It is therefore not surprising that when computers came to
the realm of images, a new dimension was added to Cyberspace (literally indeed,
from 1D to 2D) and then the term ‘’Virtual Reality’’ started to be more than a
daydream. We cannot investigate here the arguably profound impact of computers
on image creation through computer graphics and virtual images. Rather, we will
limit our study to the integration of pictures in electronic communication.
Electronic mail, i.e. alphanumeric person-to-person communication on the
internet and ‘’newsgroups’’, i.e. electronic dazibaos organized by fields of
interest, are rather old stories and would never have started the current media
trend for the internet and the cyber-everything by themselves only. The World
Wide Web did so a couple of years ago, triggering some unconscious appeal for
an electronic global world of pictures and images. Web pages are attractive and
full of meaningful information - or so they seem. Surfing on the Web is worth
the hours spent waiting in front of the computer while data is transmitted from
the other side of the planet, or spent wandering through useless information on
uninteresting subjects. Our purpose here will only be to use semiotics to
analyse the Web as a communication tool and determine what classical concepts
are rectified in it.
Let us go back to Pierce’s classical classification of signs
as Icons, Indexes and Symbols, which is very useful in understanding the
different ways in which signs operate and semiosis is performed. Let us take
Arthur Burk’s presentation of this trichotomy :
" We can best do this in term of the following examples
: (1) the word ‘red’, as used in the English sentence, ‘the book is red’ ; (2)
an act of pointing, used to call attention to some particular object, e.g. a
tree ; (3) a scale drawing, used to communicate to a machinist the structure of
a piece of machinery . All these are signs in the general sense in which the
term is used by Pierce : each satisfies his definition of a sign as something
which represents or signifies an object to some interpretant. (...) A sign
represents its object to its interpretant symbolically, indexically, or
iconically according to whether it does so (1) by being associated with its
object by a conventional rule used by the interpretant (as in the case of
‘red’) ; (2) by being in existential relation with its object (as in the case
of the act of pointing) ; or (3) by exhibiting its object (as in the case of
the diagram). "
Let us now try to use those notions for analysing the main
features of Web pages. Web pages are so-called hypertexts, that is, texts with
some of their components (words or sentences), possibly linked to other
(hyper)texts, and so on and so forth. The reader can navigate through the whole
text in a non-linear manner, by activating so-called hot links or anchor points
that are linking some piece of text to some other.
These links are an obvious example of indexes, with a word
pointing to (refering to) its definition or to some related piece of
information. The WWW merely extends the basic notions of hypertext by making it
possible for one index to refer to some physically-distant location on a remote
computer somewhere else on the Internet, together, of course, with the ability
to link to and therefore communicate images and sound. However in order to act
as an index, a sign has to be recognized as such, i.e. the index has to exhibit
itself as a reference. This is done in hypertext by marking the hot links in
blue ink, in order to make the reader aware that he can jump to another piece
of hypertext or image, therefore using a conventional symbol in order to
‘’show’’ the index as such.
Web pages are usually full of small images that act as
user-friendly and aesthetically appealing ways of navigating through the
network. These are symbolic signs, in the sense that their object must be
conventionally established in order to help the reader to orient himself in a
homogeneous and unlimited cyberspace. In general, all pages at one Web site
(physical/logical place hosted by some institution) are homogenized in order to
use the same symbols to designate basic moves in the hypertext documentation
(usually at the top or bottom of the pages), in such a way that the reader can
quickly learn their conventional meaning. This can be seen in the example of
the Sony Virtual Society home page. In this example images act as tautologies
and duplicate the textual links below, which actually give their meaning to the
pictures.
Another example (again from Sony) will show us that such
symbols for hypertext links tend to become icons, as if it was their only means
to get rid of the textual tautology. Another example of iconic signs currently
used on the Web is given by the Sony’s ‘Cyberpassage’ software, which makes it
possible for several users to wander in a common ‘virtual social space’ represented
in real-time 3D. Users can communicate in this virtual world by two means :
either written language in a small window shared by the people meeting
virtually, or by using predefined expressions that can decorate their so-called
‘avatars’. As can be seen from the picture above, and from the previous
'smiley' example, the range of feelings that could be expressed is rather
limited and this points out in a rather crude manner the poverty and
standardization of the virtual communication towards which we are concretely
going.
