| Trans | Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften | 15. Nr. | Juli 2004 | |
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1.2. Signs, Texts, Cultures.
Conviviality from a Semiotic Point of View / Buch: Das Verbindende der Kulturen | Book: The Unifying Aspects of Cultures | Livre: Les points communs des cultures |
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Kvetuše Lepilová (Ostrava)
Summary: Multimedia readers are typically children aged five to six who can competently decipher the principle and rules of a computer game from the information on the screen. The game, however, is not collective, and fantasy is replaced by virtual reality. The contextual linguistic development of children was previously acted out mainly in reading, and reading formed an important part of children's total linguistic activity. In addition, this development was closely connected with written language. Nowadays, however, letter-writing and rhetorical exercises are no longer present in school curricula. These disciplines have been replaced by the use of mobile phones and e-mail. Since the era of silent film, readers have been living in an optical age. Today they are used to reading text simultaneously with and alongside an image - both a symbol and a code. Traditional media and multimedia are still both valid alternatives, and their main advantage lies in the interactive format which children find so stimulating. Will the phenomenon of childhood then remain unchanged? Which aspects of childhood are constant, and which are variable? The video diagnosis pointed us to the following interesting phenomena (changes between 1986 and 2002).
According to Walt Whitman, "for great poets to exist, there must also be great readers." And the Czech writer Karel Capek was also right when he said that "a person who has few words as a child will have few words for his entire life." In the words of choirmaster Frantisek Lysek: "All the best things begin to develop in childhood."
Since the 1990s even the youngest Czech children have been under the magic influence of multimedia and the new literacy. The laws of the ontogenesis of communication and thought processes of the individual from early childhood now require researchers of children's reception of the world and culture to react much more quickly to changes. In the last fifteen years video-diagnostic research has shown significant shifts in views of the world and in communication and thought, including figurative thought. What was the child-reader like at the start of the last century? Was it not radio but film that became the center of his attention, and were the 1920s not called the "age of eyes" due to the influence of film on people's everyday lives? What kind of text is it that today's children carry in their internal dialogue, and what kind of model do adults provide for them? In the imagination and in the communication of ten-year-old children the world has gained a new dimension, a dimension that is both real and virtual. Much more information is now available, but this information is also superficial and education is pragmatic.
My longitudinal research, which used the video-diagnostic method in an eight-part video series filmed over fifteen years (from 1986), has followed the influences on the development of children's imagination and communication from the pre-reader stage into later stages when children become readers of literary texts. The rapid acceleration of the development of electronic media at the end of the millennium, and the accompanying development of communication, have led to changes in the mentality of children every five years. The video diagnosis shows how children's dependence on play, the family, television fairy tales, encyclopedias, friendship - and friendship with computer games - have all changed: children now eat their breakfast in front of the TV and spend their school breaks playing computer games. They watch adult programs with adults, and are interested in adult topics now. The video series monitors the same group of nine children over a period of fifteen years (1986-2002). Some are extroverts, some introverts, some are sociable, some are loners. But all of them, from the age of three, wanted me to talk with them and tell stories. Mainly these stories were fairy tales, or the children's memories. The videos showed that children want one of the basic human needs - the sharing of a story. And that has not changed - it is only the way they approach the stories that has altered, even from as early as the age of 18 months. According to Plato, the telling of traditional fairy tales was the role of the grandmother, and these experiences helped cultivate both children's communication and their thoughts. Currently, the imported video-stories and action fairy tales broadcast by Fox Kids prefer aggressive images, confusion and chaos to the spoken word. This also changes children's communication and their lifestyle as the owners of new technologies - or as people who perceive these technologies whether they want to or do not.
