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International Cultural Semiotics Symposium, Nanjing 2008

Patrick J. CoppockDepartment of Social, Cognitive and Quantitative Science,School of Communication and Business, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italypatrick.coppock@unimore.ithttp://game.unimore.it

+Semiotics of Culture

Thematic Area: Theoretical studies concerning cross-cultural semiotics

My Title: Local and Global Identity Games: [Re]mediated modelling of transworld “glocal” identities in an “open” world

+Here, there and everywhere?

The Beatles (1966)

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I want her everywhere and if she's beside me, I know I need never care. But to love her is to need her everywhere. Knowing that love is to share. Each one believing that love never dies. Watching her eyes and hoping I'm always there. To be there and everywhere. Here, there and everywhere.

+Managing “Glocal” Identities

In our hyperconnected continually globalising world it can seem possible for us to be “Here, There and Everywhere” at one and the same time.

But is it actually possible to blend “local” and “global” identities in mutually acceptable, desirable and, first and foremost, ethical ways?

What criteria might be useful to successfully manage transmedia, transworld identity games?

Can analytical cultural semiotics play a role in identifying such criteria?

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+Transmedia remediation

+Reality: a continuous, autonomous, creative process C.S. Peirce

“[…] we may define the real as that whose characters are independent of what anybody may think them to be.” (How to Make Our Ideas Clear, 1878)

“Synechism, even in its less stalwart forms, can never abide dualism, properly so called. […] In particular, the synechist will not admit that physical and psychical phenomena are entirely distinct, – whether as belonging to different categories of substance, or as entirely separate sides of one shield, – but will insist that all phenomena are of one character, though some are more mental and spontaneous, others more material and regular. […]” (Immortality in the Light of Synechism, 1893)

+Cognition, Consciousness and Experience

A.N. Whitehead:

“Cognition is the emergence, into some measure of individualised reality, of the general substratum of activity, poising before itself possibility, actuality and purpose.” (Science in the Modern World : 152)

“The principle that I am adopting is that consciousness presupposes experience, and not experience consciousness. It is a special element in the subjective forms of some feelings. Thus an actual entity may, or may not be conscious of some part of its experience.” (Process and Reality : 53)

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Self(hood): Feeling Subjectivity Other(ness)

World: Reality/ Novelty/ Satisfaction/ Actuality

Actualisation:

Processual realisation of possibility

Process/ Being/ Cosmos/ Evolution/ Possibility

Relationality of Being, Self(hood), Other(ness)

+Between Factuality and Fiction

Our experienced world is a cultural construct (Eco):

The experienced world as a “multitude of world pictures or stated descriptions […] epistemic worlds that are frequently mutually exclusive”

“Even though the real world is a cultural construct, one might still wonder about the ontological status of the described universe.

+Possible and actual worlds

Semiotics of Fiction (Eco: Lector in Fabula, 1979; I Limiti dell’Interpretazione,

1990)

Fictional possible worlds may be characterised as: “Small worlds”, “furnished” with actors and objects with

certain “properties” “… alternative ways things might have been, not descriptions

of these ways.” “… states of affairs … described in terms of the same

language as their narrative object “Finite, enclosed”, “handicapped”, “parasitic on the real

world”, must be “taken on trust” “Constructed by human minds and hands”.

+The Cultural Role of Fictional Possible Worlds

Fictional characters live in a handicapped world. When we actually understand their fate, then we start to suspect that we too, as citizens of the actual world, frequently undergo our destiny just because we think of our world in the same way as fictional characters think of their own.

Fiction suggests that perhaps our view of the actual world is as imperfact as that of fictional characters.

This is the way that successful fictional characters become paramount examples of the “real” human condition.

+Identity – two complementary philosophical points of view

In philosophy, personal identity refers to the essence of a self-conscious person, that which makes him or her uniquely what they are at any one point in time, and which further persists over time despite superficial modifications, making him or her the same person at different points in time also. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_identity_(philosophy)

Personal identity deals with questions about ourselves qua people (or persons). Many of these questions are familiar ones that occur to everyone at some time: What am I? When did I begin? What will happen to me when I die? Discussions of personal identity go right back to the origins of Western philosophy, and most major figures have had something to say about it. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-personal/#1

+Personal Unity as a Locus for all occasions of experience

A.N. Whitehead (Adventures of Ideas: 187):

“Personal Unity” – cf Plato’s “receptacle” – “a locus that persists and provides an emplacement for all the occasions of experience. That which happens in it is conditioned by its own past, and by the persuasion of its immanent ideals.”

+Some aspects of Transworld Glocal Identity development Taking and sharing responsiblities here, there and everywhere …

Social (or cultural) criticism (Michael Waltzer) James Paul Gee:

“Situated Learning” (e.g. with computer/ video games): Learning by planning, tryng out, discussing and evaluating outcomes of shared projects together with others.

Sherry Turkle: “Information technology is identity technology. Embedding it in a

culture that supports democracy, freedom of expression, tolerance, diversity, and complexity of opinion is one of the next decades greatest challenges. We cannot afford to fail.”

“When I first began studying the computer culture, a small breed of highly trained technologists thought of themselves as ‘computer people.’ That is no longer the case. If we take the computer as a carrier of a way of seeing the world and our place in it, we are all computer people now.”

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