Joining in the Conversation

In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein describes the human mind as able “to travel over a wide field of thought criss-crossing in every direction” in order to form an interpretation of meaning and context from the various stimuli presented to it (vii). Wittgenstein might well be describing a reader engaged with Interactive Media.  In a video game or on the web, readers are intentionally and constantly bombarded with the unfamiliar and (often) the seemingly incongruous; however, far from stopping dead, transactionalists believe the mind simply finds a way around the missing information and constructs what it believes to be a reasonable substitute using the familiar schema as well as other types of implicature. As the users continue through the text, they revise and refine their predictions and interpretations.

Although (at this point in our understanding of the synaptic and electrical impulses of the mind) we cannot say for certain how the brain reaches its interpretations, Silvo Gaggi suggests in From Text to Hypertext that the metaphor of conversation is a reasonable one; furthermore, it is a metaphor for which discourse analysis already provides a functional framework in Grice’s theory of conversational implicature. 

The notion of implicature rests on the assumption that all partners in any conversation fashion their utterances in order to contribute to create a meaningful exchange. Grice’s theory expresses this idea in the form of a general cooperative principle plus four supporting maxims by which speakers usually abide. When dealing with a seemingly disjointed hypertext, the reader-participants follows the same rules as far as they can – they assume the text is acting in good faith and that there is a connection between the discrete pieces which will allow the users to synthesize the text and the context to form meaning. 

Grice’s general principle is called the Cooperative Principle, which he presents in the following terms:

            Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged (qtd in Brown and Yule 31).

Grice’s theory assumes that all utterances in a conversation are relevant to the discussion, even if they seem to be a non-sequitur. By applying the maxims, both parties in the exchange make meaning by finding the connections between what is spoken and what is meant – a teacher says her voice is hoarse, and a student closes the window to block noise; a man asks when the last bus leaves, and his boss tells him to go home. 

Assuming the maxims are true, the student and the boss synthesize the statements with their knowledge of the situation and then interpret the utterance’s meaning in the context of that conversation. Cyberfiction, in particular, creates meaning in a similar way. As the users are presented with scene after scene, they act on the assumptions that the hypertext must make sense, and so they construct a meaning unique to their distinct reading experience of the ever-changing text.

In JCCC’s Writing for Interactive Media course, students use Grice’s maxims to analyze user-friendliness, effectiveness, and navigability of published products in order to establish a list of criteria by which their work on the upcoming assignment will be evaluated. The students found that the more closely a hypertext followed the “rules of conversation,” the more successful it was. A violation of any of these rules – the need for either excessive scrolling through lengthy passages or for continual clicking from screen to screen to find content; the use of outdated or questionable information; complete discontinuity in vocabulary, topic, or design between closely related screens; a disorganized or just plain rude space – was noted as disruptive. In other words, if the readers couldn’t “write” a coherent conversation from the chunks of text they were given, they essentially could not “read” it. In this way, we readers, as Jay David Bolter suggests, “become our own writers” (30).