Wilbur Schramm‟s model (Source: Croft, 2004) 

Context in source publication

Context 1

... major break in the overlook of trauma studies scholarship on media can be traced back to September 11 attacks at twin-tower in America . In Ann Kaplan‟s words, “The phenomenon of 9/11 was perhaps the supreme example of a catastrophe that was experienced globally via digital technologies (Internet, cell phones) as well as by television and radio”. Based on this observation, Kaplan argues for the examination of mediated trauma because “most people encounter trauma through the media” (2005, p. 2). Kaplan‟s reinforcement to Herman‟s ostensive acknowledgement of media (1992) is certainly a call for investigating the issues in trauma studies with no further bracketing of media. The invitation in 2005, it can be seen, has catered an important orientation: we can find some noticeable responses thereafter. Independent of September 11 attack study, scholars who are credited for initiating the discourse of cultural trauma have also discussed on how media can contribute to cultural trauma. Smelser (2004), for instance, writes that the mechanisms of cultural trauma unlike that of psychological trauma are newspaper, television and radio. The number of publications after 2005 demonstrates increased magnitude of the concern when we examine the availability of the books that combine media and trauma. In addition, there is a long legacy of study on screen studies, which is basically concerned with visual representation, appropriating discourses on trauma. This paper, however, does not discuss this domain as the focus is on earlier theories. In the section below, I examine the nature of treatment given to the components of communication in some of the canonical theories of trauma. The two pioneering scholars in trauma studies, psychoanalyst Dori Laub and Yale literary critic Shoshana Felman, were concerned with personal and social histories related to individuals ‟ harrowing experience. In their words, they endeavored “to grasp and to articulate the obscure relation between witnessing, events and evidence” (1992). Their collaborative work Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History argues for the urgency to construct history from vicariously traumatized individuals as Holocaust is “an event without a witness” ( pp. xiii-xvii). Felman finds it necessary to examine the relationship between pedagogy and trauma. Based on her experiment in the seminar class of Yale graduate students, she concludes, “a „life testimony‟ is not simply a testimony to a private life, but a point of conflation between text and life, a textual testimony which can penetrate us like an actual life ”. In other words, she aims to construct testimony, “composed of bits and pieces of memory that has been overwhelmed by occurrences that have not settled into understanding or remembrance” ( p. 2, 5). Similarly, Laub contributes to this necessity by primarily investigating the impact of listening to traumatic experience. The experience, he contends, “precludes its registration; the observing and recording mechanisms of the human mind are temporarily knocked out, malfunction”. Yet, the hearer becomes “the blank screen on which the event comes to be inscribed for the first time” ( p. 57). In both the postulations, we find the authors invoking essential components of communication with due significance to encoding and decoding of traumatic event. Since Laub and Felman emphasize on meaning making and thereby decoding trauma, I find bringing Schramm‟ s model 9 (figure 1) appropriate to elucidate their notion. The model, as explained by Schramm, assumes a source which encodes message and transmits it to the intended destination. Then, the message is decoded based on the receiver‟s overlapped field of exp erience with the ...