50 Ways to Understand Communication by Arthur Asa Berger

Author:Arthur Asa Berger
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780742569218
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2013-06-25T04:00:00+00:00

34 Cybertexts and Video Games

Behind each of the singularistic concepts of sender, message, and receiver in traditional communication theory there is a complex continuum of positions, or functions. (These are not related to Roman Jakobson’s [1960] communicative functions.) When I fire a laser gun in a computer game such as Space Invader [sic], where, and what, am “I”? Am I the sender or the receiver? I am certainly part of the medium, so perhaps I am the message. Compare Umberto Eco’s statement that “what one usually calls message is rather a text, a network of different messages depending on different codes” (1976, 141). If this definition is applied to a computer game program such as Space Invader [sic], it becomes nontrivial to attribute these concepts to specific communicative positions: just as the game becomes a text for the user at the time of playing, so, it can be argued, does the user become a text for the game, since they exchange and react to each other’s messages according to a set of codes. The game plays the user and there is no message apart from the play.

This epistemological problem comes into focus every time the known media increase in number and complexity. The step from speech to phonetic writing that took place some six thousand years ago in the Middle East is not merely an expansion of the reach of language in time and space, or a splitting up of language into two different media, or a new mode of graphical expression, but an event that creates an awareness of language as something other than its written or spoken realization. To write is not the same as to speak; listening and reading are different activities, with different positions in the communicative topology.

—Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 162

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.