Patrizia Calefato
Forward
This paper focuses on the forms in which the linguistic dimension of the new media, in particular computer and Internet communication, produces new technologies of subjectivity, as well as both old and new rituals of textual interaction. In detail, it deals with the electronic epistolary genre of “forwarding” (in Italian this word has been translated both with ‘inoltrare’ and with the linguistic close copy ‘forwardare’) that is assumed both as an object of investigation and as a metaphor. The importance of focusing critically on some aspects of the new communicative technologies derives from the fact that they all concern the discourse conceived as a complex social activity.
In computer communication, through different channels and in different
contests – e-mail, chat lines, forums, mailing lists – the practice of
forwarding is crucial and widely spread. It is a practice of writing that we
can conceive as a part of the genre of the related discourse. A “third” text becomes
part of the inter-locution receiving various possible forms of manipulation. It
can be simply and directly forwarded without any comments; it can be treated
according to a technique that we could call of the “free direct discourse”; it
can be sectioned and commented, maybe with the help of the “copy and paste”
technique, thus becoming a dialogic text which contains comments and
interventions.
There are different genres to investigate in that which can be effectively called a “speech act”: political forwarding; forwarding personal mails to others; medical quests (more or less fraudulent); the quest for a click that could “feed the Third world”; urban legends, etc. The “forward act” contains and diffuses a principle of authority: in fact, the forwarded text is conceived worthy to be communicated to others. This principle of authority defines a model of virtual identity. From the gender point of view, we can consider the peculiarities that this kind of communication assumes regarding the production of the female virtual identity. This practice, in fact, has much to do with communicative forms such as gossips, voices, contagion, and fashions. In this sense, the female subject of our age from the one side goes on in being defined by archaic and stereotyped modalities of communication (gossip, women’s chat, superstition), and from the other meets peculiar modalities of the “cyborgesque”, reticular and diffused nature of communication.
We define as “electronic written text” a digitally generated text in
which the idea of representation of signs is put into question. In fact,
digital signs do not refer to an external “original” that is presumed to be
represented. Nevertheless, the electronic text, being in any case “a text”, is
a dynamic whole as well, a generative process and a cultural system (Lotman).
Therefore, texts which are digitally produced and communicated show
peculiarities regarding their internal structure, their “external” reference,
and the forms of subjectivity they involve.
E-mail represents a peculiar form of epistolary electronic text: we can focus on some aspects that characterise this peculiarity. First of all, the matter of time. Everyone knows in his/her own experience that velocity has changed communication both in its forms and in its substance. E-mail is a way to communicate in “real time”, as it is currently called; in addition, the written forwarded text can be simultaneously transmitted to a potentially unlimited group of people. It depends on the space your mailbox has on the Web: so the matter of time, in terms of velocity, is connected to the matter of virtual spatiality.
Today, velocity is the condition of social reproduction: the value of messages, of merchandise, of signs, depends on the rapidity of their communication – sometimes more than on their content (examples can be shown in e-commerce, work on distance, videoconferences, and – of course – e-mail). The form of value of post-fordist age is neither use value or exchange value: it is a sort of “communicative value” that directly emerges from the possibility of producing, exchanging and consuming messages as merchandise.
The possibility of writing and answering in “real time” through e-mail has modified the nature and the value itself of a letter: both a personal and an official letter. Of course, the quality of a love e-mail letter, for example, is no longer different from that of a “snail-mail” one, in terms of passions and emotions. Anyway, writing on the screen to certain distances puts both the sender and the addressee in a sort of face-to-face interaction that is only mediated by the technique apparatus of a PC. It is well known how any sort of paralinguistic signs (e.g. smiley) supports written interaction in e-mail verbal “co-operation” (as well as in chatting), thus giving the body the possibility to create a sort of simulacrum of itself on the electronic page.
Forwarding can be considered as both a discourse genre and a speech act. It is a discourse genre within the wider electronic epistolary genre because we can distinguish it as a relatively stable form of utterance (Bachtin) which contains stereotypes and repetitions, too. It is a speech act, in one sense, though it cannot be quite classified in the taxonomy of speech acts according to the philosophy of language (Austin, Searle). In fact, if we would consider it as a form of illocution, that is, a way in which we “do something” with words, assuming a precise responsibility in language and in the social order, it should be not (or not precisely) because of its content and meaning, but because of its form, its “circular” and communicative form. Forwarding is a totally communicative act, produced for reproducing communication wider and wider. This is what, in one sense, we “do” with it.
