The multimediation of the lifeworld

Göran Sonesson

In Semiotics of the Media. Proceedings of an international congress, Kassel, March 1995. Nöth, Winfried, (ed). Mou-
ton de Gruyter, Berlin & New York 1997; 61-78

Contents:

The failure of the mediatic turn

Space and time in the communication model

Subject and interpretation in the communication model

From magic to media. An ecological tour

All our notions are too narrow

On the circulation of women and other signs

The ultimate multimedium: Bioy Casares’ invention

Where angels fear to touch

References

Umberto Eco (1977) may well have been right to suggest, in his homage to Roman Jakobson, that
the eventual resurgence of semiotics in our time, long after the pioneering work of Peirce and
Saussure, is at least partially due to the contemporary profusion of mass media and other techno-
logical means of communication. The justification for semiotics, then, would have to been sought
in the emergence of what others have termed the society of information, the post-industrial society,
the post-modern condition, the mode of information, the society of pictures, etc. Many, however,
have included the computer prominently among the new media of information (insisting less on the
masses of the mass media), and others have observed that information is more often conveyed by
means of pictures, or by pictures in conjunction with verbal language, music, and others means,
which, in its ideal form, would amount to multimedia.

GÖRAN SONESSON: The multimediation of the lifeworld 1

The failure of the mediatic turn

Certainly no discipline would seem to be as adequate for the study of media as semiotics, which
is concerned with all the different means and modes by which information is conveyed. In par-
ticular, no other discipline appears to have the resources necessary to interrogate such hybrid
media as film, television, music videos, computer games, and in particular what is nowadays
called multimedia.

Yet, before and after Ecos seminal observation, most semioticians have continued be preoccupied
by rather old-fashioned media such as the book and the oil painting, and even when turning to more
recently-invented ones, notably film and television, they have failed to inquire into their specificity
(Sonesson 1992b; 1995b). In recent years, however, the Second Congress of the International Asso-
ciation for Visual Semiotics, held in Bilbao in 1992, the Imatra Winter school in 1994, and finally
the Kassel conference in 1995, have all chosen to focus on the semiotics of the media. In spite of
this change of heart, most contributors to these congresses have either been involved with semiotics
to the exclusion of new media, or have forgotten semiotic theory over their fascination for new
technological possibilities.

There is, I submit, an intrinsic reason for the difficulties which semiotics encounters in taking the
mediatic turn (Sonesson 1992; 1995b). More or less explicitly, all semiotic theory relies on the
communication model derived from the mathematical theory of information, which was designed
to describe a few, by now rather old-fashioned, technological means of communication, telegra-
phy and radio, and in particular to devise remedies to the loss of information often occurring
during transportation. Largely because of the influence of Jakobson (1960) and Eco (1976), this
model has been used inside semiotics as a model of all communication, all signification, and of
all kinds of semiosis.

This practice has produced at least two negative consequences: by reducing all kinds of semiosis to
the mass media kind, in particular to that employed by radio and telegraphy, we become unable to
understand the peculiarity of more direct forms of communication; and by treating all semiosis as
being on a par, we deprive ourselves of the means to understand the intricacies added to direct
communication by means of different varieties of technological mediation. Taken together, this
means that we dispose of no way of explaining the effects of the multiple mediations having ac-
crued to the immediately given world of our experience in the last century. Beyond this, we may
even discover a third, even more serious consequence: by projecting the communication model
onto each and every form for conveying meaning, we lose sight of that which is really common to
all kinds of semiosis.

2 The multimediation of the lifeworld: GÖRAN SONESSON

Space and time in the communication model

It is really too easy to find faults with the communication model, both as a general description of
meaning production, and in relation to particular means of communication. Thus, many of the
observations I will make below are not entirely original, and I will refrain from mentioning other
points of contention which might also have been included.

The most well-know criticism, of course, is that the model relies on a spatial metaphor, i.e. it
emphasizes the analogy with communication in the sense of trains, cars, etc., construing all mean-
ing as some kind of object travelling from one point in space to another. Curiously, spatiality, in this
sense, is not particularly pregnant in the model media, the telegraph and the radio (not, that is to say,
in the sense of what we, following Gibson, will call ecological physics below). Rather, the model
would fit the case of the letter, which ordinarily travels by train, and before that, by stage-coach or
messenger.

