On the Monitor, Darkly. from Mediation to Media by Way of Reality 73

Siegener Periodicum zur Internationalen____ Empirischen______ Literaturwissenschaft Herausgegeben von Reinhold Viehoff (Halle/Saale) Gebhard Rusch (Siegen) Jg. 25 (2006), Heft 1 Peter Lang Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften SPIEL Siegener Periodicum zur Internationalen Empirischen Literaturwissenschaft SPIEL: Siegener Periodicum zur Internationalen Empirischen Literaturwissenschaft Jg. 25 (2006), Heft 1 Peter Lang Frankfurt am Main •Berlin •Bern •Bruxelles •NewYork •Oxford •Wien Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über <<a href="/goto?url=http://www.d-nb.de" target="_blank">http://www.d-nb.de> </a>abrufbar. ISSN 0722-7833 IISSSSNN 20179292--87087338 © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Frankfurt am Main 2009 Alle Rechte Vorbehalten. Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. <a href="/goto?url=http://www.peterlang.de" target="_blank">www.peterlang.de </a>Siegener Periodicum zur Internationalen Empirischen Literaturwissenschaft SPIEL 25 (2006), H. 1 Mediale Wende - Ansprüche, Konzepte und Diskurse / Mediatic turn - Claims, Concepts, and Discourses hrsg. von / ed. by Theo Hug (Innsbruck) Die Heftbezeichnung SPIEL 25 (2006), H. 1 ist produktionstechnischen Gründen geschuldet und bezieht sich nicht auf das tatsächliche Erscheinungsjahr dieses Bandes, 2008. Dafür bittet die Redaktion um Verständnis. Das Heft wird zitiert: Theo Hug (Hg.), 2008: Mediale Wende - Ansprüche, Konzepte und Diskurse. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang. (= special issue SPIEL, 25 (2006), H. 1). Owing to technical reasons of production, the title SPIEL 25 (2006), H. 1 does not refer to the actual year of publication of this issue. The editorial team asks for the readers’ indulgence. The issue is cited as follows: Theo Hug (ed.), 2008: Mediatic tum - Claims, Concepts, and Discourses. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang. (= special issue SPIEL, 25 (2006), H. 1). Siegener Periodicum zur Internationalen Empirischen Literaturwissenschaft <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">Contents / Inhalt </li><li style="flex:1">SPIEL 25 (2006), H. 1 </li></ul>Theo Hug (Innsbruck) <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">Introductory Note </li><li style="flex:1">1</li></ul>5Reinhard Margreiter (Innsbruck) Interdiskursive Medienphilosophie Gebhard Rusch (Siegen) <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">The Many Mediatic Turns...and a Significant Difference </li><li style="flex:1">23 </li></ul>Christina Slade (Sydney, Utrecht) From the Linguistic to the Mediatic Turn: <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">The case of virtual Reality </li><li style="flex:1">35 </li></ul>47 59 Marianne van den Boomen (Utrecht) Transcoding metaphors after the mediatic turn Hans-Martin Schdnherr-Mann (Munchen) Die Metaphysik im Weltbild des mediatic turn Goran Sonesson (Lund) On the Monitor, darkly. From Mediation to Media <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">by Way of Reality </li><li style="flex:1">73 </li></ul>89 Sybiile Kramer (Berlin) Das .postalische Prinzip’: Versuch einer Rehabilitierung des Ubertragens OliverLerone Schultz (Berlin) Augmented Embodiment. Excavated Dynamics of Media Theory - <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">Critical Inlets to the (Second) Medial Turn </li><li style="flex:1">99 </li></ul>Norm Friesen (Vancouver) <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">Communication Genres and the Mediatic Turn </li><li style="flex:1">105 </li></ul>Theo Hug (Innsbruck) Media Pedagogy under the Auspices of the mediatic turn - <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">An Explorative Sketch with Programmatic Intention </li><li style="flex:1">117 </li></ul>137 Andreas Strohl (Munchen) How Personalized Media Create Millions of Operators - Vilem Flusser’s Take on Apparatus Culture and Media Literacy RUBRIC Daniela Pscheida (Halle) Wissensmodelle im Wandel: Vom Modus wahrer Erkenntnis <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">zum Modus situativen Konsenses </li><li style="flex:1">149 </li></ul>10.3726/80107_73 SPIEL 25 (2006) H. i, 73-88 Göran Sonesson (Lund/ S) On the Monitor, darkly. From Mediation to Media by Way of Reality Wenn das Ganze der Realität auf irgendeine Weise mediaiisiert ist, wie dies von Peirce, Cassirer und Vygotsky verstanden worden ist, dann fragt sich, was sich beim Gebrauch dieses Ausdrucks ändert, wenn (Massen-)medien die Aufgabe der Zuschreibung von Bedeutungen übernehmen. Mit anderen Worten: In weichem Sinne können wir von einer medialen Wende sprechen, wenn die Humangeschichte, zumindest seit sie human wurde, sich als medienvermittelte gewandelt hat? Die Schwierigkeit ist mit dem Kommunikationsmodell verbunden, das für die Befassung mit telegra- fischen und Radioübertragungen entwickelt worden ist, und das gegenwärtig in der Semiotik, Kommunikationstheorie