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Geri Gay
Cornell University
New computer-based technologies are continually transforming communicative praxis (Schrag, 1986) and communicative spaces. They enable new ways of communicating that integrate text, static and moving images, sound and virtual presence within diverse electronic environments. The articles in this issue of The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication address these transformations from different theoretical and methodological perspectives, each offering unique insights into the workings of visual communication. The motivation for offering an issue devoted to visual communication in new communicative spaces is to convey a sense of the richness and diversity of current approaches in the field, from the utilization of film theory to enhance multi-media learning environments to the analysis of social proxemics in virtual worlds, the exploration of visual ideology and rhetoric in mappings of the internet, and the phenomenological analysis of interactive video.
The authors raise provocative questions regarding visual communication and mediation, activity, reality, representation, perception, presence and embodiment. Drawing upon film theory, phenomenology, visual rhetoric and theories of nonverbal communication, the authors share a common concern with the relationship between communication and medium. How do new multi-media, communicative tools and environments mediate communicative acts? How do visually-mediated communicative acts themselves mediate other activities such as online economic transactions, the workings of ideology, learning and perception?
Calvin Schrag has offered the term "texture" as a means of integrating communication and praxis, purposive behavior, social practices and institutional involvement (1986, p.133) "within a common space." "Texture," a richly evocative, generative metaphor that Schrag borrows from phenomenology, is particularly relevant to any attempts to accommodate the multiple layers and multi-dimensionality of communicative praxis: individual, intersubjective, social-cultural. The textural metaphor is particularly generative for conceptualizing multi-media communication in productive ways. As the following articles illustrate, computer-mediated forms of communication interweave visual, verbal, and audio elements into integrated multi-media compositions and representations that carry/mediate ideological, perceptual, virtually embodied dimensions. The metaphor conveys the complexity and richness of semiotic processes as they play out within and through practical activities.
In "Exposing the 'Second Text" in Maps of the Network Society," Martin and Dodge examine the ideological form and content of maps and cartographic metaphors in advertising the Internet. They deconstruct maps as re-presentations of "the reality" of the Internet by identifying the cultural-historical tropes used to construct them. These tropes evoke a long history of Euro-American expansionism and the cultural practices used to accomplish and legitimate that expansion, i.e., center-periphery distinctions, ecological fallacies, and the equation of technology with progress. Here the relationship between images, representation and the objectives of advertising, suasion and colonization play out through the activity and tools of visual communication.
In "Isn't that Spatial? Distance and Communication in a 2-D Virtual Environment," Krikorian et al. continue to inquire into the significance of spatial relationships and representations as forms of visual communication. The authors explore the Internet as a communication medium and its spatial dimensions as communicative tools--as indicators of uncertainty reduction, conversational appropriateness and social attraction. Drawing upon proxemics research as applied to face-to-face interactions, they pose a number of questions regarding the interactions of avatars in virtual spaces. Their study is a first step towards fleshing out the relevance of face-to-face proxemics to interactions in virtual spaces.
Mazur's work assumes a very different stance towards the meaning of spatial relationships in visual communication, focusing on the video-mediated production of meaning in multi-media instructional environments. "Cinematic Techniques that Craft Reality: Applying Insights from Film Theory to Distributed Video Communication Environments" examines film techniques and their implications for creating co-presence and engagement in interactive, electronic and video-mediated learning environments. Mazur employs activity theory as a framework through which to trace the constitutive relationships among video technology, cinematic techniques and the qualitative experience of distributed learning. Mazur provides an overview of the cinematic techniques that can enhance video-mediated communication--the visual framing of shots, camera angles, zooming, lighting, repetition, juxtaposition, etc. She contributes additional depth to the texturality of tool-mediated visual communication by weaving in technique.
Bennington and Gay draw upon phenomenological film theory and phenomenological studies of technological mediation to explore the perceptual, expressive, intentional and interpretive dimensions of the interactive video experience. In "Mediated Perceptions," they explore how surrealist and phenomenological film theory can provide insights into the communicative dimensions of the film/video experience. The phenomenological notion of "intentionality," similar to activity theory's "object," is used to explain the convergence of both filmmaker's and spectator's perceptions onto the world as referenced by the filmmaker, enabling and mediating intersubjective understanding. Both the filmmaker's and the spectator's perceptions are brought into engagement through the mediation of camera and computer.
We intend this collection of articles to foster an appreciation of the complementarity among divergent perspectives on visual communication. Understanding the integrative levels, the emergent qualities, the multiple dimensions of computer-mediated visual communication is a essentially multi-disciplinary, multi-method undertaking. The articles here offer only a select few of the approaches that can reveal and illuminate the complexity and the texturality of visual communication. Presented together, we hope they illustrate the value of continued multi-disciplinary inquiry.
Schrag, C. O. (1986). Communicative praxis and the space of subjectivity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.