Been There, Done That: Communication, Meta-Communication and Presence

In the oral version of this keynote, I began by suggesting that everybody in the audience felt present then and there. In reading this print version, different audiences will experience different senses of presence: having been there at the conference, or compensating for their absence through a (digitised) print medium, but in each and every instance being present to themselves in and through the act of reading. As suggested by Joshua Meyrowitz (1989: 326), “All experience is local (…) We are always in place, and place is always with us.” As biological and historical entities, we cannot not be present. But print, digital, and other media have extended our presence in the world and in relation to other natural and cultural entities (McLuhan 1964), for better or worse. Digitalisation is currently challenging media and communication research to make sense of presence and its implications beyond the academy.

Since the Nordic community of media and communication researchers began meeting for biannual conferences during the 1970s, the objects of study have gone through what arguably amounts to three phases of development. During the 1970s, we still referred to “mass media”, analysing and assessing what they did to people and, with time, what people did with media (Katz 1959), partly in response to contemporary concerns about and critiques of “the media”. One popular sign of the times could be found in the feature film, Being There (Hal Ashby, 1979).

Being There (Hal Ashby, 1979) trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZcBccViAtM (accessed 15 February 2016).

The second phase in the development of media, and of media studies, was kickstarted by the World Wide Web from the mid 1990s, when “the internet” became a medium for the general public. This time, an advertising campaign articulated the hope and the hype: Microsoft's launch of Windows 95. One television commercial depicted all the places one could go on a computer, grounded in an operating system that offered overlapping windows on the world.

Microsoft's Windows 95 campaign – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRdl1BjTG7c (accessed 15 February 2016).

The multimodal web and the graphic user interface jointly afforded users – consumers and citizens – yet another layer of presence.

The third and current phase – with more phases still to come – has been summed up so far in the terminology of “big data”. Media users increasingly traverse different, interconnected physical and virtual platforms, leaving traces and becoming present in places and times that they may or may not recognise or appreciate. Another one of Microsoft's mid 1990s campaigns asked: “Where do you want to go today?”.

Microsoft's “Where do you want to go today?” campaign: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zwf0EZ-50KUY (accessed 15 February 2016).

This essay addresses the premises for posing and beginning to answer such questions. My main argument will be that, in order grasp the current phase of media history, the field needs to revisit the concept of communication. Whereas the question, “what is a medium?”, has been debated regularly at conferences and seminars at least since the second, intermediate phase of networked computing, “what is communication?” represents a key challenge for media and communication research in its current phase.

In the following sections, I go meta: I review three different approaches to human communication, each of which relies on a terminology of “meta”, each of which holds distinctive implications, but which taken together help to clarify what it means to communicate, and how this mundane practice is conditioned by changing technological circumstances. The first section notes the status of the digital computer, and of computer-based networks, as meta-media – media that reproduce and integrate other types of media, old and new. The concept of meta-media sums up the affordances of digital media, simultaneously as means of communication and as conditions of research. The second section returns to Gregory Bateson's concept of meta-communication. While Bateson was examining face-to-face or embodied communication, the concept lends itself to the study of online and networked communication: the bit streams that are accumulated as big data can be understood as instances of meta-communication. Meta-media yield new varieties of meta-communication – and of meta-data, which represents the third meta-approach. The third section of the article returns to the mostly technical notion of meta-data and restates it in the vocabulary of communication theory. Meta-data indicate who or what was present in a particular place and time in the past; they also suggest who may do what, to or with whom, in the future. The last section briefly considers the implications of meta-data and meta-communication for issues of surveillance in the digital media environment.