The identification of communication with transport, is probably suggested by the spatial lay-out of
the diagram itself, rather than by the media modeled. Or it may have some even deeper source, as
suggested by Reddys well-known analysis of the conduit metaphor (which, if we are to believe
McNeills [1994] study of the relevant gestures, only appear in Western countries). Interestingly, the
transport model of communication was criticized already by Volochinov (1929), well before it was
embodied in the mathematical theory of communication. Yet it continues to be the basis of Lévi-
Strauss widely accepted parallelism between the three circulations of signs, money and women.

More importantly from our point of view, however, the idea of there being a message moving from
one point in space to another tends to obliterate the fact that, in many cases, other instances of the
communication situation have to do the movement, or to be active in other ways. Indeed, the dis-
placements required of the sender and the receiver constitute one of the principle factors distin-
guishing media in general, and modern and traditional media in particular.

Until recently, to send a fax, the sender had to go to the telegraph station, but now he may accom-
plish the same act from his computer.The receiver still have to go to the cinema to see a film, if he
does not opt for using a video recorder instead. If we insist on perceiving the real thing, we will
always have to visit a cave to see prehistoric frescoes. Sometimes even continuous movement is
required of the receiver, such as the person in the art gallery walking around the art-work, or the
house-wife leaving repeatedly the projection of the soap-opera to attend to her domestic duties. In
fact, changes in this respect are responsible for the utopia termed the global village by MacLuhan
and the third wave by Toffler (cf. Sonesson 1987; 1995b).

The active part of the receiver is better accounted for in an earlier, almost forgotten, semiotic
model, that of the Prague school (Mukarovsky 1970; Sonesson 1992a; 1993; 1995a). The notion
of a concretization of the perceptual objects opens up this problem, but it does not tell us any-
thing about the degrees of the activity required, let alone its nature. Of course, movement is only
one of its modalities.

Another object of the communication situation which may well have to be brought into movement
is the code or, as I would prefer to say, the schemes of interpretation. This becomes explicit in the
Tartu model where it is a question of texts becoming non-texts or deformed texts in another culture,
and then gradually being transformed into texts when a code has been reconstructed. Actually, this
is yet another aspect of the globalization anticipated by MacLuhan.

GÖRAN SONESSON: The multimediation of the lifeworld 3

Curiously, the temporal metaphor also embodied in the communication model has not come in for
scrutiny: what is accomplished by the sender, as well as by the receiver, are acts in time, which are
close but do not coincide. This is true of the telegraph, but not of everyday face-to-face interaction,
nor of the messenger traveling during many years. It applies even more awkwardly to the case of
media having to by recreated before being received, such as a piece of music or, in a different way,
a movie. The temporal presupposition seems even more beside the point in the case of prehistoric
frescoes having been painted once and for all at some forlorn location. Once again, the communica-
tion model obliterates precisely those changes which characterize the age of information: even
pictures now have become temporal acts, as testified by the television image and the picture im-
ported from some Web server.

Subject and interpretation in the communication model

The temporal presupposition entails another one: before the moment of sending, there is a subject
making a decision to send. This is very clear in the case of the telegraph and other technological
means: one must decide to go to the telegraph station, or to open the Fax software of the home
computer. There is much less clearly a preparatory stage, a phase of decision which can be sepa-
rated from the act of sending, in ordinary verbal conversation, gesture, and so on. But is a subject
not making the decision to send before sending properly called a sender?

Another problem concerns the modifications to the status of sender and receiver introduced by
Jakobson (1960). These terms, in Jakobsons version of the model, are amalgamations of what
Shannon and Weaver call sender and source, and receiver and destination, respectively. In this
parlance, receiver and sender are really mechanisms, such as the telegraph and the radio sender, not
human beings. Jakobson and Eco do away with all the technological mediations, treating them as if
they were always or never there.

Quite apart from the distinction between machines and men, however, we really need to have more
instances, not less, in order to account for the complexities of sending and receiving. Several sub-
jects are involved in the sending of a book: the writer, the editor, the editorial board, the proof-
reader, the type-setter (nowadays largely identical to the writer in front of his computer), the enter-
prise doing the distribution, the book-seller, the one who buys the book as a present, etc.

