Digital Fuzziness or das Ungefähre The Semiotics of Cultural Practices in the Digital Realm

Abstract

This paper reflects on the fuzzy relation between representational practices in the digital realm, the meaning which emerges out of them and their role in digital discourses. The media practices acquired by the media users impact significantly on interpersonal online discourses. The users are, however, only vaguely aware of the semiotic systems and the culture(s) they (re)create. Various forms of approximate knowledge can be identified when analysing the recurring patterns od practices in different contexts. They show how content related meaning making processes intertwine with both the media format and its distributional infrastructures.The theoretical concept of approximate knowledge (das Ungefähre) will be exemplified with three formats of online multimodal discourses. The digital fuzzy practices encompass the relation between the distributed media content and user generated content (UGC) which share the same means of production, similar dissemination infrastructure and aesthetic standards. This relation represents the basic thread of the discursive mass production of sense in the online realm, which is based on approximate knowledge and fuzzy discursive production by the users. This content in its flow represents series of actions within the discourse, and it cannot be analysed outside of the technical infrastructure which it needs in order to exist. IntroductionApproximate knowledge allows one to laugh at the joke without really knowing what it is about, without knowing its immediate context or reference, and without belonging to the same milieu as the joke teller. It is this a phenomenon which explains the logic behind Zizek's anecdotal claim that 'he can criticise the movie before watching it'. 1 In order to show how it works in the online environment, we will reflect on some examples of user generated content (UGC) from different realms of our digital life. The term UGC in the narrow sense of the word denotes only what 'private' users create. Since the content in the social media like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter is often posted by media professionals -who post also on news portals -it is hard to speak about only one kind of 'user' and his/her typical content. For these reasons, we find that the distribution and communication networks differ only in the degree of the content's formal integration into the infrastructure, the autonomy of the creators and the quality of multimodal expression. Multimodal language is itself a fuzzy set of changeable semiotic resources and rules characteristic for the digital online communication among all participants -users -in the public sphere.Firstly, we will consider an example of a user generated unit of the newsfeed on the privately-owned meme website 9gag -which has many elements of a social network. This newsfeed is mostly edited by the community through the system of points, in spite of the partial censorship in regard to the explicit content by an algorithm and a team. Secondly, we will examine the newsfeed on the mobile version of the German privately-owned port...