ABSTRACT
In the final chapter of this volume, titled “Everything is Intermedial”, Kay O’Halloran follows Bateman in addressing the lack of a social component in Elleström’s model. She compares Elleström’s media model to a multimodal model based on Halliday’s theories of the relation between a world of matter (the physical world) and a world of meaning (the language we use to describe this world). O’Halloran proposes that matter and meaning are related across four systems: the material world, the biological system, the social system, and the semiotic world. She then uses this model to address what she considers the most urgent topic for media studies going forward, namely the relation between digital media and society, where society is being shaped by invisible forces residing within and behind the digital media we all use.
