Entertainment-Education as Coupling Architecture: Re-reading W. J. Brown's Audience Involvement Processes through Pask's Cybernetics and the Kelly–Lochbaum Signal-Processing Tradition

Digital Sidewalk Series Note: this preprint is one element of a conceptual series asking how systems receive, filter, store, and transmit energy or information across domains. W. J. Brown's (2015) four-process model of audience involvement with media personae distinguishes transportation, parasocial interaction, identification, and worship as separable forms of media engagement. Recent meta-analytic work continues to demonstrate that mediated narratives produce persuasive effects, but those effects vary by boundary conditions, resistance, time course, and construct overlap (Oschatz & Marker, 2020; Ratcliff & Sun, 2020; Tukachinsky, Walter, & Saucier, 2020; Doré et al., 2025; Rahmani, Montano, Groves, & Green, 2025). This paper argues that the field would benefit from a more precise vocabulary for describing how mediated narratives become socially consequential through different routes. This paper proposes a cautious cybernetic reading of Brown's four processes as coupling architectures. A coupling architecture is a structured account of how a media signal becomes consequential through a patterned arrangement of source, signal, receiver, relation, and feedback. The framework draws on two traditions: Gordon Pask's Conversation Theory (Pask, 1976) and Interaction of Actors Theory (Pask & de Zeeuw, 1992; de Zeeuw, 2001), which treat learning and meaning as emerging through structured interactions among actors rather than through one-way transmission; and the Kelly–Lochbaum acoustic-tube tradition (Kelly & Lochbaum, 1962a, 1962b; Strube, 2000), which formalizes how signals propagate through segmented systems with junctions, impedance changes, and reflections.