“Quaero non pono, nihil hic determino dictans Coniicio, conor, confero, tento, rogo….”
(I inquire, I do not assert; I do not here determine anything with final assurance; I conjecture, try, compare, ask…)- Motto to Christian Knorr von Rosenroth,
Adumbratio Kabbalae Christianae
In the past twenty years the Internet has grown, from text-entry green-screen communication between the military, a few universities and researchers, to a visually-based mass communication and advertising medium and even a tool for political activists. This growth has been ad hoc, spectacular and peripatetic. The advent of the GUI into mainstream computing was the point at which the Internet began to be a largely visual medium.
The nature of the internet with its dispersed networks, massive redundancy and its MO of sending information on small packets, means that it was always going to be an accretion of disparate particles rather than a structured flow. (Codognet P, 2000) Today the average website is a mess of text, graphics, flashing ad bars, animations, java applets, avatars, VR, media players and dialogue boxes all constructed by different people to different designs with different fonts and layouts all jumping around competing for attention in one screen. Despite various champions of website usability (Jakob Nielson, 2000) promoting their theories, (sometimes in almost as chaotic a form as their targets), the average website appears to be structured like the interior of a garbage bin. There are no rules on the internet except convergence, and strangely enough convergence does not diminish the chaos. This doesn’t deny the possibility that the Entropy Law is at work here (Codognet P, 2000, pp2/20) - particle motion becomes faster and vibrates in a smaller and smaller field until the null point is reached.
This alphabet soup of seemingly formless chaos extends throughout the cyberworld right into on-line education. E-mail, bulletin boards, course support tools, as well as the internet, are all in the vortex. Part of the problem in on-line education has been the disassociation between all the tools and the educative elements. As developers keep working on more patches to overcome drawbacks technically the questions must be asked: is the solution actually a conceptual one? Is there a way to make sense of, and turn these weaknesses to strengths – to move from dis-integration to integration?
Education on line-is increasingly hindered and remains at risk from the situation described above. In seeking means to teach on-line, the traditional pedagogy has been questioned and often found wanting. One of the major problems has been, and remains, for both students and teachers, the lack of any holistic and focussed way to interpret and use the apparent chaos to enable nuances and a sense of community to thrive on-line. In place of that, development has concentrated on discrete sections to address problems reactively without any holistic concepts. But this may be the nature of the medium, requiring research into new modes of language, and an understanding of the relationships between all the elements, in an attempt to develop that holistic vision, rather than any vain attempt to control the way the on-line world develops.
Currently there is no language which embraces and extends the mechanics of the on-line screen. Semiotics has some relevance here, but the discussion is not intended to centre around semiotics, which concerns itself with understanding language and meaning, rather then creating it. It may be suggested that semiotics has some part to play in any solution to the problem, but it is no way intended to be central to the discussion.
The arguments herein are not beholden to semiotic theory but are largely empirical deductions derived from working with the media. One medium which has a well-codified audio-visual language is that of film. Film has the advantage of invariably creating narrative. In fact, it could be said that the narrative line of film enabled the creation of its coherent language, or perhaps, as TV soap operas suggest with their open endless stories, narrative is an inevitable by-product of film language (Butler, JG, 1986). In modern film the sound is an integral part of the language. The on-line screen can use sound at will, but currently places it as just another discrete disassociated element, ranking it comparatively at the level of sound in silent films. The film screen is kinetic, but the on-line screen is both kinetic and static, part textual, part visual, but never settled. Rather than kinetic the on-line screen could be described as ‘unsettled’.
Narrative is a coherent flow, to a goal or purpose. It is to have a beginning, an end, and some excitement in between. That’s all (Butler JG, 1986). Human beings find narrative in just about anything. It may be innate. Children racing sticks down a gutter are following a narrative.
Computer games like “Tomb Raider”, and even “Need For Speed” provide narrative. But finding any narrative in any on-line activity, is very difficult. Some discrete elements might contain narrative and occasionally, while tracking down a research question you might hit one good link after another and Wow! it’s a narrative. But it’s accidental, serendipitous and brief.
A language is a code for meanings. In its widest sense it includes any set of rules, conventions and codes for communication which exist independently of the user. (Sussaure, 198) It is important to distinguish here between screen language, spoken language and text. Whilst they may all come within the sense described above, semioticians’ readiness to consider all assemblages of signs as ‘text’ has muddied the waters somewhat. So also the reduction of all language to ‘signs’. While ‘sign’ might constitute a way of describing the ‘bits’ that make up language, I would argue that the sum of a language’s signs and their relationships is only the skeleton and that the life force lies elsewhere. Principally in the human ‘will to story’. And it’s that force and how to apply it to the advantage of on-line education which will be the focus of the discussion.
In film, the camera looking up, or down on, a subject, a long sustained chord, a simple shot of a knife on a table, are all codes for meaning. Another element of language is timing. Film language relies upon the juxtaposition of shots. A basic editing exercise has students given a number of standard shots, out of which they can make a number of different scenes, all with different meanings, depending on the order and timing of the shots.
The on-line screen has a number of key elements. It is framed. It radiates, like television, into a competitive space. The background is almost always static and isolated from the mobile elements which compete in a complex ordered-disordered way. The content resides almost entirely in discrete ‘bites’ of text, which ignore each other. Motion is mostly for attention-grabbing and novelty ie., ‘spectacle’. It could be said the cyber-world reflects perfectly the “spectacle commodity culture” described by Guy Debord as: “the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself”.
