Tag Archives: Giving life a shape

The other side of the multimodal discourse coin

Bill Thompson has an article, Giving life a shape, on BBC News which touches tangentially on approaching the world in a multimodal fashion. He takes a kind of digital approach i.e.when he uses the word technology he actually means digital technology and his examples come from social networking, Second Life, social gaming and other activities mediated through the Internet and computers. From the article,

… because in working through the creative potential of new technologies artists of all types are helping us to find new ways to think about these tools and working out how to integrate them into our wider cultural and commercial practice.

They are helping us to explore the latest chapter in the ongoing conversation between human psychology and the capabilities of modern technology, something which will matter more and more as the network becomes pervasive and digital devices penetrate every area of our lives.

Different modalities (audio files, graphics files, animation (Second Life), and others are referred to indirectly in the course of Thompson’s article, which is why I’ve picked up on it. In  light of the Kay O’Halloran interviews (on this website blog July 3, 6, and 7, 2009) Thompson’s description of how “artists help find us new ways to think about things” reveals the other side of the multimodal discourse coin.

While O’Halloran and her colleagues develop a framework for analyzing and understanding multimodal discourse, it’s artists (I define that word broadly) who enact and explore that discourse through their work.

One quibble, I think Thompson’s definition could be broadened so that technology  includes nanotechnology, biotechnology, synthetic biology and other emerging technologies. Now back to Thompson and a comment that works no matter how you define technology,

One problem in talking about this is that relatively few people understand the underlying technology sufficiently well to be comfortable with it. We have few stories that talk about technology and few workable metaphors or analogies that let us convey complex technological issues in ways that people really grasp.

Metaphors came up in the O’Halloran interview (July 6, 2009 posting) too and I got this in the comments (from inkbat),

I was struck by the point on metaphor. When you come right down to it, isn’t it sad that so many of our concepts are the result of some designer or advertiser or whoever deciding to create some kind of shortcut for us .. which would work if it was just in the one instance but then it takes on a life of its own and suddenly we no longer think of the heart AS IF it is a pump but as though it IS a pump. Or the brain as a computer. …

Unfortunately as inkbat points out, we forget we’ve created a metaphor and we treat it ‘as if it were so’ to results that can be disastrous. Still, I think that creating metaphors and then having to ‘break’ or ‘see through’ them ultimately discarding the old metaphor and developing a new one is part of the human condition.

Back to my nanotech ways tomorrow.