Language and Writing: Critical Terms for Media Studies

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

Language and Writing: Critical Terms for Media Studies

Language and writing—the mere mention of these critical terms immediately leads the human mind to conjure differing ideas about what they actually are. Some of our ideas of the terms and subsequent understanding are based on age-old conceptions that have been drilled into us, pushed down through an accepted framework of education, that are proving to be obsolete and quite detrimental to an expanded, enlivened view. The anthology Critical Terms for Media Studies edited by W.J.T. Mitchell and Mark B.N. Hansen alludes to these structured and dull impressions and a need for a “delimited,” fresh and more contemporary idea of media terms in general.

Language and Writing: An Eye Toward the Future

Specifically, in this attempt to address the terms language and writing in a current perspective with an eye toward the future, it will be necessary, and will remain necessary, to explore this idea of delimitation. Simply, language and writing are not what we thought them to be; they are not what we are thinking they are and certainly not what they will become. However we choose to define language and writing, they are so much more. We discover a much deeper and ineluctable truth—language and writing are at once medium, media, and mediator.

To ensure our ability to survive the perpetual metamorphosis as a species will require that we have new images of an even newer activity. The rapidity we have witnessed in the current technology boom will ultimately seem a snail’s pace as time fast-forwards and provides us an opportunity to look back. We should be neither frightened nor complacent in our view from the current window. Rather, we should allow ourselves to get very close to the glass so we might have the largest picture possible available to us. Only with this view will homo sapien sapien—wise wise man—affect an active participation in this change. It is my hope that the reader will gain an insight toward this much-needed larger view and open to the vast possibilities of language and writing currently underway.

Inasmuch as we, as a species, rely on these forms to communicate—or rather, associate—we will want to be aware how we are changing their use and application. In this change process is the evidenced maturation of a system that uses us, our feedback, as much as we use it. The necessity for our broadened awareness lies in moving from passive acceptance to informed director.

In a world that whirls by, we are, at best, able to process only a fraction of the totality of events that occur around us, and even this is often not clearly interpreted, in part, due to the limitations imposed by our own experience, but also by the regulation of that experience through external agents that shape our preconceived and a often erroneous assumptions. But what images come to mind when we think of language and writing?

They are usually of the mechanical actions of speaking in some understandable way to our fellow human being—verbal communication—and putting to some type of material, often referred to as media—a stone or clay tablet, an animal skin, parchment or paper—a symbolic, yet meaningful, representation of our words, those structured subsets of ordered symbols contained in the larger set of language and vocabulary.

Language and Writing: Media Triangulation

If we refer to a dictionary, we will find an abundance of definitions of what language and writing are, or rather what we confine them to be. A central concept to the delimitation of these terms is triangulation, which is “to suggest three entryways into the labyrinth of media, with the understanding that each will sooner or later lead to the other two” (Mitchell and Hansen xix). Naturally, they pose the obvious question, “Why ‘triangulate’ at all?”

Part of the answer is to avoid the seductions of binarism, the prevalent rhetorical fallback in polemical and preanalytical discourse: past and present, new and old, art and technology, society and the individual, subject and object, space and time, nature and culture, ancient and modern…The more elusive reason for triangulating [is our] intuitive sense…of tripartite models…sender-channel-receiver (in communication theory), symbol-index-icon (in semiotics)…. [Consider] the structure of a syllogism, where the ‘middle term’ is called the medium. …Triangulation…then, is a way of emphasizing the ‘middleness’ of media studies, its role as a go between, as mediator, in relation to the numerous other disciplines where it has had an impact, from ancient mosaics to digital images, from the code of human law to the code of life itself. Among these triangulations is, of course, the idea of media and the medium itself. (Mitchell and Hansen xix)

This triangulation aids in revealing the mode and imbrications in which language and writing function. It allows a view to media, medium and message from multiple angles, affirming that each is at once different and the same given the contextual viewpoint.

Language and Writing: Technical Determinism Fallacy

Another key concept, which elaborates on the aforementioned, is that of “technical determinism” as fallacy, that no one technology governs the others or in some way is “placed in the role of cause, with the other domains cast as effects” (Mitchell and Hansen xv). To consider which came first, language or writing, is of no import, but our examination of what lies between the two, that system which allows one to influence the other or act as agent toward the natural evolution of the individual processes, becomes paramount and meaningful if we are to illumine our perspective. This becomes important as we can now envision a bridging effect created by the action and evolution of language and writing which moves our humanity from one place in time and space to another, and given the sample of this time/space relation we are now able to envision what change might occur at a later time, in a different space.

