Toward an Agent-Agnostic Transmission Model: Synthesizing Anthropocentric and Technocentric Paradigms in Communication

Abstract

Technological and social evolutions have prompted operational, phenomenological, and ontological shifts in communication processes. These shifts, we argue, trigger the need to regard human and machine roles in communication processes in a more egalitarian fashion. Integrating anthropocentric and technocentric perspectives on communication, we propose an agent-agnostic framework for human-machine communication. This framework rejects exclusive assignment of communicative roles (sender, message, channel, receiver) to traditionally held agents and instead focuses on evaluating agents according to their functions as a means for considering what roles are held in communication processes. As a first step in advancing this agent-agnostic perspective, this theoretical paper offers three potential criteria that both humans and machines could satisfy: agency, interactivity, and influence. Future research should extend our agent-agnostic framework to ensure that communication theory will be prepared to deal with an ostensibly machine-inclusive future.receiving of messages (Gunkel, 2012). In turn, early human-computer interaction studies took up the dynamics of software and hardware-from hypertext to peripherals-as efficient tools for users' activities (Myers, 1998). Despite the centrality of human goals and influences to human-computer interaction, technologists often consider humans only in terms of their actions (Kaptelinin, 2012). That is, users present "human problems, " both in reference to the problems that humans face and solve through technology (Blomqvist, 2018, para. 3) and in reference to how humans create problems to which technology must be resilient (Kletz, 1982, p. 209).Arguably, one of the simplest but most foundational frameworks for understanding communication as a dyadic process is the transmission model of communication (Shannon & Weaver, 1949), in which sources create messages that are then encoded into signals sent over channels (through some degree of noise) then decoded for consumption by receivers. Taken in terms of this model, scholarship within communication disciplines often characterizes machines merely as channels, and scholarship within the technological disciplines tends to characterize humans merely as senders or receivers. The parceling out of human and machine roles across disciplines is part of each domain's strength in building rich understandings of those roles. However, such parceling is also each domain's weakness in that disciplinary blinders prevent important integration of theoretical and empirical work given that the boundaries of what counts as "human" and "machine" are increasingly blurred.Although some contend the transmission model is obsolete (e.g., for rigidity and linearity; Day, 2000), we argue that the model is a useful tool for approaching emerging sociotechnical phenomena. The model focuses on core communicative functions independent of agent type, and such independence is fundamental for initially catalyzing necessary integration between human-focused and technology-fo...

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