February 2010

Originally posted in my “Media Language & Society” Class 2/15/10

Ideology : The body of doctrine, myth, belief, etc., that guides an individual, social movement, institution, class, or large group.

The first thing that came to mind when thinking about this topic was Scientology – a ‘religion’ founded in the 20th century which has been the subject of much controversy with many of its detractors calling it more of a cult than a religion.  I thought if any contemporary ideology were making use of digital media to spread their message, it would be them, so I checked out their website at scientology.org.  Sure enough, their website leverages a number of digital formats to advocate their message.  First, the home page is a Flash player featuring a video (that plays automatically) which outlines the key points of their “pitch.” Phrases like “It is the only major new religion to have emerged in the 20th century” and “Educators announce its tools as the salvage of our youth” fade in and out to a new age soundtrack playing in the background.  As it turns out, video is the way the entire site is presented.  The lower part of the Flash player is a “Video Menu” from which you can choose to watch videos on the topics of “Belief & Practices,” “Human Rights,” “Anti-Drug,” “The Way to Happiness,” “Narcanon,” “Applied Scholastics,” and “Volunteer Ministers.”  Only if you click on the link at the upper right of the player, labeled “Church of Scientology Home Page,” are you taken to their more traditional text-based site, where you can continue to read in more depth about any one of these topics.

This kind of use of digital media to spread an ideology is certainly far different than the more traditional ways churches have used to attract members to their faith. When I think of religious proselytizing, I usually think of Born Again Christians handing out flyers on the street, Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses going door-to-door, Baptists preaching from soapboxes, or even Scientologists giving free “stress tests” in the Times Square subway station. The use of digital media allows religious ideologies such as this one a way to approach potential converts on a visceral/emotional level, in a way that written tracts or face-to-face “convincing” cannot.  While the Scientologists still offer a text-based site, it’s no accident that they chose video – and those particular topics – as the first line of attack.  We are a visually oriented culture, and I believe this has trained the public to respond passively.  That is to say, we are more likely to give our attention to something that does not require our *effort* (watching a video) than to something like the logic of a written argument that requires our full attention and critical thought.

Icons : A sign or representation that stands for its object by virtue of a resemblance or analogy to it.

There are a number of meanings that come to mind when I hear the word “icons,” – in particular I think of corporate logos or cultural icons (like Madonna, e.g.) who represent the cultural zeitgeist.  However, given the above definition, and thinking strictly in the realm of digital media, one icon that I think represents our changing relationship to information and dialogue is this one:

This is the “official” icon of RSS (Really Simple Syndication), a web-based format that allows information to be taken from one site, and placed onto another one by subscribing to a “feed” – usually in XML format.  Without dwelling too much on the technology, I think it’s interesting that while RSS has existed for more than 10 years, the icon has only been around for 5.  According to the Wikipedia entry for RSS:

“In December 2005, the Microsoft Internet Explorer team [19] and Outlook team [20] announced on their blogs that they were adopting the feed icon first used in the Mozilla Firefox browser (). A few months later, Opera Softwarefollowed suit.This effectively made the orange square with white radio waves the industry standard for RSS and Atom feeds, replacing the large variety of icons and text that had been used previously to identify syndication data.”

When the icon first appeared a few years ago, not many people knew what it was nor how to use it.  Today, because of feed readers like NetVibes, and because information has become more and more ubiquitous and portable I think most people now understand this symbol and it’s meaning.  Whereas in 2005, the icon had to be accompanied by words like “Subscribe” to convey its meaning – today you often see it appear on its own, the meaning having been absorbed into the symbol itself.  You also see these kinds of things happening with browser icons like the little house (meaning home page) or the little floppy disk (even though we no longer use floppy disks) for “save.”  More and more are we becoming accustomed to navigating the world of digital media through a language of signs and symbols, much as we do when we navigate the streets in our cars. Everyone knows a red hexagon means STOP – and I don’t think removing the actual word from the sign would change that.

Semiotics : The study of signs and symbols as elements of communicative behavior; the analysis of systems of communication, as language, gestures, or clothing.

