Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Iconicity in the Digital World

1999; John Benjamins Publishing Company; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1075/ill.1.21wys

1873-5037

Eva L. Wyss,

Digital Media and Visual Art

Popularculture is always in process; its meanings can never be identified in a text, for texts are activated, or made meaningful, only in social relations and in intertextual relations.This activation of the meaning potential of a text can occur only in the social and cultural relationship into which it enters.(Fiske, 199]face-to-face communication that stands against the fact that it is written communication (cf.Krimer 1997: 88f.).The more commonthe use of Internet communication becomes, the more the written word (and the characteristics hitherto associated with: its artificiality, consciousness, definitiveness and visual fixity [cf.Ong 1982: 81]) will lose the importance that it has traditionally had. Linguistic characteristics of Internet communicationElectronic mail is a communication too] that was instituted for interpersonal communication when the first node of the network ARPANET wasinstalled at UCLA in 1969.By 1972, thirty-seven universities and government research organisations in the U.S. had joined the network, and today, all continents and fifty-seven million Internet users (January 1997) are connected bysatellite links, fiber optic cables and telephone lines creating the network commonly called the 'Internet' (cf.Reid 1994; statistics from Quarterman 1997).Due to the great interest in interpersonal communication -the first users of the network spent most of their time in writing and reading electronic mail (e-mail)?-other tools were invented: USENET, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Multi User Dungeon (MUD), Multi User Dungeon Object Orientated (MOO), etc. (cf.Reid 1994, see note 1).These inventions may be regarded as totally or partly new forms of communication that define and demand new modesand styles of communication (Cf.Collot and Belmore 1996), different manners, rules and rituals -and therefore also new text types.When we compare Internet communication with oral and written text types we are already familiar with, the talk/phone chats may be regarded as written phonecalls; the IRCs as written informal discussions (cf.Werry 1996, Feldweg et al. 1995); e-mail messages may be anything from informal notes to official letters (cf.Giinther and Wyss 1996); Mailing Lists resemble notice-board messages or advertisement sections in papers and magazines.Newsgroup communicationis akin to written and public group discussions, but it also resembles a notice-board on which advertisements are posted.The communication in a MUD resembles the communication found in board and adventure games.Despite these similarities, which may be defined as intertextual relations, there is not yet an accepted linguistic explanation of the inherent conflict between orality and literacy.Herring (1996b) makes us understand why it is not surprising that the users of Internet facilities call some forms of computer mediated communication (e.g.