Complicated cases may be cited from ancient and modern media alike. In Ancient Greece,
inscriptions accompanying grave sculptures were intended to be read aloud by those who were
able read, while they others were listening, and they were often written in the first person
which makes it difficult to decide who is the sender, the artist, the one reading the text, or the
statue itself (Svenbro 1988). If you fetch a picture from a database somewhere out there on the
Internet, it is not obvious who is the sender, the one who made the picture, the one who put it
into the database, or you who pick it up. And to take a more homely example, should we not
have to regard the zapper in front of his television set as a sender, as well as a receiver, of the
mixture of images which he is perceiving?

Fortunately, there seems to be norms determining who is the important sender of different kinds of
messages, which are however difficult to recover in case of ancient media, and not always fixed in
case of the new ones. There is an extreme opposition between medieval art where the donator was
the sender who counted and modern art, where the artist is considered the sender of ready-mades,

4 The multimediation of the lifeworld: GÖRAN SONESSON

and even, as is the case of the Swedish artist Dan Wolgers, of a exhibition which he ordered from an
advertising agency (Sonesson 1994c).

As was first observed in the Prague school model, and as literary historians know well, senders and
receivers may even be instances embodied inside the message. The possibility of filling in slots in
the text now rapidly becomes accessible to everybody, in the form of the false personalities you
may take on when on the Internet, in particular in the case of the MUD-MOO (multi-user dungeon/
mud-object-oriented), where you may appear even as part of the furniture.

The Prague and Tartu models give in some respects a more satisfactory account of the complexities
of communication, in so far as they add subjects and norms, and the use of different interpretation
systems, but they offer little help in the study of semiotic diversity. Also the dialog, which is inter-
nal to both sender and receiver, according to the Bachtin/Vygotsky model, and the transaction where
the sender and receiver are identical but the message changes, as conceived by Lotman, add impor-
tant qualifications but fail to address the central issue (Sonesson 1995a,b).

This brings us to our final point: the communication model is about recoding, not about original
semiosis, that is, not about the emergence of meaning, but about its transformation. It tells us how
letters are transferred into Morse signs, radio signals, and more recently digital coding, which really
amounts to giving new expressions to parts of signs (phonemes, graphemes, etc.). It could certainly
be argued that this conforms to the Peirce/Jakobson metaphor according to which meaning is trans-
lation into other signs, but at least Peirce entertains the possibility of a final interpretant. In fact, all
conceptions of meaning must start out from some zero-degree, however hypothetical. We will call
it the Lifeworld.

From magic to media. An ecological tour In Husserls phenomenology, the Lifeworld, as opposed to
the constructed world of the sciences, is the place where also the scientist spends his life and
operates his instruments. A later phenomenologist, Alfred SchŸtz, called it the world taken for

GÖRAN SONESSON: The multimediation of the lifeworld 5

granted. More recently, a similar idea has emerged in A.J. Greimas natural world which is natural in
the sense of a natural language, natural to us as the language into which we are born and the eco-
logical physics of the psychologist James Gibson (Cf. Sonesson 1989; 1994a, b, 1995a).

Greimas may have given the best description of this cultural science about nature, when he suggests
that although fire is a natural force, which may be described, in chemistry, as a particular chemical
reaction, it could also be conceived as an object which is meaningful to human beings. Indeed, as a
fact of culture, fire corresponds to several quite different categories, such as the cosy fire place in
the country house, the symbol of the beginning of civilisation, the operating force of steel furnaces,
one of the four elements, the watch-fire of the lonely cowboy, the log-fire of the barbecue party, the
infernal flames, the conflagration of the building further down the street, etc.

There is a fundamental difference, however, between Greimas on one hand, and Husserl and Gibson
on the other: the latter two are concerned with the basic layer, on which all further meaning produc-
tion has to build. To Gibson, ecological physics is needed as a foundation of perceptual psychology,
and to Husserl, it is presupposed by all sciences, as well as by everyday life. To Greimas, however,
the science of the natural world is one among several semiotic systems. Also, Husserl and Gibson
focus on general principles: what Husserls calls the general ways in which things behave is echoed,
sometimes literally, in the Gibsonean laws of ecological physics, which are regularities which are
tacit and known to common sense.

