e-mail: patcop@alfa.avh.unit.no
- Introduction
- Preamble
- Making meaning out of "content"
- Meaning-making in distributed virtual environments
- The socio-semiotics of human - computer interactions
- Some subjective experiences of human - computer interaction
- Investigating the dynamics of changing norm systems in distributed virtual environments
- Closing
- Notes
- References
The evolution of the Internet as a "global information superhighway" is opening up for new forms of communication, cooperation and dialogue in, and across all areas of science, with distributed multimedia and hypermedia technology rapidly increasing the range of semiotic systems that may be used to represent and interpret the objects of scientific investigation, and playing an increasingly important role in the instantiation and construal of scientific knowledge in general. This seems to challenge existing textual and cooperational norm systems and doxas across all fields of science and education.
In this paper a sociosemiotic, systemic-functional approach to investigating processes of normative change in distributed virtual environments is advocated. Distributed virtual environments are considered as dynamic open systems, where the construal and instantiation of meaning is actualised in the interplay between the evolution and ontogenesis of mediating technological systems, and of the textual and interactional norm systems of those who interact within, and contribute to the development of, these kinds of virtual environments.
A few weeks ago I was in Rome where I attended an an information day organised by the European Commission Directorate General XIII1 on the future of multimedia technology in Europe. The main focus of discussion there was on what the organisers termed the "content" of developing new multimedia products. As they framed this particular issue in the invitational letter sent out to us in advance:
"Content, in all forms, is the vital raw material of the information society. Without abundant, high-quality content, the true benefits of the multimedia revolution will not be realised; the creation of the information highways will be of limited value."
Elsewhere in this letter "content" was defined in the following way:
"Content is: Data, text, sounds and images which are reproduced in analogue or digital formats and carried by means of a variety of carriers including paper, microfilm and magnetic or optical storage."
Now, it seems at first glance difficult to disagree with the basic contention above that what is most important in relation to the future development of multimedia products for the "Information Superhighway" is high quality content, but in this paper I would like to problematize this concept of "content" from a systemic functional perspective, and examine it in relation to some other issues related to an on-going investigation into how textual and interactional norm systems operative in scientific communication and cooperation change, as the everyday work of science moves more and more into digitally generated distributed virtual environments.
First of all I would like to focus on the distinction between "content", defined in more or less purely technical and information theoretical terms as above, and "meaning". Considered from a cultural and social semiotic perspective, there is a great deal of difference between "content" conceptualised as information types and "content" conceptualised in terms of the social and cultural meanings that this information takes part in creating. While information (in Shannon and Weaver's2 information theoretical terms) is something that may (perhaps must) be neatly coded in discrete units in order to be transmitted over a computer network, meaning is more than pure information flow. Meaning is to begin with interactional (Putnam 1975; Edelman 1989, 1992; Coppock 1995), and since it is socioculturally instantiated and construed, it changes, develops and evolves continually as a result of human beings' intersubjective interactions with one another and their material interactions with the environment. Human language and culture may be considered as information exchanging and interpreting dynamic open systems (Halliday 1987; Lemke 1993); that is, systems which persist only through being in a state of constant change through their ongoing dialogical exchanges of information with other interpreting systems constituting their environment. Any given system's interactions with its environment create internal disorder, and this is exported to the surrounding environment, increasing its entropy. This causes a renewal of the exporting system, which in becoming something more than it was before, cannot return to its previous state. An open system of this kind is metastable since the only reason it exists at all is because it is open, and this openness means that its basic state of being is necessarily one of constant becoming (Lemke 1993).
