I’m not going to lie: I was genuinely hurt the other day when my friend texted me “you really pissed me off last night.”
What had I done wrong? Did I forget to put in for the drinks? Did I punch him in the face? Did I break one of his favourite pots from his pottery class?
As it turns out, it was none of that (thank God). I had indeed fallen victim to the very media issue that I have been thinking about this week, and that is the concept of metacommunication, as championed by Gregory Bateson. You see, my friend was just messing around, using a sarcastic remark to reference some of my behaviour. But how was I supposed to know this?
In my reading this week, it was particularly interesting to think about the concept of two monkeys play fighting, as mentioned by Bateson (2000, p 179). Bateson notes that despite the fact that on the denotative level, the communication between the monkeys was representing combat (scratching, biting, etc), there was clearly some sort of communication on another level that allowed both of the monkeys to know that it was actually play fighting. “This phenomenon, play, could only occur if the participant organisms were capable of some degree of meta-communication, ie of exchanging signals which would carry the message ‘this is play,’” (Bateson, 2000, p179). Professor Murphie also noted in the lecture that these other patterns of communication are what make up most of communication itself.
But what happens in a society where most interaction does not take place in person? It’s all well and good for the monkeys (for now), but for us, who are within a society built around mobile communication, it is much harder to get these symbols of meta communication. This correlates to the study of media ecology, which is defined by the Media Ecology Association as something that “looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival.”
It almost seems like in our current media ecology, where humans are interacting through Facebook, phones, emails, and many other methods of online communication, a significant amount of this meta communication is lost.
This is something I feel that Bateson or another scholar could explore more. How do we denote “play” in an online media ecology? How do we give off all of the other important signals like tone of voice, body language, and facial expression, in a world where communication is chiefly text? This is certainly something I will be looking into as I research into this topic more this semester.
REFERENCES
Bateson, Gregory, 2000, ‘A theory of play and fantasy,’ Steps to an ecology of mind, Chicago Univesity Press, Chicago, 177-183
Media Ecology Association, ‘What is Media Ecology,’ www.media-ecology.org/media_ecology accessed 18.03.14
Media Musings 