The digital computer can be seen to reproduce and recombine previous media of expression, representation and interaction on integrated platforms of hardware and software. This unique affordance (Gibson 1979; Hutchby 2001) of digital computing was summed up early on by Kay and Goldberg (1999/1977): computers are meta-media. As modes of expression and representation, digital media recombine text, image and sound, and they incorporate the full range of traditional genres as inherited from both mass media and face-to-face interaction: news, fictional narratives, debates, games, etc. As forms of interaction, digital media integrate one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many forms of communication: in addition to blogging, tweeting and networking socially, digital media are used extensively for interpersonal contact as well as good old-fashioned mass communication. While the networked personal computer, for a few decades, was the pivotal meta-medium in the West, mobile telephones and other portable devices are becoming equally, or more, important access points to the internet around the world (Castells et al. 2007). At the same time, the integration of digital technologies into natural objects, cultural artifacts and social arrangements in a projected Internet of Things (Howard 2015) is challenging, once again, received notions of “media” and “communication”, as currently illustrated by location-aware technologies and other ubiquitous communication (de Sousa e Silva & Frith 2012).

Digital technologies invite research to refocus the activity of theorising – from media to communication – and to explore how different flows of communication intersect, on single platforms such as tablet computers, and across several platforms such as smart television sets and cell or mobile phones. Their intersections lend themselves to studies of multistep communications, not just in two steps (Katz & Lazarsfeld 1955), but in three steps of mass, interpersonal and networked interactions (Jensen 2009). To begin, consider some of the prototypical configurations of communication that meta-media enable.

Figure 1 reproduces the early and helpful typology by Bordewijk & van Kaam (1986) of what was referred to then as “telecommunication services”. The conceptual matrix distinguishes, along one dimension, between central and distributed control over an available information base. For example, an encyclopedia may be centrally administered and edited (Encyclopedia Britannica), or it may be open, to varying degrees, to input and revisions from distributed users (Wikipedia). Along the other dimension, it may be up to a central agency or authority exactly when the particular items of information become accessible, or it may be up to individual, distributed users. This distinction is illustrated by the difference between broadcast television and various dedicated services, from pay-per-view to streaming content such as Netflix.

Figure 1

The two dimensions, in combination, yield four prototypes of communication. Conversation refers to the online equivalents of face-to-face interaction (e.g., chat or conferencing), whereas allocution covers the traditional formats of one-to-many or mass communication, as recently embedded in digital platforms. Consultation is perhaps typically associated with accessing websites and other sources of information, but can also be seen to include, for instance, the more fine-grained process of following Face-book profiles (overlapping, in this systematic, with conversation). Finally, registration concerns the automated documentation of users’ trajectories within a given system of communication, and perhaps beyond, across interrelated media platforms and flows of communication.

It is this last type of interaction – registration, in which users enter information into the system, more or less willingly – that speaks most directly to current research and debate concerning the power relations and wider structural implications of networked communication. It is essential to note, however, that registration is not a separate type of communication in digital media. Each of the three other types equally involves encoded documentation and similarly establishes particular social relationships among users and service providers. The point is that these codes and relationships are registered in and of the various acts of consultation, conversation and allocution. In a next step, they lend themselves to review and analysis by anyone who gains access to the resulting information trail: system administrators, other users, government officials, hackers, spies, etc. It used to be that communicators would speak into the air (Peters 1999). In digital media, communicators also speak into the system.

One important insight of Bordewijk & van Kaam's (1986) early model was that what had commonly been thought of as separate types of communication, as associated with particular media technologies and social institutions, were merging or converging on integrated platforms. The model provided a specification of how communication could be seen to flow in meta-media. Subsequent technological and institutional developments have made the lessons of the model almost common sense to the average media user. My laptop, tablet and smartphone afford allocution, consultation, conversation, registration and then some, and yet the definitions of meta-media and their communicative affordances still appear unresolved. In networked media, the flows of communication do not exhibit neat technological or theoretical boundaries. Indeed, the very terminology of meta-media is best thought of as an ad hoc conceptualisation of new, digital media with reference to their embedding of old, analogue media – a memento that the field is still struggling to come to terms with its conceptions of “media”.