Even the youngest computer gamers are surfers. They lose their bearings in a system as a whole, and live within an information chaos. They select information rapidly, activate and then forget hypertext. They nervously follow plots on a number of TV channels, and look for programs interrupted by advertising. Traditional children's rhymes, games and songs, which teach children communication and language, are now known by a minority, while the majority are affected by the shriek of advertising. The new multimedia literacy creates a new type - the "videot". Multimedia are among the most effective forms of communication and information retrieval, including television, film, musical and artistic works (either static or animated), books, magazines, radio, animations and digital video technologies. Reading words however involves imagining, leading an internal dialogue with the text, and asking oneself questions. This activity, in the hands of the multimedia reader of both words and images, involves, above all, the option of an alternative, virtual reality and the anticipation of future plot developments as a form of incentive to play. The player reads the image, and occasionally a simple text, listens to the noise generated by the sound card, but does not write - the art of writing has disappeared. Writing SMS text messages does not require the art of formulating deeper thoughts. What, then, do today's multimedia, as surfers and game-players, readers dream of in their internal dialogue with the computer? We still know relatively little about this: in the age of faxes, e-mail and telephone answering machines, the art of writing diaries has been lost. Mastering the new literacy and new technologies of course brings changes in the mental development of children. A generation is now growing up that has been brought up on television and video, and increasingly - even in pre-school age - on computers. Children get to know color screens before they are acquainted with books. And that - in their future mental development - leads to a battle between word and image. A whole generation of three-year-old children have longed for - and still long for - the telling of fairy tales, and instead of the real grandmother, they are technically equipped to operate a cybernetic granny - first video fairy tales, and later computer games. It has not yet been conclusively proved whether the multimedia child-reader's excursions into the artificial world of virtual reality slow up the development of imagination or stimulate it, whether the new media deform or even suppress children's imagination. The video diagnosis shows that a read or told fairy tale text stimulates the imagination. It contains elements that correspond to the formulation of thought in actual communication, including figurative thought. The retardation of the text attained through the repetition of motifs is closely related to children's recognition processes through the fixed structure of the text. Books have always been an imprinting factor in childhood, however today children exist from an early age with TV, video and computers, which provide them with attractive resources and help them to develop a new literacy.
Which route, then, do readers and viewers (game-players) take towards experiences? Do they move from the text of books to imagination? Does the accelerated, aggressive image of an action fairy tale lead to the idea of words? The findings of any research depend on what we ask, how we ask, and what we want to learn: Whereas knowledge is determined by objective reality, imagination is a matter of the reader's own will, and has to be generated. Imagination, and especially figurative imagination (not only creative, but also in the process of reconstruction) is all a question of the will to be creative. A necessary condition for the generation of an imaginative idea is the ability of the brain to store previously received information - images and impressions. The specific ideas also include schematic ideas. But today's children are aware of general concepts without knowing specific ones. The words involved are also becoming more aggressive (e.g. those on billboards or in illustrated magazines), and are being demonstrated by images. Children subconsciously perceive the provocative appeals to future consumers or users of toys, and themselves become consumers - they are interested, for example, in the range of products according to colors. Our research demonstrated the influence of color on the associations between word and object. Even one-year-old children ask where the milk in the supermarket comes from - their vision of the world is cloaked in super, hyper and mega-superlatives. When asked what comes into their mind when they hear the word milk, children reply fridge, glass, ice cream, bottle, cat, chocolate, but only rarely cow, meadow or grass. The purple cow (i.e. the Milka chocolate bar mascot in TV advertising) is a common answer. In this way, ideas and imagination are created by generalization and the repetition of experience. The development of children's imagination thus correlates with the function of communication in children.
However, time exerts a merciless influence on ideas and imagination. If I tell children a traditional fairy story, a number of the images in it are less vivid than they used to be, because they have receded into history and are unknown to today's children. But the images of modern-day fairy tales, on TV or CD-ROM, create themselves and are precisely documented. Does this make children's imagination stronger, or does it actually weaken it? Traditional texts contain a number of features that make a positive contribution towards figurative thought in children's communication, e.g. the structuring of the tale and the repetition of motifs, which corresponds to the process of the formulation of thought in children's developing communication: the retardation of the text attained through the repetition of motifs is closely related to processes which enhance children's recognition processes. Today's imported fairy tales, however, lack these characteristics - they accelerate the plot and create tension, but as part of an optical and acoustic chaos of words. The dubbed action fairy tale is also close to future viewing in the form of thrillers, romances and horror films for adults: it programs the child-viewer to consume these genres in the future. The discovery of virtual reality has thus brought with it new questions about the origin of children's creative imagination and inspiration. The video diagnosis experiment highlighted (in the early stages of readership): 1 - the influence of the increasingly synthetic nature of art on children's reception of verbal art; 2 - the influence of aesthetic activities themselves on the development of children's receptivity to art; 3 - the influence of multimedia on changes in the understanding of the poetics of a text in relation to the prevailing lack of knowledge of the meaning of words and symbols. A whole generation of three-year-old children have longed for - and still long for - the telling of fairy tales. Nowadays, five-year-old children are technically equipped to operate a video to watch a fairy tale, or even a computer. It has not been proved that media stimulate active communication, but it is known for certain that song precedes speech in the development process (see F. Lysek's Vox liberorum, 1976). We know that an understanding of the intonation and rhythm of speech plays an important role in educating children to be aware of words. And today's television and radio advertising takes much advantage of this fact.
