Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series foreword
- Preface
- Contributors
- Part I Computer-based signs
- Part II The rhetoric of interactive media
- Part III Computers in context
- Introduction
- 13 Computer culture: The meaning of technology and the technology of meaning
- 14 One person, one computer: The social construction of the personal computer
- 15 Hi-tech network organizations as self-referential systems
- Comment: Disturbing communication
- 16 Dialogues in networks
- 17 Historical trends in computer and information technology
- Comment: The history of computer-based signs
- 18 A historical perspective on work practices and technology
- 19 Hypertext: From modem Utopia to post-modem dystopia?
- Index
Comment: Disturbing communication
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series foreword
- Preface
- Contributors
- Part I Computer-based signs
- Part II The rhetoric of interactive media
- Part III Computers in context
- Introduction
- 13 Computer culture: The meaning of technology and the technology of meaning
- 14 One person, one computer: The social construction of the personal computer
- 15 Hi-tech network organizations as self-referential systems
- Comment: Disturbing communication
- 16 Dialogues in networks
- 17 Historical trends in computer and information technology
- Comment: The history of computer-based signs
- 18 A historical perspective on work practices and technology
- 19 Hypertext: From modem Utopia to post-modem dystopia?
- Index
Summary
The standard communication model analyses communication into five main elements: A sender encodes a message into a signal, transmits the signal through a noisy channel that may distort parts of the signal before it arrives at the receiver who decodes the signal and hopefully retrieves the original message.
In semiotic terms we can translate signal by expression/signifier and message by content/signified. The assumption is that the signified “glue” to the signifier; although it is the signifier that gets transmitted, the signified rides along with it and can be unpacked at the end of the transmission line.
When applied to actual communication, this assumption turns out to be inadequate. The actual interpretation of the “signal” seems to rely more on the context of communication than on the signal received, so the idea of “decoding the signified” explains very little in actual conversations.
Qvortrup's chapter on organization theory replaces the five standard elements by new concepts, two of which are perturbation and self-maintenance. The purpose of this note is to suggest how they can be applied more concretely to communication analysis with a point of departure in catastrophe theory (CT) (see “A Semiotic Approach to Programming”).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Computer as Medium , pp. 384 - 388Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994