Meaning, like the information which is interpreted intersubjectively in order to create it, is grounded within, and thus dependent on for its creation, a context of culture; and it constantly evolves and changes while the amount of information produced, stored, exchanged and interpreted merely grows in volume. Information cannot in itself constitute meaning. It is when information is exchanged and interpreted by people who need to actually do something with this information that social and cultural meanings arise. Seen from a systemic-functional perspective, the process of human meaning-making is then a culturally and socially grounded semiotic, involving the production, exchange and interpretation of information as well as material goods and services. As Halliday (1994) points out: "Meaning (acting semiotically) develops along with doing (acting materially) as interdependent modes of human behaviour, and both depend on interaction with the physical and social environment".
Gregory Bateson (1972) once defined information as "a difference that makes a difference". A systemic functional semiotics, however, is not only interested in structural relationships between pieces of information (which might also be called differences) that make a difference for someone or something, but the who or what it is that these differences actually make a "difference" for - the someone or something who interprets the difference as a sign of something else, how or why they actually make this difference, and even more importantly, what the difference that is made actually consists of, qualitatively and quantitatively. The focus is on the dynamics of the wider "effects" of sign exchanges on interpreting systems like societies and cultures, and with the actual consequences of these interpretational effects in terms of meaning. The concern is with how information or "difference" becomes dynamically transformed, or dialogically translated, and instantiated and construed by these translation processes as changing social and cultural meanings.
Charles Sanders Peirce, one of the fathers of modern semiotics, defined the sign as:
"...something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea." [CP 2.228]
Meaning conceived at this extremely general level is the "reference to a sort of idea" that some kind of information - let us call it a sign - might come to stand for in respect to some object or other in the mind of someone or something who perceives that sign. Broadly speaking, these "references to sorts of ideas" stand for the full range of potential general meanings that might come to be realized by some (community of) interpreter(s) in some particular context over time, by signs which stand in some relation or other to some object of investigation.
Distributed multi- and hypermedia technologies can be considered as both socio-cultural artefacts and mentefacts.3 Artefacts are objects produced by cultures, societies, social groups and individuals in order to make it simpler for them to perform certain types of tasks, communicative or not, deemed useful to further the basic needs of the community. Information disseminated by means of communication technology combines through representational and interpretational processes into complex semiotic systems which become instantiated and construed intersubjectively as cultural meanings by individuals, groups and cultures as they use the technology. When artefacts like computers are used as a medium for the exchange and interpretation of information and take part in the actualization of new kinds of social and cultural meanings, they act in force of this mediating role on the dynamics of the cultural and social semiotic, setting various sets of parameters that reduce, elaborate or augment the flow of information in different ways. This mediation process affects how people who use these artefacts perceive, communicate, think, work and cooperate with one another.
Technologies may also be considered as mentefacts, as carriers of social and cultural meanings, since they are interpreted as signs and given symbolic meanings by the cultures, societies and people who use them as they do so and reflect upon their functions in meaning-making processes. They are also dynamic cultural objects, since they change and evolve themselves as they incorporate into, and interact with, the socio-cultural contexts and practices that they are evolving out of. These interpretative processes work also at the material level of culture, since the practices that evolve around technologies and the ways in which they are understood, act upon them and gradually change them structurally, making them more functional. In this way technologies become integrated both as artefacts and mentefacts into everyday life as they develop over time and take on various kinds of forms, functional roles, and symbolic meanings for those who use them. When these processes of material and symbolic integration no longer are seen to function adequately for some reason or other, or the technological artefact outlives its perceived material functionality, it either becomes obsolete and disappears, or assumes a purely symbolic functional role as a mentefact, for instance as a museum object.
Some semioticians (see for instance Andersen 1990) have described the process of human communication with a computer via its user-interface as an interpretational process (semiosis), which is most certainly true on the part of the human user. A computer, however, is not really capable of producing the same kind of complex interpretations of signs into meanings that human beings routinely do in everyday life. The range of possible interpretants which a computer can generate and develop in response to any given sets of information with which it is presented is limited to those interpretative reactions that have been pre-coded into the computer system and the software algorithms that control it by human programmers in advance. A computer cannot make creative inferences.
