barebones communication

No, you’re not using the flashbone yet?

I can tell, because this is the first time you have set eye and mind on a flashbone. 

So, why flashbone?

Flashbone is a portmanteau meaning it is a fusion of two other words barebones and flash. Barebones you know from this blog by now, and flash you know from ordinary vocabulary as a regular flashlight or a flashlight used by photographers.

With the flashbone you do barebones flashes.  

So let’s take the allegory a little further.

When you flash you light up things. To see them better. To get a better view if you are out at night. If in a dark room where lights are low or not at all.  You could have one on top of your camera, if you need better light for your picture.

A flashlight is a portable light source.

But there is also the verb to flash, which means something like a short and fast burst of light. 

Flashbone will adapt both these meanings: portable and fast. 

To have a flashbone you have to buy one or to build one. In fact, I am not sure you are able to buy one, so you have to build one. I am sure that you get the point .

To build a flashbone for barebones communication flashes, you need ingredients as well. Here is what you need. 

1)  gestalt ingredients

2) semiological ingredients 

3) phenomenological ingredients 

4) naturalistic psychology ingredients 

5) experiential ingredients

Not in any measured proportions, since you have do adapt the flash light to the material. 

Flashbone is in a few words; an instrument for you to fast check out the overall communication efficiency of a piece of communication. You don’t need to be an expert in the field, but you need to know the basics. Definitely.

Yes, I will make a checklist for you to use. Later on.

Would you believe it? .

” … the need, that is, of grounding moral not von oben, but von unten, as Husserl frequently expressed it; that is, to derive ethics not from a metaphysical structure systematized in advance and therefore a priori, but from an authentically verified description of the phenomena of conscience. In a word, it is necessary to begin building the moral edifice from solid ground rather then from the roof. In this perspective the phenomenological method proves very useful as an introduction to a morality existentially lived and at the same time removed from a relativistic and historicist situationism“.

Paper by Paolo Valori: “Phenomenology and Personalistic Morality” in Analecta Husserliana Volume VI (The Self and the Other, page 82), D. Reidel Publishing Company, Holland 1975. (Edited by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka).

Library Thing. 

More on barebones pitstops  

It is late Saturday the last weekend of January 2008.

And I really think that Wertheimer would have loved this one too. I am sure Barthes would.

Reasons why? You tell me . Go here. 

BTW, this is shot outside Hotel Churchill in Dover, UK, April 2007. There is a tiny beach there.

Elements of Semiology.

And that is just what I had in mind. It will be elements of semiology. No more than that.

This is also the title of a famous little book written by French philosopher Roland Barthes in 1964. Translated into English 3 years later. 

I will refer to the English translation. And I will use the book as the steppingstone to the semiological tools that will go into the barebones toolbox. As you remember, semiology, or the American cousin semiotics, are one of the main resources for the barebones project. As I used Wertheimer’s early article as the door to gestalt theory, I will use Barthes book as the opening door to semiology.

Some of you may argue that this is a shift of source “sincerity”: Wertheimer was a primary source. Barthes is not. In particularly not in this book where he first and foremost refers to the Swiss scientist Ferninand de Saussure, and his “Course on General Linguistics”, published in 1916.

And yes, you are right, maybe I should have walked straight back to Saussure? But that will not be.

Barthes makes and excellent and brief introduction to the area, and since his book is written about half a century later, he has an historical outlook on semiology, that was not possible for Saussure to have in the beginning of the century. And besides, Barthes talks about the wider notion of semiology, as opposed to the more narrow linguistics.

Barthes operates with 4 main themes in his book. Those are:

1. Language and Speech

2. Signified and Signifier

3. Syntagme and System 

4. Denotation and Connotation

These 4 areas will be the headlines for the semiology themes, that I will cover in the blog.  Some words have already been said about denotations and connotations. The light version that is, because Barthes text in the book are much more troublesome to get through.

As always, I will do my best to illustrate the themes in question.

