Dissertation (Introduction)

     This study has grown out of an exciting period of time in the history of human communication. It started, for me, in 1983 when as a teacher I introduced computers into my English classroom. At first I considered a computerto be a special pen, or at least a highly automated typewriterthat took much of the slavery away from writing to allow my students to “write”. After only a few days it became evident that what we were using was not a special pen or automated typewriter but a new tool that allowed my students to do something other than “write”. It was a composingtool that allowed students to participate in a new culture, a new way of communicating. This new way of communicating challenged students, teachers, parents and the whole community and caused us to re-evaluate matters to do with ownership of ideas and textual expression, the nature of text and textuality, plagiarismand copyright.

     This ethnographic journey moved on from those small beginnings in a Western Australian country town to Sydney where I took up the study again. Sensing that my contact with people was my route to understanding the problems and possibilities of this new media , I took on a task of seeing more than 1,000 students (over a four year period) having difficulty with making meaning in work and schooling contexts over a three year period. My motivation was to re-introduce these people to literacy , but instead of through books, paper and pen , I chose to do this through the stimulating medium of personal computers. These people certainly improved in their ability to communicate, but texts and documents at the time pointed to the fact that these people had not necessarily improved in their literate ability, at least as measured through pens and paper.

     The ethnographic study continued as I moved from the confines of schooling and work communication problems to the wider business community which uses thousands of computers. Through my consulting activities, I have come into contact with and personally interviewed more than 1,500 computer experts. More than 500 of these have been programmers immersed in acts of making meaning with computers to organise business ideas and principles through programmes activity . These programmers work for some of the largest institutions in Australia: Westpac , the Commonwealth Bank, BT Australia, Coles Myer, Qantas, and AAP. The balance of these people, approximately 1,000, are expert computer users , using computers for the majority of their working day, making meaning with personal computers to achieve specific business tasks. Amongst these people there are technical writers, accountants, secretarial staff, middle level management, information technology consultants, technical drafts people, and information management consultants.

     My research has had three distinct parts:

1.      The first phase, working within a schooling environment with my notions of text , writing , print , computers as tools of writing under constant challenge.

2.      The second phase, marked by a quest for understanding computers as a tool and the effects of using that tool with which to solve problems.

3.      The third phase, a cultural study - a study of computer cultures to reveal what I considered at first to be the culture of computer use, but later revised to consider the “cultures of computer use”.

     This cultural study provided for me an understanding of not only computers and how they are used, but additionally, the way people were now working with language , merging words with non-verbal elements, moving between older conceptions of writing and text through to constructing text in new ways, with new elements. The most significant change I have noted over the last thirteen years has been the change from planning and structuring a text through various composition stages, to the notion of what Lévi-Strauss named bricolage . Because a computer allows people to experiment, modify change, therefore simulating what the final text is to be, the notion of planning or setting out an idea before it is borne has almost completely disappeared. Working in a bricolage style has certainly permeated activities of programmers and expert computer users particularly as non-verbal elements have been included in practices of meaning making.

     During the last two years of this study, computer texts have come into their own. The Internet has exploded into activity with more than 30 million people actively communicating across the entire globe. The default computer text in this environment has come to be the multimedia textual pattern we have come to call the world wide web . Millions of web pages have been constructed across the world, and these are available for any person with an ordinary personal computer and a modem to use. Millions of people are constructing web pages and putting them on both large and small computer systems for others to see. With this explosion of activity, millions of computer texts are now constructed specifically, for the electronic medium.

     I have come to label this new culture of computer use the culture of simulation . This culture has come about through the wholesale introduction of a new type of context, or interface for personal computers — the graphical user interface . Computers are now not the techno-tools of the early 1980s, but through this introduction of this new interface ordinary, non-technical people can work with computers, not focusing on what the computer is doing, but focusing on the task at hand. This culture is one that emphasises a practical trial and error experience of learning and usage; partly this is due to the environment of constant change with which a user must interact, and partly it is due to a more democratic approach to the use of computers ¾ as personal computers rather than a monolithic centralised main frame computer.

