on text, context and context layers

Let me pick up on the last post right away and give you an example, and an indication, of how I will use some of the terms just introduced. 

A text is what I (or you) decide what should be the object of communication. Could be verbal, could be visual, could be anything. The text is relative to what you want to focus on.

When you have picked your text, then what you have not picked is the text’s contexts.

Within the context your can work with layers of context. Being it intentional layers or extensional layers. The intentional context and layers are derivations of what you mentally bring with you to the act of communication. The extensional context and layers are based on the physical extensions of the communication text in question.

What concerns us in this blog post, is the extensional layers. Only. Let me show you what I mean.

 

 Example 1:

This photograph is of a simple picture on a wall. And some of the wall.

If I pick the picture as my text, then the wall will be its visible context.

There is however also an invisible context related to the picture. This invisible context will be a) the whole wall, b) the room in which the picture hangs, c) the house that contains the room, d) the area of town, e) the part of the city.

All this is pretty easy to comprehend, and the spheres mentioned constitutes the context layers of the text, which in this case is the picture on the wall. 

Example 2:

Now, in this same photograph I can chose another text for my focus of investigation.

The picture on the wall consists of (among other things) 10 dried flowers. I presume these are Italian flowers since the picture was bought in San Gimignano, Italy, some years back. There ara 10 dried flowers attached to a yellowish paper. The text is embedded in a passepartou frame, which again is fixed to a wooden frame.

If I pick the upper right hand viola as my communications text, then a) the yellowish paper, b) the other dried flowers, c) the passapartou frame, and d) the wooden frame will the viola’s immediate context. That is: in addition to the contexts layers mentioned in the first example. 

Is this little exercise in context layers important? And the ones like it? I think it is, and for several reasons:

1) It explicates a set of tools that you can work with in analyzing, and even constructing, meaning in communication.

2) It can drill your talent, enhance you vision, and make is easier for you to recognize such layers in the future.

3) It gives you the opportunity to work with one theory of communication, and one (barebones) toolbox when doing communication

4) It will eventually provide you with a set of communications tools that comprises semiology, gestalt psychology, hermeneutics … and the lot, in one coherent universe. 

And these are good enough reasons for me  

Example 3 & 4: 

Now, before I end this post, let me give you two more visual texts that show you how changing elements in context layers, will change message content in a photograph.

Imagine that you are a journalist, or a photographer, and you are on an assignment for your paper. You are going to interview a guy, and you want the pictures to tell the story, as well.

The story tracks the person from early childhood to the present, and you need to take some pictures that “follows that track”. You want to do that by using context layers If you get a chance.

As your text you pick the picture frame standing in the bookshelf in his home. That makes the books in the shelf part of the context, right?  And the books will constitute a context layer.

You take two pictures. One to illustrate an article about a rather “boring guy”, who has spent his life reading a certain kind of books (if that is boring)  

 

For the other picture you rearrange the context a bit and substitute some of the books in this shelf with some others from another part of the shelf. Making the guy potentially little less “boring”. Definitely more versatile and colourful  

 

What picture was used for the article?

Well, there was no article produced, but normally the picture editor at the paper decide such things. So, we will never know about the article and the picture, will we

What we, however, will know, is that changing a part of a context layer of a text, will most certainly change the message of that item of communication.  In this case an image.

Thanks for reading.