Antinomy of text in the interface: Continuity and discreteness

Anna A. Rodi­ono­va
Nation­al Research Lobachevsky State Uni­ver­si­ty of Nizh­ni Nov­gorod

Antin­o­my of text in the inter­face: Con­ti­nu­ity and dis­crete­ness

Abstract. This paper presents an approach to exam­in­ing text in the dig­i­tal envi­ron­ment, focus­ing on both the fea­tures of a con­cep­tu­al per­cep­tion of text and its essen­tial prop­er­ties, asso­ci­at­ed with its spe­cif­ic orga­ni­za­tion in the dig­i­tal envi­ron­ment. The author relies on a lin­guis­tic def­i­n­i­tion of text as a writ­ten mes­sage, objec­ti­fied in the form of a writ­ten doc­u­ment that con­tains a series of state­ments com­bin­ing dif­fer­ent types of lex­i­cal, gram­mat­i­cal, and log­i­cal con­nec­tions. The paper dis­tin­guish­es the fea­tures of the con­cep­tu­al per­cep­tion of text and the essen­tial prop­er­ties con­di­tioned by the dig­i­tal back­ground of the place it is rep­re­sent­ed on. The author pro­vides an analy­sis of the con­stituent char­ac­ter­is­tics of the dig­i­tal envi­ron­ment that con­sti­tutes it and, pro­ceed­ing from them, dif­fer­en­ti­ates the fea­tures of dig­i­tal tex­tu­al­i­ty asso­ci­at­ed with mate­ri­al­i­ty of its medi­um – dis­crete­ness and vari­abil­i­ty. Their man­i­fes­ta­tion becomes most evi­dent in con­tact with the inter­face, which, on the one hand, com­mu­ni­cates with the per­son through the text, and on the oth­er – pro­vides arrays of texts to view. Based on this analy­sis, the paper focus­es on how text in the dig­i­tal envi­ron­ment is includ­ed in inter­ac­tions with humans, how it under­goes restric­tions and which qual­i­ties it acquires. This sug­gests some changes in the con­cep­tu­al­iza­tion of the writ­ten – anoth­er mod­el of text per­cep­tion is emerg­ing, in which text appears as an anti­n­o­m­ic phe­nom­e­non, both con­tin­u­ous and dis­crete. This con­tributes to trans­for­ma­tions in the per­cep­tion of infor­ma­tion as a whole and the meth­ods of its gen­er­a­tion. The author relies on the works by such media the­o­rists, as Lev Manovich and Alexan­der Gal­loway, as well as on the the­o­ry of cog­ni­tive metaphor by J. Lakoff and M. John­son. 

Key­words: con­ti­nu­ity, dis­crete­ness, text, inter­face, dig­i­tal envi­ron­ment, media the­o­ry, cog­ni­tive metaphor

DOI: 10.5840/dspl20192111

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