More importantly, we are able to develop the awareness of the impact our actions, through usage, through acceptance, currently have and will continue to have on language and writing. Then, too, evolves the idea that how these changes proceed will become a type of “feedback” to the systems of language and writing from which refined change is generated—a cycle of process, feedback, generative evolution, followed by enhanced process. This “feedback” is defined as “a process in which the factors that produce a result are themselves modified, corrected, strengthened, etc. by that result” (“Feedback”).

This, of course, is not new. This process has been underway even prior to the first utterances of Stone Age man enjoying the warmth of fire. We needed, we desired, as a species, to invite another into our thought. We needed a format with which to accomplish this—communication. However, as Niklas Luhmann questions, “How can the mind participate in communication? Humans cannot communicate; not even their brains can communicate; not even their conscious minds can communicate. Only communication can communicate. The mind thinks what it thinks and nothing else. …The mind can be seen as a medium that could accept and transmit a myriad of conditions” (Luhmann 371, 377). He points out that “a system of consciousness can be active even without communication. It experiences this and that within itself, observes something, feels itself thinking, and even talks to itself. Communication, on the other hand, can hardly come into being without the participation of the mind” (Luhmann 373,374). It may have been symbolic—a particular look or gesture—before that first utterance, or possibly tactile—a touch, possibly a combination, or combinations of each. The point is that a process began through which the process itself improves by result. This moves us into a new medium, that of cybernetics. The idea of action within defined boundaries of a system that produces various other information, and change, in the form of feedback, that the system can integrate in a dynamic fashion, moving that system from rigidity to a virtual real- time intelligence, “implies humans, animal and machines can all be understood within such a framework” (Hayles 148).

Given this theoretical perspective, media are important primarily for their differential capacities to store, transmit, and process information. The cybernetic perspective implies that human and animal bodies, no less than cybernetic mechanisms, are media because they too have the capacity for storing, transmitting, and processing information….An equally strong tendency within the cybernetic tradition has been the impulse to construct a framework within which animals, humans, and machines can all be located (Hayles 148, 150).

A Reconceptualization of Information

Analogies are often drawn that liken the biological functions of the human body to that of a machine. Likewise, the ideas language and writing have been extended to encompass the world of high technology, that of hexadecimal and binary code, machine language, the writing of zeros and ones that gives the computing machine its instructions and operational format. In this context, we can return to the idea of feedback, “the idea of a theoretical framework capable of analyzing control and communication in animal, humans, and machines” (Hayles 152). These systems are, by design, meant to self diagnose, self repair and self improve—some perform more efficiently than others.

This conceptual shift moves language and writing from the realm of purely “informational flows to computational processes,  and this opens the way for a reconceptualization of information” (Hayles 150). We can observe this shift in our relatively rapid embrace of computing technology, which has overflowed into the world of high tech communications—cellular telephony, blackberry, ipod, and other wireless communications devices—as well as the accelerated advance in the language of these devices, which we, as user, have, actively or passively, participated in.

Consider the use of emoticons and other symbolic representations of spoken words, or the abbreviated text employed by savvy keypad communicators. Emoticons—short for emotion and icon—were originally the “facial expression[s] represented by a short combination of letters and other characters you can type on your computer’s keyboard. They remain this now, but the framework of the system—the computing application development network, those individuals who create and write, the programs we use daily—has allowed for feedback and an evolution of these rudimentary shorthand expressions into a polished set of often animated symbols. These have evolved “into the accepted and practical punctuation of the Internet” (Goldsborough 16). We are no longer relying on the written word to describe and be representative of our conscious states, but engaging in artistic symbolism to convey meaning and feeling, but in so doing, we are leaving the accurate interpretation of these symbols to the receiver, thereby losing a level of control in what we are attempting to transmit.

It is imaginable that the feedback which can be achieved within the boundaries of language and writing, in terms of technology and computing power, will allow for an artificial ability to clarify these representations, that is, enable the receiver to understand precisely what you, as transmitter, meant in the original conveyance. Of course, this cannot be real-time in the natural sense, as any machine system modification will occur after the human receiver switches roles and becomes transmitter. This is the distinction between biological, thinking beings and machines as cognizers.