Let me just warn you that it is not my intention to write a summary of the book, or even stay very faithful to it. I will simply use it, as I already said, as a first steppingstone to semiology. Or rather; I will use elements of it, since what I am interested in here, as elsewhere, are the bits and pieces of semiology that are handy as communications instruments in the barebones project. 

And is was my intention, actually, to move beyond  Roland Barthes, but again with offset in  his book.

If you want to precede me in this project, please be my guest, since the first half of the book is to be found right here. 

May I add, there is also another very good reason for spending time in the company of Roland Barthes. He is heavy into visual communication. He writes a lot about photography - and I am a fan of Barthes’ trials in this fields. That much for my personal bias . 

Please be aware that I am still in the process of gearing up the garage.  

As usual, stay tuned. 

It is really good that I have all these pictures, right . Since they all speak more than a thousands words.

Each.

Well I enjoy it, and if you too participate in the initial stages of the barebones community building, you will as well .

So here is another notebook brief for you. The white bus in Berlin. Shot this August.

I could ask you how this fit will a couple of gestalt factors, but that would be too easy. Obviously both proximity and similarity are at work here, as the two most dominant factors. Nearness and similarity of objects have me perceive this picture as a picture of two groups of people (not six individuals): one group upstairs and another group downstairs.

Let’s however make this notebook brief a bit more interesting by pointing to two levels of closure potent in the image. Do you remember, that I talked about a physical closure and a mental closure in the post on gestalt closure.

Closure is, in a quick word, the human capacity to perceive a bit more than you actually get. The whole is more than the sum of its physically given parts.  This is the gestalt basic.

Now, the picture that you find in this post is a pretty complete one. There are no blank spots or areas. Things that you need to fill in to comprehend them. You should be able to recognize, at first glance, what the picture is all about.

On the other hand, there are still things “missing” in the picture. Let me point to a few:  you don’t see the bodies of the talking heads on the bus, and you don’t see the whole bus. Yet, that is what you perceive; people with intact bodies, and a bus that will certainly drive away if the driver tends to it.  Your are not in doubt about these things.

So for reason that will be clear in future posts, I will introduce two additional layers within the closure concept. These are layers 2 and 3 below.

1) Closure, as the capacity to mentally close figures where visual information is actually lacking (as in the example with the dog in the blog post on closure). This is the gestalt original. 

Then, let me add some layers to this: 

2) Closure, as the capacity to mentally close figures where the visual information is actually hidden or cropped away (as the bodies of the talking heads or the parts of the bus that are not actually there).

3) Closure, as the capacity to mentally elaborate on the context of the actual visual stimuli. You clearly have a notion of what these people are doing on that bus, don’t you? And you have an idea of how they are going to spend the next hours, haven’t you? You even may have an idea of why these guys are in Berlin in the first place? How will you close this open context and continue the story?

It does not really matter how you close it. The important thing is that you have the ability to close it. Any way you want . Remember the last pitstop. I do .

So much for the nostalgische rundfahrt, apart from that tiny, but important thing, that what I just did was to link a gestalt factor to that popular idea of telling a story, as a communication means.  That passport to success, would you believe it? I think they call it storytelling, right? .

I also introduced another gestalt factor: the factor of experience or habit. 

More on this later, so stay tuned to a barebones blog near you.

And, sorry for taking all the notes myself.  I will make up for it .

Denotations are a man and a woman, a mike and a shadow on the wall.

But what are the connnotations in this photograph? Read more on connotations. 

More on barebones notebook.  

“If, on the basis of the given perception, the subjects undertakes to contrive an idea of the perceived thing as to sides, aspects, and conditions not given in the direct sense-experience, he has the freedom to imagine any of the possibilities as realized, and he may in his own imagination, substitute at will any possibility for any other”.

Aron Gurwitsch: ”The Field of Consciousness”, Duquesne University Press, Pittsburg. PA, USA, 1964, page 245.  Library Thing. 

More on barebones pitstops