In general, however, Gibson is more specific. In our daily dealings with the perceptual world, we
make use of a physics which is not that of science. It is this other physics which is defied by magic.
Indeed, the laws of ecological physics may be discovered by the fact that magic apparently sus-
pends them (one is reminded of the discovery of social norms by Garfinkel). Some of these laws are
as follows: A substantial object tends to persist: rock lasts, but smoke does not. The major surfaces
of the habitat are nearly permanent with respect to layout. Some objects, like the bud and the pupa,
transform, but no object is converted into something entirely different, as a frog into a prince.The
whole habitat cannot go out of existence, only parts of it. A substantial detached object must rest on
a horizontal surface of support.

In these respects, media are like magic, and so require a foundation. The media habitat does
indeed go out of existence, and transforms into a entirely new one, with the invocation, not of a
spell, but of the remote control. The television set, as well as the equipment making virtual space
possible, must be located in the Lifeworld. The I-here-now-origo of the viewer remains in the
same place while the virtual habitat changes (as shown very early on by Buster Keaton in Sherlock
Junior). Indeed, in some versions of virtual reality, and even in some computer games, prehensile
organs visible in virtual space assure the connection to the Lifeworld, in a way which may re-
mind us of personal pronouns in ordinary language (where space is actually more virtual but less
reality-inducing)

The Lifeworld was opposed to science by Husserl, as well as by Greimas and Gibson. Habermas
uses the term also in opposition to organized society, the so-called the system world. Now we are
suggesting the Lifeworld could be opposed to media (or rather: the world as seen by the media
the media themselves, just as Husserl notes about the sciences as praxis, are parts of the Lifeworld).
In all three cases, we seem to separate primary interpretations (mediations) from secondary ones
projected onto the praxis world from other practices of signification (science, social institutions,
media institutions).

6 The multimediation of the lifeworld: GÖRAN SONESSON

However, the prototypical Lifeworld would be immediate (or as little mediate as possible) and
taken for granted but more than science and social institutions, media may well be able to transform
secondary interpretations into significations taken for granted. Media, rather than the system world,
may already be colonizing the Lifeworld (Sonesson 1995b).

All our notions are too narrow

Even if the recent consolidation of semiotics is due to the emergence of information society, as Eco
suggested, the secondary or tertiary layers of mediation which have recently accrued to our every-
day experience, should force us to realize how deeply mediated is our ordinary, unreflected life in
the unquestioned, sociocultural Lifeworld.

The particular point of view of semiotics is to study the point of view itself, as Saussure once put it,
or, in the words of the late Peirce, it is mediation, i.e. the fact of other things being presented to us
in an indirect way (cf. Parmentier 1985). Indeed, as Saussure argues, semiotic objects exist merely
as those points of view which are adopted on other, material objects, which is why these points of
view cannot be altered without the result being the disappearance of the semiotic objects as such. In
construing mediation as branching, illustrated by a fork, the handle of which is the interpretant,
which is the stand-point taken on expression and content, Peirce also conceives of meaning as a of
principle of relevance (Cf. Sonesson 1989, 1994b, 1995a).

In this sense, there is much more to semiotics than signs. We should start out from the medium in
the most comprehensive sense: the general conditions of perception (thinking, acting, etc.). Ac-
cording to Gibson, the basic medium of humankind is life in the air close to the soil. This fact
conditions our perception, and thereby all other kind of acting and experiencing. This, then, is the
primary principle of relevanc, by means of which meaning is given to us. We could go on to con-
ceive of media more generally as that which conditions the (production and) reception of informa-
tion, at ever further removes from the Lifeworld.

It may well be true, then, that there is nothing beyond interpretation, and yet there certainly is a
meaning more simple than signs, that is, a relative presence, something which is less of a simulacrum.
In this sense, the sign is a (relatively) elementary form of mediation (but not, as we have seen, the
most elementary one), to which further degrees of mediation may be added.

What we need, then, is a communication model which accounts for relative degrees of mediation,
perhaps along several scales. If, as Martin Krampen argues here, enormous amounts of face-to-face
interaction and telephone contact are necessary for television production to occur, we must be able
to explain our intuition that not only face-to-face interaction, but also telephone communication, is
in some way less mediated than television.