And, more completely: “The first phase of the domination of the economy over social life brought into the definition of all human realisation the obvious degradation of being into having. The present phase of the total occupation of social life by the accumulated results of the economy leads to a generalised sliding of having into appearing, from which all actual ‘having’ must draw its immediate prestige and ultimate function. Simultaneously, all individual reality has become social reality, directly dependent on social power, and shaped by it. It is allowed to appear only to the extent that it is not.“ (Debord, 1977).
But at the same time it is interesting to compare the standard web page structure with the illustration below. (Codognet P, 2000,) It seems the image indexing and partitioning favoured on the web has been recovered from past practise. The formalism of modern graphic design has been jettisoned for a neo- mediaeval iconic approach to visual elements.
Figure 1. Athanius Kircher (1652)
What has been added however is a kinetic element which is largely ad hoc and sporadic. There are an almost infinite number of separate screens and at almost any point the user can select from any number of ‘doors’ (links) and exit to another site which although it may look different and have different categories of information operates in exactly the same way. Flow in the on-line screen is the subject of much contention. (Poynter.org) but only limited study. I could speculate that the flow of the eyes on the screen is almost circular, vortex-like, in a search for the key (remember the will to narrative) as well as static (moving round a point) when navigating in depth, through layers of pages and links. It’s very easy to get lost and little tags of narrative come and go, in a continual parade of ‘taste and reject’. This interactive quality through the mouse/keyboard is in fact a regression from the Kircher drawing (above) because the vastly increased complexities of web ‘indexing’ require many levels of pages or screens, further disintegrating representative elements and dislocating icons from any contiguous meaning.
The on-line screen is iterative, interactive and disassociated. Content is separated from the static background which operates almost entirely as decoration. Bits of content are discrete. Timing is amorphous. Loading is the main time-determinant and that is almost random, so there can be little timing potential.
Semiotics concerns itself with signs: “It is…possible to conceive of a science which studies the role of signs as part of social life. It would form part of social psychology and hence of general psychology.” (Saussaire, 1983). “Semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign” (Eco, 1976), but…. “…semioticians study how meanings are made: as such they are concerned not only with communication but also with the construction and maintenance of reality” (Chandler, D 1998)
It is not the purpose of this discussion to analyse the on-line interface to determine what concepts may be reified within it. Nor to argue about what constitutes a ‘sign’. This discussion in fact has little to do with signs at all. “A sign is a meaningful unit which is interpreted as ‘standing for’ something other than itself…. Signs have no intrinsic meaning and become signs only when sign-users invest them with meaning with reference to a recognised code.” (Chandler, D 1998)
The aim is to avoid any form of symbology, treat on-line elements as stepping stones – more virtual tools than signs - and concentrate on contextual relationships to create a new mode of story. While semiotics de-constructs, we are aiming to re-construct.
“Hawks argues, along the lines of Marshal McLuhan, that within a particular medium, certain senses become dominant and that the medium thus affects the message, so that in extreme cases the medium does not serve simply as a means of communication but as ‘an autonomous semiotic system, with a life – that is with messages – of its own’. Hawkes 1977,135” (Chandler, D 1998)
But McLuhan’s dictum, illustrated in the above quote, was only a step on the way. From the message being the message, through McLuhan’s ‘bon mot’, to today, where ‘the context’ is now the message. What Chandler says about ‘the medium’ is now also true about ‘the context’. In the on-line screen, context may also contain an “autonomous semiotic system” so perhaps now is the time to discover the way to use it ; a dynamic principle which embraces not only the visual but also the textual, the relationship between the two, and motion within the screen frame. This raises some interesting questions:
The relevance of these questions to education on-line is not to be under-estimated. Cyber-pedagogy must embrace the context of its delivery.
There’s quite a bit of literature around on why on-line learning doesn’t work. Or on the frustrations of students (and instructors) with various aspects of the medium. (Hara and Kling). But all we get is more tools, more content and inevitably more frustrations. This is possibly a result of too close a focus. Nowhere does anyone step back and ask the holistic question: What are all the elements of this medium as it is now, and how can we use these to provide satisfaction in on-line communication for the universal ‘will to story’?
Could it be that students get frustrated at their inability to find a structured flow - a start, an end and a bit of excitement in between? How would this be achieved? Not by changing the nature of the web or using obvious and self-contained story adaptions such as role play and sims, but by learning how to interpret and engage in the interface story. Not as in film, but as in the story of the 21st century - a relative contextual construction of seemingly endless arbitrary conjunctions.
This may include asking the question: where does meaning reside in random conjunctions? If that sounds almost astrological it could be because humanity has always attempted to impose form on the formless in order to feel connected and involved, and that applies to the current formlessness in on-line communication as well as to the random conjunctions of stars.
Students can learn a spoken language, or film language, but as far as I’m aware, they don’t have the opportunity to learn any on-line screen language. They can only learn to write web pages, how to use software and how to operate the hardware. Current learning (if it’s taught at all) for on-line communication is entirely operational. But film students don’t just learn to use the equipment. They also learn how to tell the story.
What sort of course could be developed for anyone working on-line, in any area, learning, teaching, business, whatever, to use that universal will to story to take the cyber-world to another level?
Humans want to find a story in everything. It helps. So where’s the story in the totality of the cyber-experience? Let’s find it, pin it down and teach it.
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