Anxiety. Did I remember to check my school email account? And my Facebook wall, to make sure nobody posted anything obscene? I pause from my reading and jot down some notes about what to pick up from the grocery store tonight, and an idea I had for a tweet. I could just pull out my cell phone now, but I’m not sure that five minutes is adequate time between tweets. I wouldn’t want people to think I was addicted to this stuff. Besides, I might want to edit.
In the technology-soaked existence that most of us lead, there is little time for reflection. At least, little “real” time. It seems as though everything is done “in real time” these days, which makes it seem like anything that will take longer to think about than to say is not worth saying at all. It’s a shame, because some things really are worth thinking about, even outside of real time.
Carey Jewitt observes that “the page is increasingly shaped and remade by the notion of screen.” I imagine this as being similar to the way the written narrative was shaped by the notion of cinema, with its utilization of flashbacks and simultaneous story lines. I wonder how social interaction is being shaped and remade by electronic communication. Could it be that short bursts of twitter-style information will influence our face-to-face interactions? Or will the use of twitter for brief messages reserve face time for more in-depth discourse? Maybe, as Theodora Stites confesses, we will increasingly dread in-person socialization. “Eye contact isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” she says, “And facial expressions are hard to control.”
This sounds a lot like Jewitt’s description of the multimodal video game Ico. The title character speaks a made-up language which is subtitled in English, but the character Yorda speaks a made-up language that is subtitled with inaccessible symbols. The video game creators have removed modes of communication (verbal, written) from their characters just as social media creators have removed modes of communication (body language) from people.
The world is multimodal. There have long been efforts to recreate this multimodal experience. Motion pictures added an element of time and motion to the presentation of static images. Later, sound added another mode to movies. New technologies sometimes add, sometimes take away modes of communication. What they do provide are options, sometimes overwhelmingly so. I have ideas that I wonder would be more effective if presented in photo, video, or musical form. Each medium’s combination of modes has strengths that I do not yet understand. If anything, multimodal communication reinforces the importance of every slight utterance, blink, or punctuation mark. We ought to slow down and think about the implications of our communications. So that scrap of paper in my pocket with ideas for tweets? I’m going to sit on it.
In the technology-soaked existence that most of us lead, there is little time for reflection. At least, little “real” time. It seems as though everything is done “in real time” these days, which makes it seem like anything that will take longer to think about than to say is not worth saying at all. It’s a shame, because some things really are worth thinking about, even outside of real time.
Carey Jewitt observes that “the page is increasingly shaped and remade by the notion of screen.” I imagine this as being similar to the way the written narrative was shaped by the notion of cinema, with its utilization of flashbacks and simultaneous story lines. I wonder how social interaction is being shaped and remade by electronic communication. Could it be that short bursts of twitter-style information will influence our face-to-face interactions? Or will the use of twitter for brief messages reserve face time for more in-depth discourse? Maybe, as Theodora Stites confesses, we will increasingly dread in-person socialization. “Eye contact isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” she says, “And facial expressions are hard to control.”
This sounds a lot like Jewitt’s description of the multimodal video game Ico. The title character speaks a made-up language which is subtitled in English, but the character Yorda speaks a made-up language that is subtitled with inaccessible symbols. The video game creators have removed modes of communication (verbal, written) from their characters just as social media creators have removed modes of communication (body language) from people.
The world is multimodal. There have long been efforts to recreate this multimodal experience. Motion pictures added an element of time and motion to the presentation of static images. Later, sound added another mode to movies. New technologies sometimes add, sometimes take away modes of communication. What they do provide are options, sometimes overwhelmingly so. I have ideas that I wonder would be more effective if presented in photo, video, or musical form. Each medium’s combination of modes has strengths that I do not yet understand. If anything, multimodal communication reinforces the importance of every slight utterance, blink, or punctuation mark. We ought to slow down and think about the implications of our communications. So that scrap of paper in my pocket with ideas for tweets? I’m going to sit on it.
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