The Virtual Umwelt :: Internet Communication Essays

The Virtual Umwelt In my last reflexive paper titled Semiotics in Cyberspace (April, 1995), I referred to the following statement from Philip Elmer-DeWitt's article Welcome to Cyberspace: What is it? Where is it? And how to get there?: "Stripped of the external trappings of wealth, power, beauty and social status, people tend to be judged in the Cyberspace of the Internet only by their ideas and their ability to get them across in terse, vigorous prose." This statement was used to prove a point in that context. The point was that Cyberspace is a place for the discovery and exploration of semiosis. I found Elmer-DeWitt's comment to be an excellent example of the kinds of issues that semioticians could argue about when analyzing the semiosis of the Internet. In his statement, Elmer-DeWitt depicts Cyberspace as what appears to be a world without umwelts. He implies that the only reference we have from others in Cyberspace is their writing and composition abilities (as if those by themselves were not signs leading to a million interpretations). I very much disagree with Elmer-DeWitt's argument. Semiosis in Cyberspace is a lot more complex than just the act of signification from writing styles and well chosen words. Most of us would agree that when communicating through the Internet we all must realize that we do so with other human beings, not with machines. Those machines might be considered to be one of the components of our umwelt in the context of that experience. The technological devices we need to interact with are bear essentials of Cyberspace and they establish the first element of characterization we use to impersonate other human beings. We know that our correspondents must have access to the technology and should have a certain amount of skills in order to get to Cyberspace. By simply making this assumption (which in most cases is true) we are issuing a set of new set of labels and re-localizing our correspondents in a specific spot within our umwelts. We might very easily connect characteristics like the access to highly technological devices with a relatively high socio-economical status or with a certain level of academic achievement. I also believe that most of us conduct very dynamic communications through the net. We do not just read messages. Instead, we try to find out more from the person who wrote it. We start by looking at things like their e-mail addresses.