In this regard, meta-media and meta-communication come with rather different histories. Whereas “meta-media” represents an attempt to move beyond predominant conceptions of “mass media”, “meta-communication” returns the field to differences as well as similarities between face-to-face and technologically mediated communication. All media, including humans, meta-communicate; meta-media meta-communicate in largely unrecognised ways. The following section lays out two aspects of meta-communication and their relevance in the digital media environment.

Bateson (1972) developed the concept of meta-communication with reference to face-to-face interaction, building on a wide range of studies spanning anthropology and psychiatry. His premise was that, far from being simply the literal exchange of information, “human verbal communication can operate and always does operate at many contrasting levels of abstraction” (p. 150). Any given statement carries multiple potential meanings that hold implications for the further course of the communication and its outcome. This polysemy is not a contingent product of either channel noise or errors of precision at either end of the channel, but a constitutive feature of human communication. In face-to-face settings, moreover, communication incorporates not just verbal language, but all manner of bodily expressions from the communicators as well as any number of contingent aspects of their context of interaction. Embodied human beings can be considered media in their own right – media of the first degree (Jensen 2010). Much of our face-to-face communication is outside our conscious control, and yet it may qualify as communication as far as other people are concerned. Humans are constantly ascribing meaning to each other and to their cultural and natural environments (Ruesch & Bateson 1987/1951: 6). As students of Bateson summarised the point, humans “cannot not communicate” (Watzlawick, Beavin & Jackson 1967: 49), productively and receptively.

Bateson (1972) identified two aspects of meta-communication. First, people meta-communicate about the codification of their interaction. In some instances, this may amount to meta-linguistic (Jakobson 1960) or explicit information about the meaning of particular words, phrases or statements. Taking a standard example from logic – “the cat is on the mat” – Bateson noted that, in a certain context, the reference of “cat” might be said to include tigers, for example, as part of a game. In a wider sense, the codification of communication is in question whenever new topics or vocabularies are introduced into a conversation, and in the common use of humour or irony. In the vast majority of instances, however, people will work out the relevant meaning of statements and expressions as part of the flow of their communication through repetitions, rewordings, examples etc. Humans are remarkably good at finding out what words and, by implication, other people mean without constantly asking, “What do you mean?”.

Second, people meta-communicate about their social relationships. In Bateson's example, the suggestion that a cat is actually a tiger might be an aspect of children's play, organised role-playing, religious ritual or other cultural practices. In the unlikely event that someone takes the reference literally and, perhaps, is startled, a meta-communication can reassure them that “This is play” (Bateson 1972: 151). Again, the nature of the communication mostly becomes clear to people in the course of their turn-taking, including openings, responses, elaborations, etc. It is only rarely that one finds it necessary to explicitly or directly raise questions regarding interpersonal relations or personal identity: “Who are you?”, “Who am I?”, and, by implication, “Who are we?”, as far as this communication is concerned.

In noting the multiple levels of communication, Bateson was further recognising their interdependence in the practice of communication. For one thing, “the vast majority of both metalinguistic and metacommunicative messages remain implicit” (Bateson 1972: 151) in “the message” as commonly understood. For another thing, “a majority of propositions about codification are also implicit or explicit propositions about relationship and vice versa” (Ruesch & Bateson 1987/1951: 209). Depending on who one is talking to – family, colleagues, strangers – different kinds and degrees of codification are called for. The meaning of the codes that we use in our communications with each other implies the meaning of our relationship. Both these meanings are established in and vary by context.

Bateson (1972) was focusing on embodied interactions in local contexts, but also in technologically mediated communication across time and space, meta-communication is one constitutive aspect of the interaction between user and medium, or between user and user. In the case of traditional mass media, codifications and social relationships are signalled and accomplished, not least, by genres: discursive conventions of expressing and experiencing a particular subject matter in common. Whereas the analytical category of genre has most commonly been associated with literature, aesthetics and other humanities, recent decades have witnessed a growing literature on genre simultaneously as a discursive structure and a social practice (Bawarshi 2000; Lomborg 2009; Miller 1984; Miller & Shepherd 2004; Yates & Orlikowski 1992). Beyond epic, dramatic and lyrical formats, political negotiations, financial transactions and cultural criticism also constitute discursive forms with social functions. Genres meta-communicate about the anticipated uses of their characteristic contents. For example, news and advertising employ distinctive codes and conventions, and they imply different social relationships with their audiences – as citizens or consumers – who can be expected to interpret the contents as scripts for subsequent action, beyond the moment of communicative interchange.

