The multimediation of the lifeworld by Göran Sonesson

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The multimediation of the lifeworld by Göran Sonesson

After the influence of Jakobson (1960) and Eco (1976), this model has been used inside semiotics as a model of all communication, all signification, and of all kinds of semiosis.

This practice has produced at least two negative consequences:

by reducing all kinds of semiosis to the mass media kind, we become unable to understand the peculiarity of more direct forms of communication;

by treating all semiosis as being on a par, we deprive ourselves of the means to understand the intricacies added to direct communication by means of different varieties of technological mediation.

Until recently, to send a fax, the sender had to go to the telegraph station, but now he may accomplish the same act from his computer. The receiver still have to go to the cinema to see a film, if he does not opt for using a video recorder instead. If we insist on perceiving the real thing, we will always have to visit a cave to see prehistoric frescoes. Sometimes even continuous movement is required of the receiver, such as the person in the art gallery walking around the art-work, or the house-wife leaving repeatedly the projection of the soap-opera to attend to her domestic duties.

In Jakobsons version of the model, are amalgamations of what Shannon and Weaver call sender and source, and receiver and destination, respectively. In this parlance, receiver and sender are really mechanisms, such as the telegraph and the radio sender, not human beings.

The communication model is about recoding, not about original semiosis, that is, not about the emergence of meaning, but about its transformation. It tells us how letters are transferred into Morse signs, radio signals, and more recently digital coding, which really amounts to giving new expressions to parts of signs (phonemes, graphemes, etc.). It could certainly be argued that this conforms to the Peirce/Jakobson metaphor according to which meaning is translation into other signs, but at least Peirce entertains the possibility of a final interpretant. In fact, all conceptions of meaning must start out from some zero-degree, however hypothetical. We will call it the Lifeworld.

Lifeworld could be opposed to media (or rather: the world as seen by the media the media themselves, just as Husserl notes about the sciences as praxis, are parts of the Lifeworld). In all three cases, we seem to separate primary interpretations (mediations) from secondary ones projected onto the praxis world from other practices of signification (science, social institutions, media institutions).

In a famous formulation, echoed by Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss once suggested that there were three important circulations in the world: of words (or signs generally), of goods (and/or money), and of women (and/or men). This parallel may be criticized from several points of view, ranging from anthropology to sexual correctness. Semiotically, however, the real problem with this formula is that it relies on the spatial metaphor inherent in the communication model (Cf. Sonesson 1992a; 1995b).
In so doing, the description misconstrues essential facts. Actually, it is the woman, or the man, who is moved from one place to another, but it is not the person in question who carries meaning, it is the exchange as such. Indeed, according to Lévi-Strauss himself, the exchange of partners breeds solidarity between the tribes, not the persons exchanged.
This should not deter us from considering, not the exchange as Lévi-Strauss does, but the woman (or man) as an object to be interpreted after transference to another village.

Multimedia is not a precise term, but we will take it to stand for a storage medium in which different sign systems are conveyed in their most adequate substance. In this sense, a book which contains printed text, phonetic transcriptions of speech, musical scores and pictures would not be called a multimedium. The computer disc may contained written texts, real, resounding speech and music and (at least in theory) pictures presented in more adequate conditions of reception.
Interactivity has something to do with permeability, which may involve different sense modalities and occur in one or several directions. It should be noted that the penetrability of bridges and doors concern movements (trajectories properly speaking) and those of windows glances (visual trajectories). Among more or less modern media, the telephone allows a two-way permeability to speaking, to the exclusion of any other kind; television allows a one-way permeability to vision and speech, without reciprocity. Internet, on the other hand, contains the possibilities of two-way permeability to speaking, writing, pictures, movies (complete with perspective shifts) and (by means of video-conferencing) the other persons looks (but only with simulated three-dimensionality).
Semioticians are familiar with the study of one kind of permeability, touch, when considered in the sphere of immediate closeness to the body, which is the subject matter of proxemics (Hall 1966). Media semiotics needs to become some kind of extended proxemics, involving individuals at greater distance to each other, and even cultures.
Media, is has been said, serves to bridge time or space, or sometimes both. Bridges, it will be remember, reach indifferently in both directions.

	by reducing all kinds of semiosis to the mass media kind, we become unable to understand the peculiarity of more direct forms of communication;
	by treating all semiosis as being on a par, we deprive ourselves of the means to understand the intricacies added to direct communication by means of different varieties of technological mediation.