On the circulation of women and other signs

In a famous formulation, echoed by Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss once suggested that there were three
important circulations in the world: of words (or signs generally), of goods (and/or money), and of
women (and/or men). This parallel may be criticized from several points of view, ranging from

GÖRAN SONESSON: The multimediation of the lifeworld 7

anthropology to sexual correctness. Semiotically, however, the real problem with this formula is
that it relies on the spatial metaphor inherent in the communication model (Cf. Sonesson 1992a;
1995b).

In so doing, the description misconstrues essential facts. Actually, it is the woman, or the man, who
is moved from one place to another, but it is not the person in question who carries meaning, it is the
exchange as such. Indeed, according to Lévi-Strauss himself, the exchange of partners breeds soli-
darity between the tribes, not the persons exchanged.

This should not deter us from considering, not the exchange as Lévi-Strauss does, but the woman
(or man) as an object to be interpreted after transference to another village. In terms of the Tartu
school model, he/she is a text for which the new culture does not possess any valid code. In actual
practice, of course, the exchange normally takes place between tribes as a matter of tradition, so
that the requisite code will already be extant. The suggested situation would rather apply to the case
of modern day mixed marriages.

In time-geographical terms, trajectories, or life-lines (the movement from cradle to grave), of all
individuals in a village tend to run parallel most of the time. These continuous neighborhood rela-
tions could give rise to gossip, presumably a characteristic feature of village communication, as a
kind of leakage (Asplund 1983; cf. Gren 1994). In this context, the introduction of a new indi-
vidual, giving origin to a new life-line, carries meaning.

The model metaphor for village life is the central square (el parque) or the water front, where
everybody go for a walk in the evening, often covering over and over again their own trajectories.
The information gathered during this walk is largely redundant: always the same persons, the
same faces, appearing at the same points of space. It is in this sense that one might look upon the
Parisean boulevards as the root metaphor of modernity, as opposed to the pre-modern life of the
village square.

8 The multimediation of the lifeworld: GÖRAN SONESSON

On the boulevard, woman (and men) circulate in a more extensive sense, giving rise to new inter-
pretation tasks as they go along. Considered from the point of view of pedestrians, the boulevard is
made up of numerous trajectories which tend to crowd up on each other: it forms a bundle of
trajectories. Goffman (1971) admirably describes the way in which a stroll through a big city de-
pends on a continuous negotiation of space, in order to avoid running into each other. These nego-
tiations are normally accomplished quite unconsciously. In terms of time geography, these are cou-
pling constraints (different individuals may not occupy the same time-space), but also steering
constraints are involved (which of the individuals having, temporarily in this case, more claim to a
territory than the other).

In his Cellar man, Dostoevsky describes this procedure becoming conscious: the narrator has been
forced to step aside on the boulevard when meeting a person having higher social status. Signifi-
cantly, he retires to a basement (in some ways the opposite of the boulevard) to prepare himself for
not stepping aside the next time, that is, to be capable of claiming the others territory.

Whether it is conscious or not, this procedure supposes typification, one of the basic operations of
the Husserlean Lifeworld. With the exception of pathological cases, such at that of cellar man, we
collaborate on determining the respective trajectories, perhaps both stepping aside a little, which is
different from the way in which we avoid dogs or lamp-posts that is, we unconsciously categorize
someone as a human being. One is reminded of iconicity as conceived by Peirce, and of exemplifi-
cation according to Goodman (1968): each person here signifies one or other of his properties..

Another peculiarity of Boulevard life may be gathered from Gogols Nevskij Prospekt, which is
about two persons coming from different spatial and social parts of the city who walk together on
the boulevard. Each of them later discovers a woman he likes and follows her to a different part of
the city. Thus, like the village, the boulevard supposes numerous parallel trajectories, but it does
not give rise to gossip (permeability to address), but rather to observation (permeability to glances).
Contrary to the parallel trajectories of the village, those of the boulevard have widely diverging
points of origin and arrival.

This accounts for the sentiment, expressed by one of the persons in Rohmers film Les nuits de la
pleine lune, that the boulevards hold infinite possibilities of adventure. Indeed, the boulevard is the
site of numerous projects of trajectories (of movements, of glances, and even of addresses).