It is within this distinction that the limitations of cybernetics can be demonstrated. Soren Brier, in his “The construction of information and communication: A cybersemiotic reentry into Heinz von Foerster’s metaphysical construction of second-order cybernetics,” “shows that…cybernetics lacks explicit and ontological concepts of emotion, meaning, and a concept of signs. Advances in the understanding of how animal—not to mention human beings—and their nervous systems really function in relation to cognition and communication, have had their limitations” (Brier 355).

In the technological sense, much of what cybernetics claimed to be about has developed into the disciplines of control and communication, widening the chasm between human and machine. Machine requires human intervention to organize control and communication—it is not possible for machine to be cognitive in these functions, certainly not in the complex natural, biological sense. Many of the transhumanists have predicted “that within a few decades, human consciousness will be uploaded into computers, achieving effective immortality” (Hayles 154). Others predict this is an unlikely scenario given that the complexities of the human being are far beyond the most sophisticated computers (Hayles 154).

The framework in which language and writing function in relation to media and message, and as a demonstration of human cognition, “is basically a self-organizing process, which creates or brings forth a reality” (Brier 359). Proponents of artificial intelligence (AI) have long dreamed of machine systems that are cognitive, capable of functioning as humans do, existing as systems evolving, based upon their experiential feedback, to self-awareness. But to the dismay of “AI and cognitive science researchers and implementers…that as long as this…self organization is not the way computer systems function, we are not even near making machines, which are cognitive, information processing, having memory, or being intelligent. Von Foerster remarks… that machines are not problem solving, because by their nature they do not have any problems. We try to use them to solve our problems. But that does not make for cognitive entities” (Brier 359).

Language and Writing: Inevitabilities Ahead!

The future will hold many more developments that, now, may seem very far away, but, as we have witnessed within the space of our own time, the current feedback rate from our exuberant embrace of technology is setting an unprecedented mark for development, improvement and re-entry to the system. It is not science fiction to consider that language and writing will change even more dramatically sooner rather than later. Much of the technology exists, but, hindered by development cost, user ease of use and widespread, rapid, market acceptance may not realize public release yet. One such advancement will likely be holographic communication. An example might be a discussion about a written script to be developed into a holographic format for three-dimensional viewing. Naturally, all of the discussions about the written text will be conducted by way of holographic conferencing, much the same way we currently videoconference. A step farther takes us to interactive holographics or advanced virtual realities. Language and writing have suddenly morphed into much more than even bits and bytes, zeros and ones—although these will continue an overlap of critical importance to the content, medium and message.

All of this leads us to ponder the true impact of technology in relation to media, medium, and message. It would seem that what is taking place in the leaps and bounds of technological discovery is a cycle, an unbroken cycle of development, implementation, improvement, followed by advanced development. It is a cycle that “was already underway when Homo sapiens became a distinct species” (Hayles 154). It is certain that we, “the tool using and inventive primate,” will continue to separate ourselves from the technology we adopt, but it remains critically important that we continue to inform our awareness of the power and influence of media, medium and message (Mitchell and Hansen ix). Through the delimitation of our conceptions and definitions of language and writing, of media, medium and message, we as human will continue to assert our observations and assumptions only as cognitive, thinking, biological beings can.

Works Cited

Brier, Soren. “The construction of information and communication: A cybersemiotic reentry into Heinz von Foerster’s metaphysical construction of second-order cybernetics.” Semiotica 154-1/4 (2005): 355-399. Academic Search Premier. Web. 20 Oct. 2010.

“Feedback.”  Webster’s New World College Dictionary. 4^th ed. 2008. Print.

Goldsborough, Reid. “Emoticons Evolve Into the Practical Punctuation of the Internet.”  Community College Week 28 Dec. 2009: 16.Academic Search Premier. Web. 20 Oct. 2010.

Hayles, N. Katherine. “Cybernetics.” Critical Terms for Media Studies. Ed. Mitchell, W.J.T., Mark B.N. Hansen. The University of Chicago Press, 2010. 145-156. Print.

Luhmann, Niklas. “How Can the Mind Participate in Communication?” Materialities of Communication.  Ed. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, K. Ludwig Pfeiffer.  Stanford University Press, 1994. 371-387. Print.

Mitchell, W.J.T., Mark B.N. Hansen.  “Introduction.”  Critical Terms for Media Studies.  Ed. Mitchell, W.J.T., Mark B.N. Hansen.  The University of Chicago Press, 2010.  vii-xxii.  Print.

Note from the author: This is a draft essay I wrote a couple of years ago while attending a Media Studies class. The information, points and positions espoused herein remain relevant today. That is why I am posting it here!

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