I think there are similarities between Icons and Semiotics, although as  I understand it, the former is really more of a subset of the latter which is more like an entire “language” of symbols than individual icons (this is given with the caveat that “my understanding” of Semiotics is sketchy, at best)

I randomly decided to choose a news item to represent Semiotics and one of the top results was, interestingly, an online NY Times review of the current Karen Finley performance about Jackie Kennedy/Onassis (for those who don’t know, Finley was the center of a controversy about NEA funding in the 80′s).   One passage from the article reads:

“she leads her audience through a haphazard slide-show tour of the events of Mrs. Onassis’s life and the marketing of them, Ms. Finley makes a persuasive case for why a country focused for so long and so obsessively on the image of one woman and what she wore. In pictures of the exquisitely photogenic widow Kennedy, Ms. Finley says, the public found a way of giving formal shape to tragedy and bereavement, a 20th-century equivalent to the Madonnas of classical paintings.”

Through the use of multimedia (performance, slides) Ms. Finley is demonstrating the semiotics of celebrity and fashion as applied to a cultural icon – that is, celebrity and fashion as meaning; in this case the meaning being the grief of a nation.   Doing this through performance and slides (i.e. semiotically) makes this performance seem in some ways self-referential or “meta” as the kids today like to say – which brings me to the way in which this might apply to the dialogue of digital media.   One of the main ways that digital technologies are being used today by artists is by appropriating existing media and cultural iconography and “remixing” them to either subvert their original message or create an entirely new work altogether.  This technique of meta-creation isn’t really new (it has traditions in Pop Art, Dada, etc.) but the tools are now so ubiquitous that almost everyone from 12 year old kids to professional artists are able to participate in the creation of a new semiotic language and participate in a public discourse in a way that was never before possible.

Representation : The expression or designation by some term, character, symbol, or the like.

Probably because of the simplicity of its meaning (one thing standing for another), this was the term that gave me the most trouble in this assignment. Narrowing this down to a concise definition that can then be applied to dialogue and digital technology is challenging.  I suppose that metaphor can be defined as a kind of representation.  If I take the idea of digital space as metaphor as a jumping off point, then examples abound as to the metaphoric nomenclature we’ve used to define the web and digital technologies for the past 15-20 years.  A few examples:

The Web : Although perhaps not its primary meaning, a web is something we think of as being associated with the complex structures woven by spiders that have no distinct beginning or end points.  This is an easy, and apt, way to represent the network of computers that form today’s internet.

Web Pages : Clearly these aren’t “pages” at all, but when the web emerged the only thing we had to compare it to was print.  We had to place it into a context that was familiar so that we’d at least have a foothold in understanding them.

Web “sites,” Cyber “space,” the @ symbol :  All of these things are metaphors for actual physical space, when the internet, of course, doesn’t exist in physical space. Again, this would seem to be a way for us to give some dimension to a dimensionless concept, enabling us to understand it a bit more easily.

Information Superhighway : Anyone remember this one?  A mercifully short-lived metaphor for the internet.

Email : Again, not mail at all, but a way for us to understand the encoding and transmission of electronic messages.

Facebook : Although I didn’t know this until fairly recently, a facebook was something that got sent to new students of a college with pictures of, and info about, their new classmates to help them to get to know each other.  In other words, it served some of the same functions of today’s social networks.

Desktop, files, folders : Way back at the dawn of the PC, these were the metaphors chosen to represent the computer interface.  It makes me wonder what other metaphors might have been chosen, and how the evolution of digital technology might have been different if they had.

YouTube : Even TVs don’t have “tubes” anymore, but the metaphor isn’t lost.

I’m sure I could sit here all night and come up with others, but the point is that it seems like much of digital culture has grown up using representation/metaphor in order for us to understand it.  Will these metaphors fade away as we become more comfortable with digital technology?  Or will the old meanings of things like “pages” fade away as digital communication gradually supplants things like books, magazines, and newspapers?

Tagged as: language, MLS, semiotics

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