Is Body-to-Body Communication Still the Prototype?

Abstract

Body-to-body communication has widely been accepted as the prototype for mediated communication. This article interrogates the assumption that there is a dividing line between body-to-body and mediated communication. It shows that body-to-body communication intermingles profoundly with forms of mediated communication, to the point that it becomes very difficult to tell them apart. Starting from this framework, it analyzes the great imitative capacity of mediated communication with regard to body-to-body communication, and analyzes how this similarity is destined to grow in time. It concludes that because of these changes, body-to-body communication is an increasingly evanescent prototype.

Keywords:

• artificial
• communicative act
• copresence
• face-to-face communication
• mediated communication
• prototype
• the human body

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks to Ronald Day for patiently checking through this text and making suggestions. I am also very grateful to the four reviewers who dedicated their time to a careful reading of the text and giving a wealth of comments and criticism. Finally, a very special thanks to Harmeet Sawhney for his patience and wise guidance.

Notes

¹Cf. Fortunati and Manganelli (1999a, 1999b), Fortunati (1995b, 1998a, 1998b, 2001, 2002a), Fortunati et al. (1999), and Fortunati and Contarello (2002a).

²These calls have been the object of important research sponsored by Telecom Italia. This research, which was composed of two parts, was conducted in Italy in 1994. The first part consisted of a national representative telephone survey (4130 respondents) and was aimed at investigating the use of the telephone in interaction with TV and radio by viewers/listeners. The second part involved a content analysis of the programs of the 7 most important TV networks for a week (from 17 to 24 October) and the programs of three public radio networks (from 23 to 30 October) from 7 in the morning to 11 at night (Fortunati & Manganelli, 1995).

³Let us use the term “greater adhesion to the social” to summarize the different aspects of a single process that have been called “social realism” (Dorr et al., 1980), “perceived realism” (Potter, 1988), “verisimilitude” (Barker, 1988), “plausibility” (Elliott et al., 1983), “authenticity and believability,” and so on. The fictional representation of the social has, however, been a design change of the media induced by users who, in the continuing process of domestication, integrated and appropriated these technologies in daily life and domestic routines (Silverstone & Haddon, 1996) and decided to rediscuss the pact that existed between them and those responsible for television and radio programs. The audiences of the respective media, instead of continuing to offer themselves as model first- and second-level TV viewers of television and radio narration insisted on being direct protagonists on the fictional plane. Let us remember that according to Eco (1994) there are two ways of reading a narrative text, which correspond to the first- and second-level model reader. The first approach is to want to know how the story finishes; the second is to try to understand how the author would like us to read the text and thereby collaborate with the author's design of narration.

⁴I do not share this provocative assertion of the prototypicality of mediated communication, if anything I observe that mediated communication is also able to inspire body-to-body communication.

⁵The toy telephone is linked to the magical dimension of the telephone. The cord of the fixed phone is like a “long umbelical cord” that connects us with a distant partner, whose voice appears and vanishes as if by magic. The toy telephone leads us back to the favorite children's game of appearing and vanishing (Freud, 1920), which is connected to the development of the notion of the object and especially the scheme of the permanent object. “The universe initially,” state Piaget and Inhelder (1970, p. 21), “is in fact a world without objects, made up only of shifting and fleeting ‘pictures’, which appear to have then been completely re-absorbed. Weeping or dismay for the vanished object becomes joy and satisfaction when it reappears.” The toy telephone forms part of toys of imitation and socialization in the world of adults, and the proper expression of the world of childhood takes on at times anthropomorphic characteristics: the telephone becomes a face, more often than not smiling. The telephone game is play-acting, which is generally the most important manifestation of “symbolic thought” in the child (Piaget, 1974, p. 249).

⁶It is interesting to note this use of ICTs to avoid undesired body-to-body communication because it is a much more frequent phenomenon than it would seem. For example, in the domestic realm, men, who earlier hid behind the pages of a newspaper, now hide in front of a computer screen. It is also evident in the absent presence that has been observed in the uncommunicative use of the mobile phone (Gergen, 2002; Fortunati, 2002b).

⁷Empirical research on the use of the landline phone, for example, suggests that the more intense is its use, more frequent is the sociability with friends and relatives (Fortunati, 1998a). Quantitative studies, particularly studies on the Internet, show a positive correlation between the use of the e-mail and a higher number of friends (Anderson & Tracey, 2001). A more nuanced understanding is provided by Ling et al. (2003, p. 371), who found that ICTs facilitate body-to-body communication only “where there is already a core upon which to build.” So, “the rich get richer” type of dynamic works here—that is, “the net in itself does not generate social capital; it only facilitates already existing tendencies” (p. 361). The problem is that due to the lack of institutional studies we know nothing about the preexisting social context of our respondents. So, we cannot really know if the use of any one technology has increased or diminished social interaction over a given period. Moreover, even if we had this data, we would not know how many social relations that individual could have had in the same amount of time if ICTs did not exist. With regard to “quality” itself, the construct is difficult to operationalize let alone measure.

⁸It is only through the process of knowledge and domestication of the means of communication (Silverstone & Haddon, 1996; Haddon & Silverstone, 1996), also at a sociocognitive level (Fortunati & Manganelli, 1999a; Fortunati & Contarello, 2002a, 2002b), that we manage to understand what it is best to say over the phone. But not by chance, as Lambert acutely observes (1999, p. 112), domestication is a typical artificializing process. Consequently, even the communicative pacts that we establish become ever more pliable and complex.