Human - computer communication is rather different for lay users in relation to technologically competent users; a computer programmer, or systems developer will generally be able to communicate with and understand his or her computer at other levels of understanding than those of lay-users as they use it to do everyday tasks like writing or communicating. In the case of the engineer or programmer his or her interactions with the computer will generally develop a deeper level of understanding of the present potential and limitations of the system, and possibly lead to the innovation of new developments in the longer term. But computers, and the software that runs on them, are still extremely limited and simplistic in relation to the complex task of interpreting and understadning information in any meaningful way. They cannot establish intersubjective relationships with those who use them, or with other computers, and cannot make meaning in the human sense of the term.
Recent work with neural networks, evolutionary programming, case-based abductive reasoning systems and "intelligent agents" in the field of artificial intelligence (see eg. Lund & Mayoh 1995, Michaelowicz 1995, Skowron 1995, Meyer & Guessoum 1993; Hobbs & al. 1990, Malheiro & Oliveira 1995, Josephson & Josephson 1994) claims that computer modelling systems can be developed that, in elementary ways at least, will be able to learn from their own dialogical interactions, not only with human beings, but also with their own environment, and modify themselves accordingly to perform more specialised and functional tasks and operations which will come to resemble human interpretational and reasoning processes more and more over time. There is still however an enormous qualitative gap between artificial modelling systems of this kind and the semiotic complexities of human meaning-making in a context of culture, and it is difficult to see how this semiotic abyss might ever really be completely closed. Perhaps even more importantly, it is unclear what the possible conserquences of this might be for us as human beings if it actually was. I have discussed these kinds of issues in some more detail elsewhere (Coppock 1995), so I will leave it at this for now and go on to discuss the notions of interaction and interactivity in more depth.
It has often been pointed out that a defining (and innovative) characteristic of hyper- and multimedia technologies is that they are "interactive", since living people can interact with inanimate technology and make it perform tasks like bringing on to the user-interface an image, animation sequence, or video sequence that illustrates or expands some aspect of the particular hypermedia text they are browsing at the time. Human - computer interaction of this kind differs - as discussed here previously - considerably from the intersubjective interaction involved in cultural meaning making processes discussed above. Handling virtual objects while playing computer- or video-games, for instance, or "surfing" the Internet using a Web browser, may create learning effects with regard to using the technology, and perhaps give some insight into its possible potentials and limitations. Investigations of these kinds of practices can of course be of interest, but they are essentially related to individual meaning-making processes and cannot, in my view, provide deeper insights into the mediating and norm-constitutice role of the technology at the level of culture. Now, as people are actually beginning to use these communication technologies on a reasonably large scale to communicate and cooperate - using it as an everyday medium for everyday life and work and forming virtual communities in the process - then it becomes of more interest to investigate how social and cultural norm systems are changing over time in relation to these kinds of practices. I shall illustrate briefly below how subtle changes in individual norm systems may be related in a simple way to some wider social and cultural framework by reference to some of me and my colleagues changing practices over time in relation to some recent changes in the functionality of the communication technologies we use.
When we first started using the Internet for communication and research purposes at our department here at the university around 1990, the tools and services available to us for communication were relatively limited. The first e-mail account we were given involved a simple on-line text editor run on a mainframe computer, which did not allow for easy revision and editing of messages, while the off-line editor we now have makes this whole process much easier. This functional change at the material level can looked at subjectively in several ways.
One advantage is that it is no longer necessary for us to stay logged on to the mainframe computer for hours in order to read and write replies to messages we receive; there is now more choice of time and place to do this. This log-on time aspect is something that has become increasingly important for me personally in recent years, since I now quite often use a telephone and modem connection from home, which means I have to pay for every minute that I am logged into the university computer system. The fact that all the members of our interdepartmental writing research team now in principle can choose to work at, or from, home whenever we wish has slowly begun to change many of our basic working and living habits, and indirectly, also our interpersonal relationships as friends and colleagues, often with our places of work in different places. In principle, we can always get in touch with one another, as long as we have access our respective e-mail accounts from where we are. Since I now spend quite a lot of time in two different countries, Norway and Italy, and other colleagues and friends move a lot too, this potential is very important for our group as a scientific community to maintain some degree of continuity in our personal and working relationships, while being free to move around between our respective environments.