We could try to group some typologies of forwarded mails, starting from what we could call “friend-forward”, that is, the creation of a more or less open net of friends and/or colleagues among whom someone let circulate messages whose origin is well known. For example, a friend sends me the programme of a conference that he/she is organising and I forward it to my collaborators adding some phrases such as “Give a look to this text” or “We could present a collective paper”, and so on. Another common example of this typology can be that of Christmas and New Year wishes that I received from a friend of mine and that I forward to other friends because, e.g., I like the animation the message contains or the written text itself (maybe it is a poem). In these cases I feel easily “authorised” to transform a private correspondence into a public one, exactly because it concerns a relatively close group of people, though I know well that this group could widely enlarge.
A second typology of forwarded mails can be called that of “political engagement”. During the last two years I have personally received – and sent on my turn – dozens of these kind of messages: about women in Afghanistan, Haider in Austria, the war in Yugoslavia, Seattle conference, against death pain, etc. Being member of an “alternative” mailing list, I receive daily a lot of messages on almost everything happens in Italy and in the world, with the possibility of commenting and replying on my turn to all the components of the virtual community. In the case of mailing lists, you know, though approximately, the persons belonging to it or at least their names, or their virtual identities. In other cases, on the contrary, you know only the person who has forwarded the message to you. You have been chosen as the addressee probably because this person already knows your political opinion and supposes that you will agree with it or that you would like to be informed about something. In most cases, the “author” of the message is anonymous and the community that it reaches is incommensurable, as wide as the Web itself. This is the reason why most of these messages, originally written in the vehicular language of the Web, English, are afterwards translated into various languages by anonymous translators.
A third group can be classified as that of “chains”: the message goes “from hand to hand” without any control both on its origin and on its content as well as on its destination. The subjects can be the “Happy 2000 from the Dalai Lama” (see text), jokes (see, if possible, on the screen, see movie), information on the Web. All the urban legends of the Web belong to this category: there is, for example, the legend about Microsoft that pays people only for staying on the Internet clicking on some site addresses; the legend of the presumed free offer of Nokia and/or Ericsson mobiles to people who forward the message to other 8 or 20 friends of their; the legend of the quest for medulla osseous for a leukaemic child; and – last but non least – the multifarious world of legends about viruses in the Web.
These are the most typical cases in which forwarding enables at the same time the principle of authority and the phatic function of language (Jakobson). The former derives no longer from the fact that you recognise an authority to someone you know, but from the act of communication itself. A metaphor, which well expresses this situation, is that of contagion.
Contagion has the same Latin etymology of contact: in fact, both words derive from the Latin verb ‘contingĕre’ which evokes proximity, metonymy, and indexicality among signs. The contact concerns the communicative channel where information goes on. In Jakobson’s linguistic theory the phatic function of language is funded exactly on the channel of communication: this is the function through which we become sure that there are no obstacles in the channel itself. This means that the social dimension of utterance is realised even apart from its content. As Jakobson reminds, the phatic function of language is the first verbal function that children acquire: this shows that the need for the other as another in him/herself is the very condition of possibility of communication conceived as putting both messages and senses in common.
Nevertheless contagion, in the common use of language, is also an expression that evokes the “dangerous” symbology of contamination. To expose oneself to the other is a risk, an adventure of the self in a world in which signs could degenerate into viral formations. At the same time, contagion is part of common sense, made up with received meanings and stereotypes. Urban legends, mystification, fakes and forgery on the Web confirm this aspect.
Thus, the situation of the “forwarding subject” is emblematic: on the one hand, this subject calls on the very condition of communication, and in particular of communication in our age, that assumes no longer the shape of a straight line, but that of a branched way. On the other hand, his/her condition forces the theory to reflect on the serialisation of thought and subjectivity that this new shape of communication expresses.
