Studying Mobile Media by Burgess Jean Hjorth Larissa Richardson Ingrid & Jean Burgess & Ingrid Richardson

Author:Burgess, Jean, Hjorth, Larissa, Richardson, Ingrid & Jean Burgess, & Ingrid Richardson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis

DEIXIS OF NAVIGATION

Navigation as way-finding entails constantly registering presence (where am I?). But rather than focusing on the trace of the past, navigation is geared toward deciding where to go next. Hence destination (where will I go?) becomes the new center of indexicality. Space is constructed in this indexical reading of space where the three temporalities merge.

Let us look at the consequences of the fact that the present moment is indexicality signified. Deixis is a term borrowed from linguistics to explain how language is context-dependent. The focus on deixis has shifted the conceptions of language dramatically. In fact, as Émile Benveniste has argued, deixis, not reference, is the essence of language.16 Deictic words, or shifters, function as mobile focal points, often within an oppositional structure such as “here,” implicitly opposed to “there.” Deixis indicates the relative meaning of the utterance, tied to situation of utterance, an I in the here and now. They have no fixed, referential meaning. Deixis establishes the point of origin, or deictic center, of the utterance: the I who speaks, as well as its point of arrival, the you that is spoken to. These terms are by definition mutually exchangeable. Moreover, or consequently, deixis frames the statement in temporal (now) and spatial (here) terms.

As such, deixis helps set up the world to which the text relates. In contrast to nouns or adjectives, deictic words, or shifters, only have meaning in relation to the situation of utterance. Their meaning is produced through indication rather than reference—think of pointing. Personal pronouns of the first and second person—I, we or you—are shifters. But he, she or it are not. The latter, although also in need of identities to fill them in, do not change when the situation of utterance changes. But when I speak and you answer, you become I, and I, you. Hence, if we do not know who is speaking, the first and second person pronouns have no meaning. Similarly, we cannot place the meaning of such words as “over there” or “right here” if we don't know from where the speaker is speaking. Nor can we time the meaning of “yesterday” without a determined temporal frame.

I deploy these examples of shifters to suggest that the intersection of time, place and subject is their primary anchor. Therefore, while the term was first introduced in linguistics, the perspective on the construction of space, time and subjectivity in screen-based spectatorship is particularly useful for analyzing how the spectator or user—here, navigator—is bound to the screen image. At the heart of deixis lies the interaction between an “I” and a “you” whose positions are essentially exchangeable. This can be applied to user-screen interaction and sheds light on the particular performativity involved in navigation—a reciprocal performativity of making space in a (subjective) engagement with it and the constituting subjectivity in the reading of space.

Hence, the screen image is not simply presented as from an internal point of view—a diegetic perspective—but also produces the subjectivity of the spectator (the “I” doing the

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