What if we stopped talking past each other? What if, when we said something, we were interpreted exactly as we had intended? What if technology could help? (Warning: today’s post is an idea only and not a resource – just something that’s been swimming around in my mind lately)
So, what’s going on when I talk, another listens, and we both walk away with two different ideas in our heads? Hearkening back to my linguistic classes, Ferdinand de Saussure wrote extensively about this issue, articulating the concept of the “sign,” the “signifier,” and the “signified.” In a nutshell (corrections welcome in the comments area), the “sign” is the essence of the thing to be communicated. The “signifier” is the words, pictures, etc. that one party uses to communicate the “sign.” The “signified” is the idea that is carried away in the mind of the one who received those communications.
Saussure posited that communications never quite match the “sign” they intend to express. Because of this, the party receiving the communications leaves with an inaccurate understanding of the sign, at least to a small degree. Effective communication, then, seeks to reduce this inherent misunderstanding to a level small enough that both parties come away with a sense of agreement.
How does this play in to technology? First, you’ll need to know a bit about one of the “new” ways information is now indexed on the web. In this new 2-way web (meaning that any person can consume as well as publish), web sites are allowing users the freedom to organize based on subject headings they create. These are called “tags.” At the end of this post, I’ve “tagged” it “delicious, bookmarking, ideas, Saussure, sign.” These tags allow me and other readers to find this post more easily.
delicious is a service that allows anyone to bookmark a site and keep those bookmarks on the web. It, too, works with “tags.” (If you’d like more info on delicious, check out another article I wrote.) delicious offers something else, though: the opportunity to share your bookmarks with others. In fact, it keeps a log of the tags most used by members around the world and suggests those to you when you bookmark a site.
A function I’d like to see added to delicious would be the ability to see all the tags associated with a given site, displayed in a web-like format (similar to this site). I think this would contribute to the web world in two ways: 1) website creators could get valuable feedback about how readers are interpreting their sites, and 2) it approach, in web terms, representing the “signified” in a more complete way.
If thousands of people are visiting your “hard-hitting” investigative news site and saving it under the tag of “funny,” something may be getting lost in the translation.
(photo by ernop)