For many of us, however, this is still not a potential that is being fully realised, and in order to understand this may be, it is necessary to understand that there is a considerable degree of what we might call socio-cultural intertia, which means that although the potential for more continuity in relationships may be present, it takes considerable time to realise this potential. To exemplify briefly: something that we are still working hard to understand is just how much this particular type of communication might mean to us in terms of personal and professional development. There still seems to be a tendency to think of our use of the computer as a medium for communication rather than a "writing tool" to write articles and papers, as something that belongs "outside" of our real work as researchers and academics, and that it in some way or other detracts from our total working time at the office, while in fact, if one sits down and thinks about it, the wide range of personal and professional relationships that actually are being initiated, developed and maintained through the wide range of writing practices that may be carried out within virtual environments like e-mail are becoming an increasingly important part of our private and professional lives. In fact, the borderlines between our professional and private lives are beginning to merge even more because we now have access to this means of cooperation and communication. The countless discussions and controversies we can follow and take part in through joining e-mail discussion groups mean it is possible to intermingle and interact with some of the most engaged and knowledgeable people in the world in the various areas of science that we are interested in. This kind of participation can enrich and expand our professional and social life-worlds far beyond the walls of our offices, department and university, and bring `back' with us many of these new ideas and insights into our everyday as colleagues and friends at our department. For many, though, the most fundamental problem is how to sort out what is functional and useful for us from what is not. Another is when one feels, as often can be the case, that the technology does not function "invisibly" in the background, but rather gets in the way of our potential meaning-making activities.
There has been an almost exponential growth in the number of tools for scientific writing and publication in virtual environments: for instance for composing HTML pages for publication on World Wide Web. These allow the inclusion of images, sound and video sequences, graphics, animations etc.. The general range of semiotic systems and codes that we may consider using to convey a message for our peers and others is greatly increased. The potential audience for the scientific writing we do is now much wider than even the national and international specialists in our own fields. This can be both problematic and advantageous on several levels. An advantage because the increased functionality of the technology means that our creative and expressive potential is increased; a problem because it involves even more choices and necessary skills in order to do it well. On another level, the awareness that the potential audience for what we write can be huge means that we are constantly forced to make choices with regard to who we are actually adressing our messages to. There are many other kinds of other considerations too, such as which kinds of message structures and writing strategies are best suited for conveying certain kinds of messages in virtual environments of this kind. There is not time or space here to examine all the above issues in any depth, so we will move on to discuss changing systems of norms in virtual environments in a more general way, with reference to a current research program.
The object of investigation for the research program TextNorm>CoDiVE4 is textual and interactional norm-system constitution and change in groups of novice writers cooperating in distributed virtual environments. More specifically, our research is focused on how novice scientifc writers' textual and interactional norms change when they begin to use distributed virtual environments for a broad range of practices categorised loosely as scientific writing. Distributed virtual environments are understood as forms of digital communication technology that facilitate communication and cooperation at a distance by means of "writing". Writing here is used in a very broad sense to characterise all forms of text creation and communication practices made possible by the particular technologies that we are using. The term "distributed" implies that participants in the writing process gain access to virtual resources - ie. digital resources used in the writing process that do not reside physically where the writing is actually being carried out, but which are retrieved or activated from where they are stored by participants at their computer screens, whenever and wherever they are needed. A distributed virtual environment of this kind is seen as a dynamic open system, in the sense referred to previously: a technologically mediated sociocultural environment, for communication and cooperation that evolves and develops as participants interact (in real time or not) while not being physically proximate in space.