The colorful and dynamic nature of advertising has entered children's lives with full force. Loud music is seen as necessary in all situations. In supermarkets this feature is known as "acoustic smog". Children learn at home surrounded by a background of loud music and the aggressive slogans of advertising, and thus lose their sense of the gentle and tender nature of words. The world has been captured by the optical hold of advertising and videos, and the acceleration of the modern lifestyle and marketing are devastating our reception. We perceive the world of the word in passing, subconsciously, but as soon as words and phrases appear in couplets, sayings or slogans, they turn into clichés which we subconsciously repeat, thus devaluing the meaning of the words. The psychologist J. Piaget (1896-1980) claimed that children used to exist in a self-contained childhood world. Today children join the adult world very soon: young people's means of expression react to Western values, they learn about the world from the Internet, they are well-oriented within their own environment and the outside world, and they are independent. Czech children now use words such as best, super, horror and cool from the Cool Girl magazine, and ape the heroes of action movies. Expressions that juxtapose opposite meanings are in fashion - for example "terribly beautiful", which is often heard in show business, the fashion industry and TV game shows. Children's diction has degenerated, and they now take on words through laziness (the proportion of derogatory and even vulgar words is also increasing under the influence of television). Young people are also becoming easily acquainted with written English through computers and billboards, and their spoken native language reaches them subconsciously through the media. The mixing of written and spoken forms of communication cannot be stopped, and no amount of xenophobia can suppress the influence of multimedia communication. Linguistics deals with the current functioning of communication and culture; the discipline is inspired by the gap between language and communication, the lack of an accepted standard and the dynamics of speech and literary communication. But linguists can only describe and analyze; they have no other influence. The globalization of communication and culture comes at children from TV dubbing and the internet.
"Europeans (and with them Europe) are necessarily born from an internally experienced, long-standing feeling of wholeness as a specific type of differentiation" (said Robert Burns, 1759-1796). The European dimension of research has shifted. Traditional, specific and local aspects of culture (including the culture of communication) are becoming mixed with global and universal aspects, and the modern phenomenon of globalization both unites and divides. Fears that traditional cultures are not strong enough to resist globalization are brushed aside by some with reference to resistence by local cultures that use the stimuli of globalization to reproduce their own traditional customs, standards and values.
The whole world is preparing for the multimedia era. The illusion of real communication given by multimedia both liberates and extends the image and dynamizes communication and sound. At the turn of the millennium many experts forecast that computers with high-quality monitors would eventually take over the functions of videos, TV and CD players. There is an increasing need to select and group new information in databases, to create video catalogues, to master the new literacy and to approach science as a transformation of knowledge. Digital TV will become the first, and perhaps the main element in the information superhighway. The need for this new literacy has a significant effect on communication in speech and literary reading. Children's communication is an internal dialogue with computers (and now also with mobile phones), but not with the world of the text of a book. Children write as they speak (spoken language dominates). The computer is a friend who asks questions and corrects spelling. Hidden dyslexia slows down reading and creates an aversion to reading in many children. The culture of letter-writing has been replaced by e-mails. The basis of hermeneutics, however, was the attempt by the philosophy of communication to correctly (truly) interpret the meaning of an utterance or sign. At the turn of the new millennium, children's reception of artistic texts often means "I saw" rather than "I read", and thus is no guarantee of the reception of literature by future, adult readers. Receptivity towards verbal, graphic and musical communication (and to the relationships between them) has always drawn on the traditional reception of spoken poetics, inspired in early childhood by listening to fairy tales and nursery rhymes. A full reception of literature is possible if it begins with the perception of language in the child's very first nursery rhymes and pop-up books, i.e. from the tradition of the systemic reception of verse and fairy-tale prose (which, moreover, is immensely important in learning about the traditions and figurative nature of literature). From an early age, however, most young people read (and learn) by skimming quickly over texts to a background of reproduced music, video, TV and computers, and this environment certainly does not improve either reading techniques or the concretization of the read text: reading and reading matter are replaced by screen adaptations and summaries. The fashion for "mobile mania" is, however, now being temporarily replaced by "Harry Potter mania", which may encourage children to read again.