     The culture of simulation has also been spurred on by the large scale connection of personal computers to the Internet. As people connect to each other across the world , they are forming on-line communities. In these communities people are discovering that it is possible to simulate identities, activities and even to simulate what would normally be regarded as highly personal activities — such as the simulation of intimacy, immediacy, and even sex across the Internet.

     This emphasis on simulation , however, has led most highly skilled computer users to reconceptualise the older tasks of number manipulation, word processing , design drawing and modelling ; they now understand them in terms of simulation. The older culture of computer use, the culture of calculation , emphasises the computer user’s ability to map human understanding onto highly abstract and technical capabilities of a computer. In contrast, the newer culture of simulation treats computer activities in terms of an iterative dialogue. Word processing, in this newer culture, is the simulation of “print ” in a non-print environment. Simulation in this context means working with trials of “print” before committing it to “print”. Print is not modifiable once it is set on the page , and is not usually moveable from one page to the next, and cannot be experimented with until it is set in the manner required by the author. When print is simulated in a computing context, such as in a “word processor”, it is possible to experiment, using “what if” questions, such as, “What if we move this paragraph/sentence/word to here? Does it improve the text ? Does it help people understand what is meant here?” Simulation, besides meaning a way of working, also places a different emphasis on electronic texts . They are trials, they are not an end product , but a move towards an eventual goal. Most people who understand this are released from the pressure of producing a perfect product the first time. Instead they can mould and modify the product until it achieves the purpose or goal intended.

     In working with people making meaning on computers, I have recognised the intricacy of the symbolic activity in this context. To me it was like working with a language, so great was the intricacy. A further stimulus for thinking of computer-based symbolic activity as language stemmed from a personal study of Poster (1990), primarily, and then supplemented with Ulmer (1989) and revisiting Ong (1982). Poster suggests that we must consider computer-based meaning making in terms of “electronically mediated” language, or as he terms it electronic language. While Poster gave me a name to pin to this intricate range of symbolic activity, it did not answer a number of questions. For me, Poster’s description of electronic language did not provide a practical guide to the shape of electronic language, how people might recognise it, how they worked with it on a computer in their office or at home.

     To a certain extent, when first reading Poster (1990) I had a conflict over Poster’s electronic language and Ulmer’s (1989) notion of videocy. I had studied at some length Ulmer’s suggestion that a new form of meaning making had arisen, based on the characteristic technology of the electronic age of the video camera. This was at conflict, in my thinking with the notions of Poster. As a starting point in extending my practical study of a “new form” of language, I surveyed Ong, Ulmer and Poster to some depth.

     From my study, it was apparent that there are identifiable ages in human communication formed through the domination of a particular technology of communication. Ong (1982) proposed such identifiable ages most significantly through tracing the rise of literate activity from a previous period of oracy. Ulmer (1989) extends Ong’s (1982) thesis suggesting that there are identifiable ages throughout Western history, each where a dominant form of meaning making is a major organising force in the patterning of human activity. Ong (1982) proposes two ages: the age of orality and the subsequent move to literacy . Ong identifies Plato as a key figure who marks the change from a way of “thinking” that was predominantly oral, to a way of “thinking” that was predominantly “literate”. A key notion of this theory is that human consciousness is modified because of the new dominant expression. Thus, when literacy became a dominant means of making meaning, the consciousness of the people was changed.

     Ulmer (1985a, 1989) sees Derrida as a key figure of another era. Because of the strange and different texts Derrida composes, Ulmer suggests Derrida has already taken on a new form of consciousness and this not only affects the way he might compose texts in the new medium but also the way texts are composed in the older medium. Thus, what Ulmer outlines is the way in which Derrida’s texts are non-linear, collagic, juxtapositional; and he equates this with the way in which films and videotexts are composed. For Ulmer, this new form of consciousness is named videocy, that is, the form of communication in this age takes on the organisational characteristics of the videotext.

     In Teletheory, Ulmer (1989) outlines a theory of composition based upon the notion of videocy. This provides the organisational principle of a textual genre for all media — voice, print and video . From this basis, Ulmer outlines the genre of mystory. It is a collagic genre, acting like a periodic table of cognitive elements. A mystory is specific to each composer: it is based upon the specifics of one’s own experience with regards to a particular arena of interest. The genre, Ulmer suggests, is organised like a video would organise clips of particular experiences or happenings. The value of this genre in pedagogical contexts, Ulmer argues, is that a person is not expected to reject her/his culture before starting to think. Rather, thinking is piled one on top of the next to form geological-like layers of experience depicting changes in thinking and understandings of culture as thinking progresses.

     Ulmer ’s (1989) notion of a genre based upon the organisation of a dominant medium of meaning making has merit pedagogically — it can provide the basis for a variant form of dissertation , for example. What Ulmer emphasises, though, is a form based upon the collagic and juxtapositional nature of the dominant medium — video or as in his earlier works film. This has dominated his work since his seminal text (Ulmer, 1983) where he discusses the notion of “representation ”. This notion, upon which Ulmer bases mystory and which has aided in the generation of his comments concerning Derrida , has arisen from his pre-occupation with filmicity in earlier versions of his discussion about the new age of making meaning, and video in more recent works. Linking juxtaposition, collage and non-linearity to video, however, in my thinking, is limiting in that there are in our society other forms of symbolic exchange that are also based upon these principles. A far more expansive view, that should be taken in place of the narrow view base upon video, is to identify these principles of composition as those that are based on electronic language . To me, computer-based technology, particularly in that computer technology is so pervasive entering into our lives through nearly every machine we use ¾ even the video machine is a computer controlled mechanism ¾ should be the characteristic technological based for a new form of symbolic exchange.

     This wider view of current forms of symbolic exchange is supported but not elaborated extensively in Poster . Poster (1989:6) stresses that every age employs forms of symbolic exchange which contain organisational structures. In agreement with Ong and Ulmer , Poster characterises the first two as the oral and literate ages, but he differs with Ulmer on what it is that we are now facing. Poster suggests that this stage in the history of the world is characterised not by filmicity , or videocy but by “electronically mediated exchanges”. Poster’s notion encompasses Ulmer’s videocy but goes much further.

     Poster ’s (1990:6) notion of “electronically mediated exchanges” defines a field of communication that envelops all forms of known communication and binds them together into electronic patterning. In this era, Poster suggests, not only have people to learn new ways of communicating, but also the nature of language has changed - it is now electronic causing us to re-think what can be called language in this new era. Just as Ong (1982:145-155) claimed that activities in a new era carried over from the old era were substantially changed in the new era, Poster suggests activities carried over into this new era of electronic language are not the same as was practiced in the old era ¾ the way we write, read, speak and listen is quite different. The dominant form of symbolic exchange changes not only what one does when using that “electronically mediated exchanges”, but also it has an effect upon the form of one’s speaking and writing .

     What was missing for me, though, in Poster’s explication was a practical sense of what electronic language was about. For example, I wanted to fill out some detail in people’s involvement with electronic language, how that language works when using a computer, what people do, and whether we see that language characteristically in texts that are printed out from a computer or whether we see it characteristically on the computer monitor. What I needed to do, I reasoned, was not to follow Ong, Ulmer or Poster’s arguments further, theorising with or against them, but to use Poster’s notion as a starting point ¾ that there is such a thing as electronic language ¾ and fill this out in some detail by examining what people actually do with computers, and how a new form of symbolic exchange might work when people use computers. It seemed that a study of language ¾ albeit electronic ¾ was the direction I should follow all the time keeping in mind that I wanted to explain practically what this notion of electronic language meant to the user of a computer.

     This idea of working with computer-based symbolic activity as language led me to consider a linguistic perspective for my study. But by this time I had to consider some of my postmodern orientations and how these related to a linguistic perspective. In contrast to many linguistic theorists, postmodern theorists have suggested that the search for depth and mechanism is futile, and that it is more realistic to explore the world of shifting surfaces than to embark on a search for origins and structure (See Poster 1990; Jameson , 1984; Baudrilliard, 1988; Turkle , 1992). A decade ago Fredric Jameson wrote a classic article on the meaning of postmodernism. He included in his characterisation of postmodernism the precedence of surface over depth, of simulation over the “real ”, of play over seriousness, many of the same qualities that characterise the new computer aesthetic. At the same time Jameson (1984:54, 66) noted that the postmodern era lacked objects that could represent it. The turbine, smokestack, pipes, and conveyor belts of the late nineteenth centuries have been powerful objects for imaging the industrial modernity. The postmodern era had no such objects. Jameson (1984:89) suggested that what was needed was a ”new aesthetic of cognitive mapping”, a new way of spatial thinking that would permit us, at least, to register the complexities of our world.

     A decade after Jameson wrote this essay, postmodernism has found its objects (Turkle, 1992). They exist in the information and connections of the Internet and the world wide web , and in the windows, icons, and layers of personal computing . There are two aspects that must be considered here. On an individual level, computers are able to facilitate pluralism in styles of use; they offer different things to different people allowing for the growth of different and varied computer cultures . On a large scale, however, computers now offer an experience resonant with a postmodern aesthetic . Various theorists point to aspects of the postmodern aesthetic that finds its objects in the world of computers, software and the Internet.

     The theorists of the postmodern (See Baudrilliard, 1983) have written about worlds without origins. They write of simulcra, copies of things that no longer have originals. So, too, the files and documents on a computer screen function as copies of objects of which they are the first examples. The documents that scroll before a user’s eyes function as though real . They are access to the thing itself, but there is no other thing itself - it is a simulation of the “real” without an origin.

     Jameson (1984:58) wrote that in a postmodern world , the subject is not alienated but fragmented. He explained that the notion of alienation presumes a centralised, unitary self who could become lost to himself or herself. But, as a postmodernist sees it, the self is decentred and multiple, the concept of alienation breaks down. Today, the personal computer culture ’s most compelling objects give people a way to think concretely about fragmentation . In operating tools of simulation on the personal computer, identity can be fluid and multiple, a signifier no longer clearly points to a thing that is signified, and understanding is less likely to proceed through analysis than by navigation through virtual space. Perhaps the most powerful of these ways of dealing with fragmentation is the capability of a person to navigate through virtual space - to work from one fragment to another as though they all belonged to a consistent world. But it is not that the world is consistent but that people have developed a sense of what can be “played with” or “tested” to see if that too has an active link, an opening, a closing, or some other element that will move the computer operator from the current position to another. Understanding, in the context of virtual space, comes about through operating disjoint methods of navigation and appreciating change as it occurs on that navigated path.

     Ulmer (1983:94) suggests that the postmodern aesthetic is focussed centrally on an epistemology following Wittgenstein ’s admonition that the “meaning is the use”. This is an epistemology of performance rather ¾ knowing as making, producing, doing, acting as in Wittgenstein’s (1968:105) account of the relation of knowing to the “mastery of technique.” The object of knowing in these terms is exemplified in Wittgenstein’s knower merely saying, “Now I know how to go on .” This is the same knowing that is required when working with computer interfaces and navigating virtual space. When operating a computer interface it is not the knowledge of the structure below, and how that structure is interoperating with the user, but it is a knowledge of performance, or how to go on, how to continue so that the conversation with the machine will move on to the next stage.

     Lévi-Strauss (1968:16-33) contrasts the analytic method of Western Science with an associative science practiced in many non-Western societies. The tribal herbalist, for example, does not proceed by abstraction but by thinking through problems using the materials at hand. Solving problems by arranging and re-arranging a well known set of materials can be said to be practicing “bricolage ”. Ulmer (1985b) identifies bricolage as a major methodology through which people in a postmodernist setting solve problems, or arrive at solutions . Bricolage, while not a new method of working, takes centre stage replacing seemingly logical or systematic models of working. People practising bricolage tend to try one re-arrangement of the context, step back, try another, reconsider and try another — bricoleurs navigate through mid-course corrections. Additionally, bricoleurs seem to enter a relationship with their work materials that has a flavour of conversation. In the culture of simulation , a new emphasis on bricolage is obvious with an emphasis on the computer user being led towards manipulate visual objects, testing to identify causes and effects. Instead of having to follow a set of rules laid down in advance, computer users are encouraged to tinker in simulated microworlds. Hence, with the introduction of the “Mac” desktop , people were encouraged to “play” with the interface instead of reading a set of verbose manuals. The computer culture is at a point where to have full membership no longer requires the ability to program. Rather, membership is accorded to people who use software out of a box functioning as bricoleurs.

     Now when dealing with new software, the computer user knows “how to go on ” not by an overarching knowledge of how computer programmes work, but how this microworld provides cues as to how the conversation should now continue. Jameson (1984:58) in suggesting that computers give people a way of thinking concretely about fragmentation points to the notion of computing as a integrative tool whereby the fragmentation of the postmodern world is brought into a fluid union. Ulmer (1983:94) indicates that knowledge in this environment is practical, rather than theoretical, using a notion of bricolage as a method of working such similar to the description provided by Lévi-Strauss (1968:16-33). These three accounts indicate a much greater sense of concreteness and definability about the activities of making meaning in the context of computing. There is a real danger of confusing the fluidity, and changeability of the computing environment with the cultural knowledge of how computing is done which is a clear set of options of meaning making that is chartable and definable as part of the wider social semiotic of living in a world of computers.

     While a postmodern dream appears to be a reality in that people do seem to go about tasks on the Internet and in a wide variety of programmes in the style of a “bricoleur”, this postmodern celebration of change and disparity, and handling change and disparity with navigational tendencies is not as unknowable, or unchartable as might be imagined. Even though the environment is one of schismic tendencies and seemingly it is only worth working with the surface because depth may be unknowable, there are emerging, as with each of the other dominant forms of communication , mindsets, tools of thinking and techniques of making sense of what is visible and what is underlying. The computing environment encapsulates a series of wildly differing technologies , some of which date back centuries to concepts of printing and print, others involve tools of thinking that have yet to take a place in mainstream thinking; this seemingly changeable world of computing must not be confused with the identifiable set of options with which people attend to the task of doing computing.

     This is to suggest that even a bricoleur, who seemingly tinkers to establish “how to go on ”, develops tools of thinking , ways of interacting with the environment. And while there may be a multiplicity of ever changing possibilities, it is possible to consider similarities of strategy in a social context. Marvin (1988:4) argues that electronic communication , even though it may be apparently unchartable, if nothing else creates arenas for negotiating issues crucial to the conduct of social life; among these issues we may be negotiating who is inside, who is outside, who may speak, who may not, and who has authority and who is believed. Poster (1990:5) continues this argument:

An adequate account of electronic language , in the end, may be a theory that is able to decode the linguistic dimension of the new forms of social interaction .

     Language is one of the most tightly constructed semiotics that people use^{^[1]}. Amongst other semiotics, language has a special place, a superordinate place, because it is in language that people are able to construct meaningful texts that can elucidate what it is we mean when using other semiotics. So too, in language, we can construct meta-theories of sign behaviour. Because language has such a central place it is common for linguists to focus upon it alone, putting to one side, for the time, the consideration of sign systems in general.

     To take such a focus, however, is to overlook the fact that linguistic theories have their origins in the work of people who saw themselves constructing more general theories of sign. Saussure (1913, published 1959) in his Course in General Linguistics presented what he himself described as a general science of signs, or semiology. C.S. Peirce (1940, 1955) similarly proposed a semiotics , not a narrow theory of language . Hjelmslev (1943), and later, Lamb (1966), developed linguistic theories that provide a perspective on language centring on language as a system of relations. Even so, Hjelmslev’s Prolegomena proposes principles that apply to semiotic systems and not language alone. Consequently, the use of linguistic models must always defer to a broader semiotic perspective. In this dissertation , the interpretation of language as electronic substance, involves, reconceptualising language in broader terms than has been attempted elsewhere.

     Linguistic theories, have in the past, emphasised speaking and writing as the focus of linguistic explication. While this has provided significant understandings concerning the nature of meaning making in a context of languaging human beings, many of the previous proposals cannot provide explication of languaging human beings in conversation with multiple-centred languaging simulation machines. In this context a theory of underlying mechanics cannot be advanced as in each personal desktop , simulation, or “window”, the underlying rules may be different, or may have multiple centres of focus to which the complexities may only be known to the programmer. Or in the case of the Internet , there may not be any single person in any place that could provide a key to the underlying mechanisms; there may only be, much like speaking and writing, a knowledge of “how to go on ” rather than a knowledge of the rules and mechanisms.

     Linguistic theories emphasising speaking and writing are also inadequate in a context where speaking and writing are incorporated and changed by a new electronic context. Here, speaking and writing, because it is enveloped in a new context of electronicity must be interpreted from that new aesthetic. Additionally, what we must obtain understandings of may be neither speaking nor writing — it may in fact be the relationship of a graphic, video , audio or other element in context with any or all of those other elements.

     Then, it might be asked, why attempt a linguistic theory of “electronic language ”? Surely this theory must be either a general semiotic theory, or a theory of some other semiotic than language.

     A conscious decision has been made to name the theory of electronic language a linguistic theory . There are three major reasons I chose this path:

1.      There is a strong tradition of naming theories as linguistic theories when discussing a semiotic that is the central semiotic to human communication . Such theories have largely centred on speaking in terms of orality , since this was the first and most general semiotic known to human beings and within which people have conducted all manner of endeavours known to all people across the earth. So strong has this semiotic been that it has a vast array of different permutations and vestiges across the planet. Additionally, since the inception of writing , linguistic theories have explicated literate activity and in some cases compared speaking and writing in opposition and concord. Since it is a key notion of this paper that electronic language should be understood to be a central semiotic to human communication, it is a pre-requisite that we explore the theory of electronic language as a linguistic theory .

2.      The theory of electronic language provides a new way of considering both speaking and writing from the perspective of the new member of the language family - electronic language. This is not to suggest that we will view speaking and writing in the way that it has been regarded in the past. Rather, it will be emphasised that from the perspective of electronic language, speaking and writing will be seen as subsumed in the electronic appearance of language and this will provide a new perspective on the older forms of language.

3.      The fact that at the same time as electronic language has arisen there has arisen new paradigms of providing explication there also comes the possibility of establishing a new landmark of linguistics — that is, an appearance of linguistics that will provide specific guidance as to how humans communicate in this new context, and, also, a new way of performing linguistics.

     My project has to do with establishing electronic language in its rightful place as a major semiotic of human communication . Following on from Ong , Ulmer and Poster , the project of my dissertation is to reinforce the place Poster has ascribed electronic language — the third form of language. To do this, however, some housekeeping is in order. That is, in the context of electronicity there has not been identified a name for the activities human beings must perform in order to make meaning when using that type of language. When speaking a human being uses skills of oracy, or orality . When using print or writing , people use the skills of literacy . There is a need to propose what it is that people do when making meaning with electronic language.

     The new context of using language, the electronic context, is a collage of disparate and often times discordant set of elements each of which has its own way of providing the user with a way of making meaning. I concluded that Wittgenstein ’s notion of “special methods” is relevant here. There is no one way of understanding all special methods, or cultural technologies, built over centuries. By “cultural technologies” Wittgenstein means a particular way of “knowing how to go on ” that is particular to a cultural or social group. Each of these special methods is entrenched in a cultural pursuit of a specific cultural group. “Knowing how to go on” is specific to that culture and oftentimes has its own paradigm or way of understanding.

     This is to suggest that there is more than one way of doing computing - there are perhaps twenty, or fifty, or some other unknown number of ways of computing according to how many social groupings around the world use computers and differ from each other in the way they interpret what is going on. This notion, of a multiple sets of methodologies is a well documented feature of making meaning in the context of reading and writing (Green, 1988). There is therefore not only one way of knowing how to work with a computer , but multiple ways according to the social context within which computing is carried out. What is common, however, across the cultures of computer use is that the skills required to use a computer, in each cultural context, are not the skills of literacy . Through the writer’s contact with thousands of people in contexts of computing in Europe, USA, Japan and Australia, it is clear that those people who are highly literate are not necessarily prepared to know the options of meaning making in the context of using a computer.

     I have therefore suggested that when using electronic language , human beings are required to learn the skills of technacy. This is to say that these skills involve a knowledge and practical ability in using cultural technologies , as diverse and disparate as they may be, across all manner of ways we might use a computer. There is no suggestion here that the person will have an overall technical plan of a computer, but rather, technacy is the capacity a computer user develops to be able to get on and make meaning in contexts where computers are used.

     In extending Ong , Ulmer and Poster ’s notions of the eras of human communication , I have suggested that the era in which we now find ourselves is the era of technacy. In contrast with both habits of thought and methods of operation in the eras of orality and literacy , in the era of technacy people must develop habits of thought that provides a map of electronic meaning making. Instead of having to use devices to remember items of historical significance as was practiced in the era of orality, people in dealing with computers need to learn skills of remembering previous acts of bricolage and what was successful in previous attempts in making meaning. Habits of thought, based on bricolage, that have been used quite commonly by authors of ancient poetry in the age of literacy comes to the fore as a method of thinking in the era of technacy . But because computing involves new technologies , habits of thought associated with literacy are modified - bricolage in one setting does not necessarily involve habits of thought of bricolage in a computer setting. Literacy required people to eventually compose a text that has sequential and predictable form, and could be decoded in such a manner; technacy requires that people work with a computer where the form of making meaning has tendencies towards unpredictability of form - where the odd, disparate way of presenting text is celebrated.

     From this viewpoint, then, it was my intention in this study to set out a practical explication of this “language ”. In my contact with both expert and non-expert computer users , the problem that most seem to grapple with is how to make meaning with computer activity , that is, with electronic language. Most computer users work with a computer as though it was a new type of typewriter , or a magic sort of pencil and therefore see that little meaning if any is made in electronic language - meaning for them is made in written language when the text is printed from a computer and become real text. On the other hand, a few computer users, both experts and non-experts, work easily within the environment, obviously making meaning with what is presented on the screen over and above any meaning made in the written language on the screen, and then responding in meaningful sequences of activity. A theory that should be developed, I have reasoned, should identify what it is that aids such people in making meaning when using a computer.

     Many of the people I have interviewed in the past few years are highly technate people. That is, they know the cultural technologies specific to computer contexts, as disjunctive, collagic, multiple centred and abstract as they may be to those not socialised in technacy . On the other hand, technate people do not necessarily know the inner workings of these cultural technologies, but they do know the interactive roles of the technology; they can identify them, identify options of making meaning with these technologies, and thus know how to maintain a conversation-like flow of information passed to and from a computer when operating programmes and conducting simulations in these contexts.

     The problem I set out to solve was to explore electronic language and from this exploration I have arrived at a number of understandings. This dissertation is about those understandings. A summary of those understandings, and an organising schema for this dissertation, is as follows:

A new form of symbolic activity arises when computers are involved in human communication activities. This new form of symbolic activity is considered sufficiently distinct in its structures and functions to be described as “electronic language”. It is proposed that electronic language:

·        has been made apparent by two technological developments ¾ the introduction of the graphical user interface and adoption of large scale networking (discussed chapter 1);

·        has recognisable characteristics that places it apart from spoken and written language (discussed chapter 2);

·        constitutes new cultural activities (discussed chapter 3);

·        reconstitutes and reconstructs spoken and written language (considered in chapters 4 & 5);

·        integrates spoken and written language with attendant semiotics providing the human user with a seamless set of semiotic possibilities (considered in chapters 4 & 5);

is the basis of new human capacities with which human beings can exercise social action (discussed in chapter 6).

^{^[1]}     Other contenders, like music and gesture, necessarily force me to be cautious about a stronger claim.

BACK TO ELECTRONIC CONTENTS PAGE