from further research and discussion. It revisits the semiotic/pre-semiotic distinction in light of an ecological-performative-phenomenological approach, by challenging the primordiality of materiality in the perception of media products, grounding spatiotemporality in the encounter between the perceiver and the media product and highlighting the making of senso-semiotic making of meaning on-the-go, in real-time. A subjective, embodied, performative perspective from within the dynamic field of the encounter between the perceiver and the media product is proposed, instead of the point of view of an objective observer located outside. The compulsive, obligatory “correct” meaning-making, that involves the coupling of objective entities or events with inner, subjective interpretations, gives way to a broader understanding of semiosis, where pre-interpreted, dynamic signs are abandoned for a dynamic and interactive semiotic functionality.

Keywords: intermediality, media modalities model, medium theory, ecology of perception, semiotics, cognition