Our research is focused at the moment not only on e-mail as a virtual environment, but on distributed systems which facilitate written communication more or less in real time between groups of participants in multi-user object-oriented virtual environments (MOO's).
The MOO environment that we are using at present has a World Wide Web "Gateway", where a window opens into the virtual environment from a Web browser. The environment facilitates simultaneous communication in writing with others in the virtual environment, and the creation and use of virtual objects like texts, hypertext links to other World Wide Web, film projectors that project slides into the virtual environment, and to work together using these virtual objects with other people logged on simultaneously. One of the unique aspects of virtual environments of this kind is that participants can design and alter the virtual environment that they interact in while they are there. They write, discuss and alter textual descriptions of spaces and rooms, and create virtual objects with specific functions to furnish these rooms, and try these environments out together with other people for a wide range of activities. Everything that goes on in the virtual environment can be recorded and these texts used as a basis for documenting, interpreting and evaluating what has actually happened. This adds a strong dimension of social action and cooperation to participation in the virtual environment which is qualitatively different from individual "Websurfing". Rather than being merely "tourists" or "users" who "interact" with ready-made products that others have designed, participants become members of a developing virtual community where they take part in on-going design and development activities that influence the further development and growth of the virtual environment. They are participant-observers who can investigate and interpret changes in their own, and other participant-observers', textual and interactional norm systems as they are going on.
We still know very little at present about how using distributed virtual environments of this kind for enacting and construing scientific communication and cooperation affects the development of textual and interactional interactional norm-systems of those taking part. We are especially interested in understanding and describing how more general systems of interactional and textual norms that traditionally have been associated with the everyday business of doing scientific writing will change due to the increasing use of virtual environments for scientific writing and publication, and conversely, how these changing norm systems change participants' perceptions of the environments that they are using to perform these activities. Scientific writing and publication norms will be influenced by the possibility of incorporating a wider range of semiotic systems such as images, sounds and video into "texts", and probably more importantly, by the potential for more continuous forms of interaction and cooperation between authors, referees, publishers and readers of scientific texts, where co-developing texts and even the contexts for these texts, rather than finished products like books and academic journals, are the starting point for these practices.
The study presented briefly above, which is methodologically ethnographically oriented, takes the phenomenological experiences of participant-observers to be valid data, aims to take novice scientific writers into the virtual environment as participant-observers who are embracing, learning and trying out these environments for exploratory forms of scientific writing and communication, while they at the same time reflect upon, and report for each other, how it is affecting the ways in which they do these activities, and the meanings they are attributing to working together in this way.
If the aim of developing the Information Superhighway is seen as merely facilitating a relatively small number of "content producers" in pouring ever increasing amounts of "content" into people's everyday lives without questioning the meaningfulness and value of this activity for us as individuals, societies and cultures, then I feel we are somehow missing the point. In focusing on content as essentially information which is moving from producer to consumer, we would seem to be losing sight of what might be the most important potential of the kinds of distributed virtual environments mentioned above: their potential as dynamic open systems for intersubjective cooperation and meaning-making, where active and engaged participants have the opportunity to take part in developing the environment they work in from the "inside". Distributed virtual environments must surely represent a new and interesting context for professional conversational and dialogue analysts to study communication processes in. They may also pose interesting challenges to existing norm systems within this particular of theoretical and methodological framework too, since methods and analyses used to study how systems of communicative and cooperative norms change over time will not only need to take account of the way in which people communicate with one another, but also of how participation in these cooperative activities changes the very nature of the social and material contexts in which these activities take place.
1. EU's DG XII is responsible for coordinating and intitiating work on telecommunications, information marketing and exploitation of research, the information industry ans market and language processing in the EU.
2. See Shannon, C. & Weaver, W. 1949.
3. See Posner 1989 for a discussion of the terms artefact and mentefact.
4.See Coppock (in preparation) for a description of the design and goals of this program
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