Another film by Rohmer, Lamour laprès-midi, shows boulevard life to consists largely of men and
women looking at each other while the pass by. One person in the film describes this as trying
oneself out on the other. In this sense, the trajectories of movements open many possibilities for the
trajectories of glances, that is, mainly projected trajectories of glances (and, mostly as projects, also
trajectories of addresses). This could be seen as a kind of lower-order typification, an act of classi-
fication, which is, at least in the films, only applied between the sexes, thus implying a categoriza-
tion as woman to the man, and vice-versa.

But there is another side to the same act: it is not only a way of gathering information, but also of
sending it. Indeed, looking at the other is an act which, in the context, signifies: I like you/I think
you are beautiful what do you think about me?. In the Parisean context, this is supposed to be a
mutual permeability to the glances of the other. American feminists who see this operation as oc-
curring only from man to woman, describe it as visual rape, just as addressing a woman in the street
is seen as verbal rape. (There are clearly cases when both are socially received in this way, as for
instance lower class Mexican men addressing middle class women in the street).

GÖRAN SONESSON: The multimediation of the lifeworld 9

So far, we might have been discussing the boulevards inhabited by the flaneurs of the last century,
as described by Baudelaire and Benjamin. But the Parisean boulevards of the seventies also con-
tained a fascinating mix of nationalities and ethnic groups, which seems to open up potential trajec-
tories to countries and culture far away. The classification of an individual as a foreigner, which
may be as immediate as the one into men and women, implies an encounter with objects of interpre-
tation which are, in Tartu terms, spatially but not textually inside our culture. It may also be evalu-
ated differently: as a fascinating challenge to interpretation or, more likely nowadays, when great
amounts of immigrants have entered the main streets of smaller metropoles, as a semiotic white
noise defying understanding. When meaning breaks down, fighting is likely to ensue.

I have suggested that the village square, as well as the boulevard, are media, in a somewhat more
specific sense than the air directly above the earth, but still in the general sense of being filters
determining the conditions for the reception of information. They remain relatively close to the
Lifeworld, that is, relatively unmediated. They antedate the sign. So what, then, would we find at
the other end of the scale?

The ultimate multimedium: Bioy Casares invention

The prototypical Lifeworld, I have suggested, would be immediate (or as little mediated as pos-
sible) and taken for granted. Almost any familiar type of mass media would do as an example of the
opposite, something which is largely mediated, and far from being taken for granted. From the
point of view of media semiotics, what we need to find is an example of something which is very
much mediated, but still apt to be taken for granted. A case which comes rather close to being that
ideal one is offered by Adolfo Bioy Casares novel La invenci—n de Morel.

What Morel has invented is a system permitting the recording, storage, and repeated reproduction
of selected sequences of real-life behavior. These sequences are reproduced completely, in all their
sense modalities, including touch and smell, and from all points of view, not only in respect to one
person or other object (as having many cameras focused on one spot), but all those which were
involved in the behavior sequences taking place during the time of recording at the chosen location,
an otherwise desolate island. The medium in question is actually at a rather far remove from the
Lifeworld: the behavior sequences are stored on some kind of tape recorders in the cellar of the
museum on the island, and the reproduction is interrupted when weather conditions impede the
power plant from feeding the machines. Yet the productions of this medium can be confused with
the world-taken-for-granted: indeed, the narrator for a long times tries vainly to interact with one of
the characters in the recorded sequences.

Bioy Casares wrote his story in 1940, before most of our modern media were invented: yet, Morels
invention goes beyond the laser picture and the CD-ROM We could perhaps call it the ultimate
multimedium.

Multimedia is not a precise term, but we will take it to stand for a storage medium in which differ-
ent sign systems are conveyed in their most adequate substance. In this sense, a book which con-
tains printed text, phonetic transcriptions of speech, musical scores and pictures would not be called
a multimedium. The computer disc may contained written texts, real, resounding speech and music
and (at least in theory) pictures presented in more adequate conditions of reception.

