The electronic writing and presentation technology is a communication
technology. It influences our concept of writing as communication,
and there are various models of such communication.
Process models of communication, and of writing as one type of communication, go by and large back to the Shannon and Weaver model of the late 1940's (Shannon and Weaver 1949). The transmission of messages was looked upon as a linear process, and their model was a tool for reducing the technical problems of noise in various channels of communication. However, the model was adopted as a general model for communication studies, and even though it has been greatly changed and improved upon (Nöth 1990; Berge 1994), the basic concept of communication as transmission of messages has to a large extent been retained (Flower & Hayes 1981).
While process models have traditionally been concerned with the transmission of messages, and often through stages in a process, a semiotic model focuses primarily upon the text itself and its interaction with its object and the users, both producers and receivers. It is concerned with the generation and exchange of meaning, and a divergence of meaning is not regarded as a failure in communication but as a reminder of social and cultural differences. It is not the process which secures successful communication but the situation of the communication and the society around it (Fiske 1991:2-3).
In a semiotic communication model writing is a way of creating meaning for others by representing the world through signs. The text is focused upon as a sign, and all users, whether producers or receivers, writers or readers, speakers or listeners, are, in the Peircian sense, replaced by interpretants. The interpretant may be looked upon as a bridge between the sign and what the sign represents, the object. But at the same time the interpretant is the process which defines the sign, and that process creates new signs. It means that we do not operate with dyads in a communication process, and the reader is as important and as active as the writer in the negotiating of meaning. The meaning, or semiosis, is a result of a dynamic interaction between sign, interpretant and object, and this interaction is located socially and culturally in time.
Process models of written communication make a distinction between writer and reader, or encoder and decoder. Semiotics focuses mainly on the text as a sign or collection of signs and the meaning generated in the semiotic process. The interpretant is the mental concept of the user of the sign, whether this user be speaker or listener, writer or reader, painter or viewer. Decoding is as active and creative as encoding (Fiske 1991:42). This is highly relevant to written communication in electronic media. The traditional roles of both writer and reader are challenged. In a hypertextual environment they both become encoders and decoders at the same time in the process of negotiating meaning.
One of the sign functions of the linguistic code of writing was, according to Hjelmslev, the visual aspect, or the expression potential. This is, however, an aspect that is no longer just visual. With electronic writing technology the expression potential is both auditive and spatial as well. One may say that the visual sign system is familiar from handwritten and printed documents through illuminations and typography, and spatiality has always been present in the form of layout. But there is little doubt that the range of expression potential is wider, and the inclusion of the auditive aspect opens up a new dimension in writing. To say that writing approaches the expression potential of speech is, however, too quick a conclusion. In this new technology it is the distancing function of writing that seems to be strengthened, especially if it is used increasingly as a tool to replace face-to-face contact.
It is of course to be argued whether this manipulation of sign systems on the computer is still going to be termed writing. But we might keep the term until a better one surfaces. It is likewise questionable whether the product of this activity is going to be called text. If we keep the expression, we are in line with a wider text concept where text is a meaningful message generated by several systems of cultural codes both linguistic and non-linguistic (Nöth 1990:331).
As for the communicative function of writing, the new technology changes the roles of both readers and writers. The active and intrusive reader is able to choose his or her way through a text, and may annotate and create links between texts written by others. It is not that the reader changes the text of another, as has wrongly been feared, but the autonomy of both text and author is reduced in the electronic environment. The technology encourages intertextuality and discourages reification of texts. Landow talks about 'the convergence of poststructuralist conceptions of textuality and electronic embodiments of it' (Landow 1992), and this affects both the autonomy of text and the authorial mastery of it. So the writer loses communicative control while the reader gains a more independent and autonomous role in the construction of meaning. Both reader and writer as actors in the communication process recedes into the background while the semiotic process of the generation of meaning becomes the foreground. This is another way of saying that in our present cultural situation the interpersonal functions of writing are weakened in the electronic communication technology.
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