Dissertation (Abstract)

ABSTRACT

     A new form of symbolic activity arises when computers are involved in human communication activities. This new form of symbolic activity is considered sufficiently distinct in its structures and functions to be described as electronic language.

     Two developments in personal computer technology have sponsored the building of a context where communicating via electronic language has been established: the development of graphical user interfaces that has allowed multi-variate interaction between human and machine, and the pervasive networking of computers across the world through the Internet and other large scale private networks which has sponsored human-computer-human contact the world over.

     Symbolic activity centred on the computer has recognisable characteristics that place it apart from spoken and written language. Electronic language is highly modifiable, tends towards collagic expression, non-linear textual patterns, emphasises non-verbal elements, is reliant on database storage mechanisms to power the language, and through the human anonymity that it sponsors devoid of a hand-signature or a voice-signature it sponsors the development of pluralistic connection between human and human.

     Through a survey of more than 4,000 computer professionals in five countries, it has confirmed the dissertation writer’s view that there are distinct cultures of computer use, each of which sponsors a set of computer centred cultural activities. These activities form the cultural practices of people who make meaning with computers. One particular set of activities centred on using the computer as a simulating machine fosters a particular manner of working ¾ bricolage ¾ a material way of working with textualisation. This cultural orientation also emphasises knowing programmes through experience rather than formal training, building programmes into operative units rather than using programmes as stand-alone objects, and performing simulations within these operative units named here as microworlds.

     Stratification, in modellinglanguage, is introduced because we cannot handle the processes of communicationin a single statement to take into account both the content and its realisation or expression in semioticreality. It is impossible to account for semiotic patterning of language in one direct statement between what is experienced as a cultural activityand what is demonstrated as a part of language as it is written and spoken. Beginning with cultural organisation of microworlds, an underlying stratum of form ¾ named here as synthesis in comparison with grammar in spoken and written language. Synthesis is organised such that it can incorporate patterns of nearly every semiotic human beings have created including spoken and written language. It is at the level of synthesis that people manipulate semiotics on the computer platform, whereas it is the next level down, that of digitology, that the computer handles this new digital expression.

     Symbolic activity based on the activities of a machine could be passed off as a text building device rather than considering it as site that sponsors a fully functional language. It is this notion that causes new computer users to miss the cues that the computer gives as to what should be done next, and misunderstands what it is that is going on between human and computer. Of prime importance is for people to understand how a machine relates interpersonally with its user, and how humans relate to each other through the mediation of electronic language. While we can also learn from the highly complex representational and textual functioning of the language the greatest lessons for new users is to learn how the machine provides a personal space for the user.

    The capacity a human develops to work with electronic language, technacy is both a capacity to handle the language, and a capacity for social action. Through becoming a technate person, a person is empowered to use the symbolic mechanisms of electronic language to influence others, using attendant empowerment along with the language. This dissertation illustrates how changes in cultural and mental tools have consequences for social order: for practices of work, the nature of problems that people solve at work, and consequently the evolution of higher mental function.

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