A Participatory Medium
Submitted by lcimino on Mon, 02/25/2008 - 19:20.
Many mediums require the reader or viewer to participate in interpreting the medium, but in order to do so, the participant must first learn the rules of the game, much like in Zork. In order to understand the meaning of a piece, the reader or viewer must adjust to the medium or as stated in Immersion, “immersion implies learning to swim” (99). For example, in the film, Life is Beautiful, if the viewer is American, he/she must learn that in order to understand the film, he/she must read the subtitles. As with learning how to swim or ride a bike, this takes a few minutes before it becomes natural to the reader or viewer and they are able to participate with ease.
In a book, such as Beasts of No Nation, the reader must adjust to understand the Pidgin English of the narrator’s voice. Sentences such as the following take longer to read and interpret until the reader becomes accustomed to the structure: “There is not enough gun for each person to be having one and so I am not having gun. Anyway, Commandant is saying that I am too small to be carrying gun because small person is not holding gun well well and just bouncing up and down when they are shooting” (Iweala 43). For the reader to immerse him/herself in the piece, they must first develop the skills to make this process possible.
Thus, learning the rules the author, director, or creator makes and following them is the first important step in entering the medium.
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Language as Medium
Interesting point. So would you also say that reading a "normal" book or watching a hypothetical normal film in English is also participatory because we are still having to use required skills? Perhaps in those cases, it's just that we've so deeply internalized the rules that they've become trivially easy.
In other words, does participation require non-trivial effort, or is it a framework for understanding how any interface or communication fundamentally works?