10 The multimediation of the lifeworld: GÖRAN SONESSON

Speech and phonetic transcription could be considered two substances connected to the same form,
but speech is more adequate for conveying it under ordinary circumstances (not linguistic analysis).
Similarly, the score and the music as played are two substances for the same work, but, under
normal circumstances, the music as played is at least esthetically more adequate. From this point of
view, then, Morels invention may be said to convey more information by means of their adequate
substances than any multimedium so far conceived: all sense modalities, and the visual world in all
its three dimensions, from all conceivable perspectives.

In Prague school terms, a piece of information, to be communicated, must be transformed into a

perceptual object, i.e. it must be concretized (cf. Mukarovsky 1970; Sonesson 1992a; 1993; 1995a).
Some media allow for an easier concretization than others. The picture on the wall can be concret-
ized at any moment, and books allow for a more immediate and intermittent concretization than
computer discs, i.e. reading single lines and pages, skimming though it, etc. The latter requires a
computer and software to be made accessible to the receiver (and also to the sender who is the first
receiver).

In principle, the behavior sequences recorded by Morel are as little accessible to concretization as
the information stored on computer discs, but this is not readily apparent, since the projectors are
stored away in a cellar, and since the reproduced sequences repeat automatically over and over
again. There is, however, one respect in which Morels invention is similar to computer discs, but is
less advanced than some other modern media: it allows for no real interactivity.

Where angels fear to touch

Interactivity has something to do with permeability, which may involve different sense modalities
and occur in one or several directions. When opposing the boulevard to the village square, we noted
that the former had a higher permeability to glances, but rarely to touching or speaking, more than
as projected possibilities, whereas the latter was highly permeable to speech (gossip). Media may
often be characterized in terms of the type and direction of permeability which they allow.

According to Georg Simmel (1957), one may cross a bridge indifferently in any direction, whereas
stepping out of a doorway is different from going inside. The window connects the inside of the
house with the outside, not the other way round. From our point of view, these spatial objects may
be said to have different projected trajectories or narrative programs: the bridge has no direction (if
it is not at the same time a limit between countries, etc.); the door allows both trajectories, but they
have different meanings (in terms of topology). The narrative program for a window requires it to
be used from the inside out (at least in modern cities, where the show window constitutes the
inversion; Sonesson 1981)

It should be noted that the penetrability of bridges and doors concern movements (trajectories prop-
erly speaking) and those of windows glances (visual trajectories). Among more or less modern media,
the telephone allows a two-way permeability to speaking, to the exclusion of any other kind; televi-
sion allows a one-way permeability to vision and speech, without reciprocity. Internet, on the other
hand, contains the possibilities of two-way permeability to speaking, writing, pictures, movies (com-
plete with perspective shifts) and (by means of video-conferencing) the other persons looks (but only
with simulated three-dimensionality). Apart from the Lifeworld itself, only Morels invention allows
permeability to touch, smell and (perhaps) taste. But the latter is only permeable in one direction.

GÖRAN SONESSON: The multimediation of the lifeworld 11

Semioticians are familiar with the study of one kind of permeability, touch, when considered in the
sphere of immediate closeness to the body, which is the subject matter of proxemics (Hall 1966).
Media semiotics needs to become some kind of extended proxemics, involving individuals at greater
distance to each other, and even cultures. Indeed, there are two interesting similarities between
proxemics and the Tartu school model: 1) meaning is produced when limits are transgressed, which
means we get some kind of social rhetoric; 2) both models are egocentric, for culture vs non-culture
is like ego vs alter, i.e. the transgression has a direction.

Media, is has been said, serves to bridge time or space, or sometimes both (cf. Innes 1950). Bridges,
it will be remember, reach indifferently in both directions. When true interactivity is achieved,
permeability is possible in both directions, but like in the case of the door, the import of the penetra-
tion may be different.

In this sense, Morels invention could be perfected to contain double-sided permeability to all senses,
without being dissolved into the Lifeworld: it would still be a relatively fixed sequence, with a
bundle of alternative trajectories, which are repeated indefinitely, like in some computer games,
and other software using hyper-links. If we are to believe some recent films by Wim Wenders,
however, this is similar to how our own Lifeworld looks from the point of view of the angels. In that
case, however, the transition from one-sided permeability to glances to double-sided permeability
to touch does break down the limits between the worlds.

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