und andernorts zur Analyse aller Arten von Kommunikation einschließ- lich face-to-face Kommunikation angewendet wird. Diese Konfusion macht verständlich, dass manchmal behauptet wird, dass Medien nicht einmal vermitteln, sondern schlicht Realität wider- spiegeln. Im vorliegenden Beitrag wird die Behauptung kritisch untersucht, die Umberto Eco in seiner jüngsten Kritik der Ikonizität formuliert hat, und derzufolge das Fernsehen überhaupt nicht mediaiisiert ist, weil es wie ein Spiegel, der einen anderen Spiegel zeigt, selbst Realität darstellt. Indem die Idee des Spiegels als Nicht-Zeichen sowie die Parallele zwischen einer Kette von Spiegeln und Fernsehübertragungen zurückgewiesen werden, wird anderen Betrachtungsweisen Beachtung geschenkt, bei denen Fernsehen und auch Internet-Kommunikation an der Realität teilhaben, wenngleich diese bereits medienvermittelt ist._____________________________________ When students of the (mass) media tell us, either to complain about the fact or extol it, that reality is becoming increasingly mediated, they no doubt mean to suggest that we more and more have access to our environment only by means of a number of technical, often socially instituted, apparatuses, which tend to have an institutionally delimited in- group as senders and a collective audience. Psychologists, such as, notably, Vygotsky, use the term mediation to describe the process by means of which something is conveyed by signs, normally linguistic signs. Mediation, in this sense, is a stage in the development of all children, which has existed ever since the ancestors of Homo sapiens took a different route in evolution from the other apes, inventing signs such as language, gesture, and pictures. Semioticians, finally, such a Peirce and Cassirer, appear to use the term in a still more general sense, applying it to all kinds of meaning, which is accessible to us, as well as to all other animals, differently in each case, already in direct perception. Peirce, notably, decides to abandon the term “sign” because it appears to him to be too narrow. Cassirer, who sees in the “symbolic forms” something peculiar to human beings, would apparently admit that, also in the variegated worlds experienced by animals of other species, there is some kind of mediation. This is a type of meaning, which, at least in part, is determined already by the nature of sense organs and limbs possessed by the organism. It is a kind of constraint that comes close to being anatomical. <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">74 </li><li style="flex:1">Goran Sonesson </li></ul>How to lift the dead hand of information theory Mediation in the sense of Vygotsky is not technically informed, in any real sense, because it depends of extensions, which are more directly connected to the human body (to which must be counted elementary writing and drawing utensils). It does not have any institutionalized in-group as senders, but depends instead on a mutual collectivity of addressers and addressees. Because it is ruled by norms, mediation in this sense also could be considered some kind of constraint imposed on the individual subject, but it is clear that, without these constraints, the subject would not even be a subject, because this very exchange of signs contributes to defining it as such. As for mediation in the sense of Peirce and Cassirer, it may in part be biologically determined, and in other parts it is constituted by cultural meanings, which are so deeply entrenched, that they only become visible in the comparison between the lifeworlds of different animals or different human groups. Thus, the different meanings of the objects we call chairs (“something to sit on”) and tables (“something to put things on which we are handling, etc.”) are not there for the fly or the dog, nor for human groups who sit on the ground and put all the objects they handle there, too. Even today most studies of media in communication as well as semiotics rely, more or less explicitly, on the communication model derived from the mathematical theory of information, which was designed to describe a few, by now rather old-fashioned, technological means of communication, telegraphy and radio, and in particular to devise reme- dies to the loss of information often occurring during transportation. Largely because of the influence of Jakobson (1960) and Eco 1976; 1977), 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 symmetrical, equally negative, consequences: by reducing all kinds of semiosis to the mass media kind, in particular to that employed by radio and telegraphy, we become unable to understand the specificity of more direct forms of communication; and 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. Taken together, this means that we dispose of no way of explaining the effects of the multiple mediations having accrued to the immediately given world of our experience in the last century. Beyond this, we may even discover a third, even