Message from Don E. Mitchell 12/15/2003 8:52 AM
Hello Brad, Paul, Dick and cc group,
I wanted to log-in to this community as the prodigal technician returning to say "Hey!".
I agree completely with your lament, Brad, about page-flipping reductions we find in the current generation of “distance learning software systems”.
A face-to-face experience has little correlate with reading posters, whether the posters are on a monitor or a corkboard at a public commons.
When interacting with people, our ascription of their importance/severity upon our anticipations; I've captured in a term called "headdress and uniform", which can be seen active in most cultures of "civilized" cultural norms.
Headdress adorns personal rank, uniform adorns group significance.
These iconic and visual symbols, worn upon our bodies when sitting on a log (metaphorically), go a long way to settling the anticipations of appropriateness in dialogue.
Perhaps the following is off base, some word for naïve, but lizards, octopi, hummingbirds and several other species have a semiotic language built into their color and texture, like the cobra when he flares his neck widely, or the butterfly that permanently signifies eyes upon his wings, yet signals them with resting positions in open form.
These things may operate in silent fashion in human communications, the under-laid fundamental we all take for granted as we all are operating within the same genetically grounded semiotic sphere, being able to take such fundamental givens as self-evident and therefore “coenoscopic” (C. S. Peirce’s term).
Now the brain with but just a little practice can learn to "ascribe" quickly and as a native intuitively appropriate fashion these same senses of significance to an iconic ascription, a learning process, like including the symbol table first in a stream of entangled symbols that create a stream of sense.
Now when communications between one(s) to one(s) does occur without the natural grounding of the headdress and uni-formal circumstance and pomp, then our minds don't simply leave the natural information blank.
"Will the jury please disregard that statement" is a remark that simply doesn't work, in any form of semiotic sphere.
Therefore, poster-based communications by nature of cognizance requires a default set of ascriptions to complete the sense into at least an a priori appreciation.
However, in such posterized Semiosis, the fidelity of the appreciation of the receiver of the sense constructed subjectively is proportional to the accuracy of the reconstruction of the missing information needed to complete the semiotic sphere of the receiving agency. The accuracy of the semiosphere is a time-sequence of previous anticipatorial moments, and also able to rapidly escalate to gross mis-interpretation, in exponential manor.
Perhaps semiosphere is another name for Professor Smith’s “appreciative field”.
Disparate messaging and the flame-wars of misunderstanding common on the Web are evidence of this missing link in applied group theory on our present posterized metaphorical world.
Comments?
Warm regards, DonEMitchell