In particular, what does it mean with regard to the female subject of our times? Maybe that the use of the expression “female subject” could seem “archaic” in the context of new information technologies where a cyborgesque subject is involved, who is composed of both nature and culture, of both inorganic and grotesque elements (this is the origin of the word ‘cyborgesque’ – Colaizzi). Anyway, we need to consider the condition of the subject involved in new communication technologies no longer as the simple “product” of a new form of the social reproduction, but as a “semiotic self” who constantly negotiates identities on and within many borders. In this sense, a “female” subjectivity is at the same time a stereotype and the result of a “fight”, a “performance”, if we would paraphrase Judith Butler. Gender is the semiotic category that “condenses” the transformation of the biological into the cultural: in this sense it is no longer the registration of a status, but is a continuous process.
This paper is really far from onthologising the “forwarding subject” as a model for our age. Nevertheless, it is possible to think metaphorically of the act of forwarding from the point of view of women.
As I have said before, time is to be conceived as velocity of messages in communication: the movement of “going on” in forwarding is actualised in the simultaneity of communication which goes towards a lot of addressees. The sender her-himself is but a sign in the act of sending-receiving simultaneously. In his “American Lessons” Italo Calvino has written that rapidity is one of the values to preserve for the “next millennium”. In Calvino’s view, rapidity does not exclude duration, above all in fiction where the rhythm between continuity and discontinuity is crucial. Nevertheless, rapidity involves – Calvino says even recalling Leopardi – the relationship between physical and mental velocity (Lezioni americane p. 665) which evokes the idea of infinite.
I think that women have a peculiar way to approach rapidity and to be
approached by it in communication. It is a way in which it is possible to
enable the simultaneity of senses, in which “touching” the other, in one sense,
metonimically through the words on the screen. But the idea of infinite
connected to rapidity is also the possibility of a risk: the risk of losing
both the “authorship” and the destination of messages. The electronic text shows,
in this sense, its aleatority.
The sense of narration contained in the messages which pass from hand to
hand in forwarding recalls the ever actual need for “stories”, a need that
emerges even in the sphere of new informative technologies. This is well shown
in all the examples of urban legends transmitted through the Internet. There is
a sort of meta-semiotic conscience already diffused in the Web according to
which people knows – more or less – that the Web often communicates forgeries;
nevertheless “forgeries” and stories continue to be narrated and communicated.
These stories constitute an archive very similar to the genres of the fairy
tales, the novels, and the legends which fed popular culture and female readers
in the past. So the female subject is doubly engendered: both as the
stereotyped “born yesterday” and as the courageous Lara Croft of the net. Which
is another stereotype, of course: but many possibilities are left in the joke
among stereotypes and in the carnivalization of received meanings.
Female and feminist thought has variously focused on the concept of
community. In particular, the relationship between language and community has
been considered in the light of what feminism has called “to start from
oneself” as a political practice. This practice has always tried to connect the
experience of the self with the possibility of communicating it not in a
self-centred perspective, but in the horizon of a “common feeling” that not
necessarily means “to feel in the same way”.
The metaphor of the forwarding female subject shows an interesting scenario regarding concepts such as both community and experience. The continuous transit and translation of information in forwarding expresses the main importance of communication as a relationship with a community whose identity is multifarious and often unknown. There is no certainty to know who is “with you” in communication, there is no authorship in such experience, though the principle of authority is expressed by the situation of communication itself. The experience refers both to the complexity of our age and to the fundamental aspect of tracing one’s position in the communicative net. In forwarding it is impossible to say “I”: the main verbal sign of subjectivity in language get, in one sense, drowned in the communicative web. At the same time, the presence of comments and other indexical marks in the written text recalls a subjectivity quite generated both by language and by the movement of communication itself.
The metaphor of cartography has been used to express the condition of (not only) female subjectivity in our age (Bruno, Calefato). Cartography traces places and times where certainty and identity can only look for mobile compositions. The situation presents something different from the one of the “nomadic subject” of post-modernity. In fact, the “cartographic identity” is not totally determined by the fluctuations in the communicative net and is not deprived of the sense of history. The sense of time, of narration, of community, and of the self are quite involved in this horizon.
Last but not least, the sense of irony, as it is well explained in this forwarded message that has circulated on the Internet about March 8th 2000 (see text)…
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