Making Meaning in 21st Century Communication

Exploring ways to express and symbolise being in touch.

Communications technologies are often designed with the goal of bringing people together when they are physically separate. This entails many assumptions, one of which is that physical separation is a key problem that technology might solve. Consequently, technical innovation has emphasised the bodily aspects of the communicating human, such as sight, sound and touch, while focusing less on the mindful aspects of humanness, such as intentions or ideas, and the symbolic value that an act of communication can deliver. If we take into account this latter perspective, we might treat communication as involving many different purposes and goals, and as offering various different ways of creating bonds through symbolic value. For example, providing communication modalities that allow individuals to create new forms of expressive content, or tokens of their communication acts, might be one way in which such bonds are made apparent.

This research theme starts from the premise that communication technologies ought not to offer simple proxies for being physically close to those who are important to us, but should instead allow new ways of creating materials that express our being in touch with them. In the same way that a written letter is not only a device to make up for physical absence, but also a tool that creates a new landscape between sender and receiver, so new forms of communication can be built upon the goal of allowing us to create materials that manifest and embody our intentions, hopes and aspirations.

Key research questions:

• What are the lessons that derive from the success and failure of prior communications channels?
• How will the recent explosion in communication possibilities affect the language and practice of human expression’?
• In what way do the constraints associated with any particular communications technology foster particular modes of articulateness, play or creativity?
• In what ways does content get tied or linked to particular technologies of communication? Are the words on a paper letter meaningful in part because they are on paper and similarly are the meanings conveyed by a video message bound to the device on which that message is see (such as a mobile phone)?
• What are the diverse ways that one human feeling, such as affection, can be demonstrated through limited communication media and how does this affect the feeling in question (or the meanings associated with it?).
• If choice of communications media is a reflection of identity, then how might different technologies be used to bring together types of person who are distinct, such as grandparents and grandchildren?
• In technologies that offer many opportunities for connecting with others (such as social networking sites), what are the constraints introduced by users themselves that would seem to impose artificial (albeit human) constraints on the technology, and how do these change over time?

Projects

• Visual Blinks-Blink Messaging: Using a wearable cameras (such as Sensecam) to produce message content;
• Messaging Web 2.0: Exploring new ways of allowing users to create content to message;
• Stretching Feelings: Exploring ways of conveying meaning in the context of long-distance relationships;
• Home Video Communication: Exploring practices of video-communication in the home.