Is it not true that we form our image of the majority of readers purely from chance encounters with readers in TV debates or at book fairs? Is the concept of education being replaced by the idea of information-collecting and game shows based on encyclopedic knowledge of facts, and does this not create the illusion that society lives through literature and culture? N. Postman has already pointed out the dangers in the boom of images and sounds. Children carry on their internal dialogue not with books but with computers and spoken dialogue - with a mobile phone in their hand. Even five-year-old computer game players live their lives differently, and when they start school, future readers do not communicate, sing, speak and draw unless their nursery school has fostered these skills in them. At the turn of the new millennium, people are constantly trying to solve a basic conflict in their lifestyle: whether to access information quickly or with ease and in an entertaining way. The same process is being played out as part of today's readership (or in fact viewership) mentality. New, accelerating technologies affect children from a very early age, from the age when their communication and thoughts are being formed, from the age when they are still highly receptive. We still do not know how the quality of their communication might develop in the future. The dynamic nature of language and literary communication is an accompanying feature of today's world, but these aspects are becoming ever more prominent in children's communication and culture, in the spirit of Burns' idea of European-ness. It is possible to describe and analyze a number of these features, but not to actually affect them until they grow and mature in time and space. Might it not now be the right time to pose such questions on the future of children's communication and culture and to attempt to deal with them?
Concept, screenplay, experiments K. Lepilová. The Audio-Visual Studios of Palacky University, Olomouc 2002 (The material used was recorded 1986-2002).
Our camera has been following the progress of these nine children since June 1986. Here they were three years old and in nursery school. In our study from 2002 they were eighteen. According to the statistics, children don't talk much and don't read. In their early childhood, our children grew up with the story. Three-years-old ALENA and MIREK (1986) also grew up playing creative games and were surrounded by other aesthetic activities. (Dialogues with children develop communication, and are stimulated by the relationship between words and pictures: - Let's see - what is it? A ruler - a compass - a box. - A triangle - a circle, and at the bottom, a square and a rectangle. - That's a circle, a triangle, a square. And I don't know what that is. Have a think what it might be? I don't know.)
ALENA - seventeen 2001. - How are you? Great. What's that? A good feeling that everything in life is going well. - As a three-year-old about a picture: Here's Jack and the Beanstalk, a birdie, bunny rabbits, a little house, dice. - As a four-year-old girl who has watched a video fairy story has the faculty of memory: a name Daddy Smurf, Laukonie, horses, a carriage, a castle. - I've been thinking. - Why did you want to read? - I asked mummy how I read... The picture in a book provokes words. - Don't all those letters frighten you? It's hard, isn't it? - It doesn't frighten me. I'll be able to read them when I'm bigger, in the 8th grade. - Alena in the 8th grade: - Alena, at one time you used to write poems. Do you still draw or sing, or enjoy writing poems? - None of those things. - What are you reading now in the 8th grade? - In school only some sections of the textbook. - At grammar school: I like the book See You at the Summit the best. It's really good. I can work on my personality with it, and be better than the average. I like talking to people.
MIREK eighteen-year-old 2001. - At primary school when I was ten I managed to get a computer out of my parents. - Did you talk to the computer, or did it talk to you? - We didn't talk. I told it what to do and it did it. - And you liked that? Of course I did. - And when you made a mistake? I found the mistake. By myself. - Can you remember the question in your school-leaving exam? - "Procedural programming and how it works." The picture and fantasy got Mirek to communicate (four-year-old): - What do you like? That house, the path. No, that's a rainbow. - What did you draw about the story of the fox in its hole? - That's a sign, and it says "Beware of the hole!" The hole was black, and the foxes threw pots in there and poured black water on them. - That wasn't in the story! - Yes it was! Ten-year-old: - Here you've drawn some countryside. Did you dream it up or do you know it? I dreamt it up. - Here the people who live in the black, blue and green towns could go and pick mushrooms, strawberries and other good things from nature. The hunter lives there. Here there's a well. Here lives the mayor of the three towns. A village and a little shop. There's no traffic there, no cars, so the air doesn't get polluted.
Mirek (eighteen now). - What do you enjoy? Almost everything, almost nothing. I like reading a mystery or watching a well-made film. What does that mean? A plot, action, instead of two hours of boredom. - An action movie? - Not really, something like the X files. - Science fiction? - That as well. - And horror? Yes, that too. - Why read books then? Isn't it easier to do it faster on the computer? - Will books survive in the future? Maybe not in paper form, but I'm sure they will.
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© Kvetuše Lepilová (Ostrava)
Sektionsgruppen | Section Groups | Groupes de sections
Inhalt | Table of Contents | Contenu 15 Nr.
For quotation purposes:
Kvetuse Lepilová (Ostrava): Who is the Young "Multimedia
Reader"? Video Diagnosis Let's Tell a Story. In: TRANS.
Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften. No. 15/2003.
WWW: http://www.inst.at/trans/15Nr/01_2/lepilova15.htm