Digital media join some of the meta-communicative affordances of face-to-face communication and traditional mass communication. On the one hand, digital media, like mass media, rely on a wide variety of genres to address their users – emails, websites, quickpolls, tweets, likes etc. – but also the genres inherited and remediated (Bolter & Grusin 1999) from earlier media forms: news, advertising, serial fiction etc. On the other hand, because of their interactive potentials, digital media reintroduce certain expressive potentials from face-to-face communication – a remediated body language of sorts. Beyond emoticons, users enter and leave behind a great variety of information about the communication and about themselves.

Web search engines (Halavais 2009; Hillis, Petit & Jarrett 2013) offer a useful example of meta-communication in the digital media environment. Search engines codify information: the algorithms lend a coded structure to an available mass of data points, so that users gain access to them (or not) as information and as this kind of information with some presumed relevance. Search engines also enact communicative relationships: users establish a communicative relationship, not necessarily or explicitly with identifiable individuals or institutions, but with a distributed resource of information, which may lead into multistep flows of communication and interaction, including mundane offline activities such as finding out where to go to in order to meet someone or buy something. Most important in the present context, in and of their searches, users provide input to the medium or system of communication and, in doing so, they reconfigure the system, however minimally. Such meta-communication prefigures subsequent searches and communications by the person in question and by others: users participate in the codification of a common information pool, and they articulate identities for themselves vis-à-vis the present information.

It is the continuous documentation of these two aspects of meta-communication through the architectures of digital technologies that together present one of the most central challenges to current communication theory. Both information and communicators are codified as part of any act of communication. The question is who codifies what – and whom – with what consequences, when it comes to digital channels of communication and meta-communication. To address that question it is useful to revisit the concept of meta-data, which has become increasingly common in the field of media and communication research, but which has retained its mostly technical connotations.

Media and communication researchers are still brought up on variations of Lasswell's (1948) model – who, says what, in which channel, to whom, with what effect – even if they gradually learn to distance themselves from its apparent simplicity, certainly in the presence of other researchers. Still, we live the model; old models die hard. At the present juncture of media history and communication theory, at least a complementary model of meta-communication is needed.

One way of reformulating Lasswell (1948) is to ask: which information is present, to whom, for what kinds of action, in what time frame, with which consequences? In the case of meta-media, much meta-communication remains present in the shape of meta-data for others to make sense of and act on. As citizens and consumers, we remain present, here but also there. Having communicated and meta-communicated, we have been there, and we have done things.

In order to reintegrate models of communication and of meta-communication, we may return to the complex configurations of one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many communication that digital technologies afford (Helles et al. 2015; Jensen & Helles 2011). A next step is to include many-to-one flows: Which individuals and institutions are in position to monitor the actions of other individuals and institutions for political, economic and cultural purposes? Big Brother now has many little sisters. Compared with the traditional understanding of top-down surveillance, citizens, interest groups and social movements are now in position to engage in bottom-up sousveillance of the powers that be, in addition to performing coveillance of each other (Rainie & Wellman 2012). The question – who knows what about whom? – is, in part, empirical. But, as always, empirical questions are premised on theories and models of what we might expect or imagine.

It was Kurt Lewin (1945: 129) who suggested that, “Nothing is as practical as a good theory” and, one might add, good models. In common parlance, “been there, done that” articulates a certain self-satisfied self-conception, here and now. Dr Dre, the rapper, offered an ambiguous elaboration of this position on his single “Been There, Done That” (1997).

Dr. Dre, “Been There, Done That”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c80dWbiONqM (accessed 15 February 2016).