On organizing multiple multimodality in multimedia messaging. Aspects of communicative complexity.
| Author: | Bliesener, Thomas |
| Author 2: | Jens Loenhoff |
| Author 3: | Walter H. Schmitz |
| Abstract: | |
| The selectivity as well as the combination of synchronous multimedial and multimodal forms of communication open up completely new possibilities to structure communication processes and, in particular, to pursue strategic options as, for example, the inclusion or exclusion of communication partners or the building of a front region and a back region (cf. E. Goffman) which couldn’t be realized under normal conditions of bodily presence. In using multimodal and multimedial communication technologies participants in communicaton build up a so far hardly known degree of communicative complexity. In a pilote project for children who are almost completely isolated from friends and relatives during a quarter of a year because of a particular cancer treatment, technology for synchronous telecommunication (including Skype, MSN Messenger, ICQ, Desktopsharing) was installed and supported. In audiovisual desktop capturings of more than 200 hours, there are sessions with an enormous liveliness, closeness and relatedness of children and friends. On the basis of painstaking descriptions of some representative interaction sequences it will become clear not only how competent young interaction partners know to use such a technology for their purposes, but also how they relate, for example, heterogeneous communication processes with one another in which they and their various partners are involved at the same time and how they combine them to one multilevel communicative event by their ingenious use of the articulation possibilities of the technological infrastructure. A first analysis of such an empirical material will offer an opportunity to show how the concept of communicative complexity could take into account specifics of technologically mediated multimediality and multimodality and help to structure the explicative dealing with our empirical data. |
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