more serious consequence: by projecting the communication model onto each and every form for conveying meaning, we lose sight of that which is really common to all kinds of semiosis. The most well-know criticism, of course, is that the model relies on a spatial metaphor, i.e., it emphasises the analogy with communication in the sense of trains, cars, etc., construing all meaning as some kind of object travelling from one point in space to another. More importantly from our point of view, however, the idea of there being a message moving from one point in space to another tends to obliterate the fact that, in many cases, other instances of the communication situation have to accomplish the movement, or to be active in other ways. Indeed, the displacements required of the sender and the receiver constitute one of the principal factors distinguishing different media in general, and modem and traditional media in particular. Until recently, to send a fax, the <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">On the Monitor, darkly </li><li style="flex:1">75 </li></ul>sender had to go to the telegraph station, but now he may accomplish the same act from his computer - or perhaps rather, send an e-mail or a text message on the mobile phone, or engage in a video conference. In fact, changes in this respect are responsible for the utopia termed “the global village” by MacLuhan and “the third wave” by Toffler: they have to do, at least in part, with the subject being now able to accomplish from his home what would earlier have required an appreciable spatial displacement (cf. Sonesson 1987; 1995; 1997a). Curiously, the temporal metaphor also embodied in the communication model has not come in for scrutiny: what is accomplished by the sender as well as by the receiver are acts in time, which may be close but do not coincide. This is true of the telegraph, but not of everyday face-to-face interaction, nor of the messenger travelling during many years. It applies even more awkwardly to the case of media having to be recreated before being received, such as a piece of music or, in a different way, a movie. Once again, the communication model obliterates precisely those changes which characterise the age of information: even pictures have now become temporal acts, as testified by the television image and even more the picture imported from some Web server, not to mention the Quick Time or Flash movie on the web page. Instead of a continuous process initiated by a subject and affecting another, communication really should be seen as a double set of acts, which may coincide spatially and/or temporally, but often do not, and which are initiated by at least two different subjects, the sender and the receiver, or, to choose more appropriate terms, the creator and the concretises Curiously, the case of the radio, and to some extent even the telegraph, should really have suggested this model: no matter how much a program is broad- cast, no communication will take place until somebody puts his radio receiver on. Nowa- days, when we have to start up our computer, connect to the Internet service provider, start the e-mail program and then fetch our mail on the server, we get an even more acute idea of the double initiative required for communication to take place. The temporal presupposition entails another one: before the moment of sending, there is a subject making a decision to send. This is very clear in the case of the telegraph and other technological means: one must decide to go to the telegraph station or to open the Fax software of the home computer. There is much less clearly a preparatory stage, a phase of decision which can be separated from the act of sending, in ordinary verbal conversation, gesture, and so on. Quite apart from the distinction between machines and men in the part of addresser and addressee (made, curiously, by Shannon & Weaver, but obliterated by Jakobson and Eco), we really need to have more instances, not less, in order to account for the complexities of sending and receiving. Several subjects are in- volved in the sending of a book: the writer, the editor, the editorial board, the proof- reader, the typesetter (nowadays largely identical with the writer in front of his computer), the enterprise doing the distribution, the critique, the bookseller, the one who buys the book as a present, etc. Fortunately, there seem to be norms determining who the important sender of different kinds of messages is. The general view in our culture, for instance, is that the author is a more important sender of a book than his printer; but in some cases, as that of the critique or other avatar of the gatekeeper, the layman and the scholar take different views on the matter. In the case of ancient media, however, these norms are not always easy to recover; and they are not always fixed in the case of the

On the Monitor, Darkly. from Mediation to Media by Way of Reality 73

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