Transcript ideas pertaining to a meaning divide - digital

MEANING DIVIDE
::: the spectral communication :::
Marco Toledo Bastos
(Universidade de São Paulo / Frankfurt Universität)
I. Ideas pertaining to a hardware divide
II. Ideas pertaining to a wetware divide
III. Ideas pertaining to a meaning divide
The difference of computer ownership in a given class of people.
•For Wilhelm (2004), it is the variations and uses among groups of people
and their ability to use information technology in its full capacity.
•For Mehra (2004), it is the gap between those who use computers and the
internet and those who do not.
Either way, the idea of a digital divide focuses on the disparity of hardware
availability and usage over the world.
This hardware obsession might be missing another divide technology
creates. It concerns the nature of a technological world and it is not related
to a hardware but to a wetware divide.
IDEAS PERTAINING TO A HARDWARE DIVIDE
It is something that takes place in a continuous integrated media reality,
which takes over from the previous face-to-face atmosphere.
•From meaning generated by interaction of people in the flesh, the reality
of cyberspace presents a communicational atmosphere which process
meaning differently. If Kurzweil (2005) is correct about the Law of
Accelerating Returns, we might be living a Singularity among ourselves.
•For Fassler (2005), it is a evolutionary media reality. It brings a continuous
spectrum of electronic media in which communications are no longer
irradiated but spectralized.
It is a silent divide regarding cognitive operations and media sensibility. It
concerns the faculty of acknowledging this world as an integrated
worldwide system.
IDEAS PERTAINING TO A WETWARE DIVIDE
Against the idea of a hardware divide that urges for an IT expansion, the
spectral reality might not take advantages of progressive steps from one
technology into the other. It is more like a breaking.
This is because computer presents a problem regarding its processing of
meaning. Its spectral pattern deals with the surplus of meaning in ways we
do not understand yet.
For Luhmann (1997), the computers add reflexivity to communication
autopoiesis installing a competition with consciousness. They change
information and understanding, which is grasped only due to electronic
routines of processing and filtering. Media are cultural forms because they
deal with the surplus of meaning in specific ways.
IDEAS PERTAINING TO A MEANING DIVIDE
For Luhmann (1997), actual society needs a cultural form to survive the
new distribution patterns of communication, that is, it needs a form to deal
with the surplus of meaning computers brought. The Aristotle’s idea of
telos managed to deal with the surplus of meaning from writing; Descartes’
idea of a self-referential consciousness dealt with the surplus of meaning
from printed communication. Yet there is not a form to tackle the surplus
of meaning from computers and cyberspace.
For Baecker (2004), the surplus of meaning from computers is a third
catastrophe for it reorganizes styles and contents of communication thus
changing the meaning and deconstructing the ways we used to understand
understanding. There are criteria to what to look at as well as to what
messages are going to be accepted or not. It is not quite clear so far how
technological society is organizing forms and contents.
IDEAS PERTAINING TO A MEANING DIVIDE
Our hypothesis on the electronic meaning comprises both synchronous and
asynchronous platforms. The major characteristics of this meaning are:
•Unlike mass broadcasting model, in which it is possible to draw diagrams
with lines, the spectral pattern is related more to circles crossed by lines
than lines themselves.
•Although made out of language, it cannot be subsumed within a semiotic
nor linguistic model. There is no triadic or binary relation but a spectral one.
•It works both as a social system and as a communication index. The
paradoxical nature of spectral meaning comprises closed systems and open
communicative operation.
•It does not rely on communicative agents but on communicative
environments. It is more like a spectral atmosphere that enwraps the users.
IDEAS PERTAINING TO A MEANING DIVIDE
Meaning in cyberculture is an environment of continuous inputs
engendered by a logic other than the linear writing based model. Its
autopoietic dynamism allows spectral meaning to account for the
conditions of experience at the same time it conveys a system in itself.
The spectral surplus of meaning conveys an extent that is technological but
also social. It addresses both online interaction platforms and programmed
information systems (i.e., systems that do not need human intervention).
CONCLUSION
The surplus of meaning coming from computer data processing represents
a divide between cognitive patterns. This actual model is hardly reducible
to former patterns of meaning processing so we might have to take into
account the possibility of a clash of senses in the contemporary world.
IDEAS PERTAINING TO A MEANING DIVIDE
Marco Toledo Bastos has a BS in History with focus in Media Press at UNESP
(2001) and a MA in Communication Sciences with focus on Journalism and
Cyberculture at USP (2005). He is now a Ph.D. student at São Paulo University
researching topics on Meaning, Cyberculture and Theory of Communication.
Marco Toledo Bastos is currently a researcher at the Center for Philosophical
Studies on Communication of the São Paulo University (FiloCom - USP) and
during the years of 2008 and 2009 he is a fellow on the Research Network for
Media Anthropology (Forschungsnetzwerk Anthropologie des Medialen) at the
Johann-Wolfgang Goethe Universität Frankfurt/Main (FAME - JWG Frankfurt
Universität).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR