We are living in a time when new technologies and the ongoing "globalization" of media surround us with new systems of surveillance, virtual environments and an unprecedented proliferation of images.  Contemporary information culture promises to enrich our knowledge of the world, extend our experience, pleasures and fantasies; and the so called 'global telecommunications' are said to be creating new forms of sociality, binding together new kinds of community, and protecting us from the dangers of the world (Robins 1996). We may (or may not) believe in this utopian technofuture, but in the vicinity of the serially produced 3-D dreams our own realities and everyday experiences seem to be fading out.

Something is really being changed, anyway. A kind of transformation is taking place in our perceptual practices and the so called image revolution is gradually reshaping the communication process itself. In what follows this transformation is observed.

The subject range of the present text involved an interdisciplinary approach, which proved the most difficult charge of my project. Due to the ever growing division and narrow specialisation of knowledge, if such an approach becomes sine qua non, nowadays it is usually realized as a mere borrowing of certain concepts and terminology from other disciplines. This way allows to preserve the style and to avoid the breakdown of the reader’s comprehension. However, there is another option, which involves an actual study on the other disciplines. In that case,  the text is implicated with risk of being bizarre, because every knowledge has its own language and means of expression. However, I find the latter way more important, even if it makes my text eclectic and somehow irrepressible.

The other difficulty I encountered, was the problem of organising the text, because the knowledge concerning communication networks and visual experience is itself like a vast intricate network of different viewpoints. How was I supposed to reflect upon this extensive knowledge and disentangle it to a single string of narration?

There are many different ways of classification, though. Cultural studies, for instance, sets apart the "institutional discourse" from the "academic" theoretical domain. Obviously, this is a conditional division; and the condition is – whose interests are maintained by a certain theory. Institutional discourse is said to promote intentions of institutions that represent a certain communication technology or media, and does not reflect the actual needs of audience of that media (Aumont et al. 1994,  Ang 1994, Gitlin 1994).

Another (conditional) separation is made on the basis of the research method, between the empirical, formal and normative approaches (Smith 1995). My assumption is that any point of view or way of seeing things cannot be good or bad itself insofar as it represents a particular level of comprehension of the problem. My proceedings included a broad range of standpoints and involved the three methods. And even if it happened for them to come into a contradiction, I tried (as far as it was possible) to consider them rather complementary than right or wrong.

Hence, an opening discussion of the control and ownership factors in the global information flow can be regarded as a sample of institutional discourse created by Hamid Mowlana (1986), the UN expert in global communications. It can be labelled as a superficial, reified vision of human communication as a "traffic-system" of data circulation, produced by an  institution of information technology, with no respect to the actual perception process. Then, next to this vision I placed a vivid story of an old man, who has been made to face the information outfall in a foreign country. This opposition of viewpoints sets up the backdrop of the present text.

In the second chapter, communication is discussed further as an action or event within the framework of the 'process' school of communication studies. Yet, there is an attempt to theorise about the process of communication from a phenomenological standpoint and, once again, to modify the well known Shannon and Weaver's transmission model of communication. Thus, the third participant, the witness of a communication event, is introduced and the structure of channel, modified to an elementary network unit, is discussed. As a conceptual support to my analysis of the phenomenon of witness, I took the Maurice Merleau-Ponty's (1964) idea of perceptual dichotomy.

The third chapter, called The model, bears a short survey of models of the 'process' study of communication. However, I claim that, because of impossibility to ‘monosemantically’ allocate the place of the witness in the segment(s) of communication channel, proposed by those models, my research requires a change of the standpoint, and thus, there is a transition to the opposite ‘semiotic’ school of communication.

Within the framework of the semiotic method I am trying to look over the visual experience and communication as exchange of meanings. The fourth chapter includes also the Althusserian concept of ideologies and the theory of hegemony of Antonio Gramsci along with their interpretation by the scholars of the Birmingham Center of cultural studies.

And finally, a conception of communication matrix is introduced and the generic qualities of the message form are discussed in terms of the place of the viewer and entropy and ongoing development of communication networks.

Part Two

Download the viscomm.zip file of the thesis.

viscom.zip

	: Butterfly | thesis