Sun Wei: Spread and recreate the body

In recent years, in the research boom of communication and body, one of the main directions of the question is what new topics and dimensions the body has opened up for communication research. Here, I intend to reverse this line of thinking and ask the opposite question: what possibilities have propagation opened up for the study of the body, and how propagation has recreated the body. Of course, from a macroscopic point of view, this can also be seen as an incentive for the study of communication by the body issue, and a further extension of the body-communication issue. This idea forms the basic framework and theme of this article.

First, the phenomenon that body issues have gradually become a hot topic of research does not occur in the field of communication science, and the body shift constitutes a trend in the entire academic community. The body begins the process from retreat to regression in Western theory, in which "man is reduced to the web of bodily relations and reconstructed into a body-subject in interaction." There is no more essential reality for man than the web of physical relationships. At the same time, the transformation of body discourse also reappears in Chinese poetics. Examining the problems of communication and body in this broad field of vision is helpful to explore the new possibilities of communication research in the current development, to explore the explanatory power of communication perspectives for universal social phenomena, and the academic value and unique contribution of communication research in this transition.

Second, the most important achievement of body research is to break the theory of body essence and the dualism of body and mind. This means that no matter which academic path we take to discuss the body, the first question must be, in what sense are we talking about the body? The body, as a central concept of this issue, is not an unconfigured presupposition and must be examined in the context of scholarship. In any academic field, the body can never be merely a completely natural body in the common sense. According to the existing consensus in the study of body theory, the current human body has long been an unnatural body infected by factors such as technology, culture, and power. So we have to ask how communication is involved in the process of body regeneration.

Third, an important premise for the current body issues to enter the field of communication research is the rise of new communication technologies. At present, the field of communication science focuses on whether the traditional physical-based communication may be replaced by machines and artificial intelligence. In view of the path of body study, this problem has largely been dissolved, because in the view of the anti-essential theory of the body, there is no natural body in the full sense. Even when it comes to discussing the infestation of technology on humans, body research has gone far beyond this issue. The impact of technology on the body involves not only the body itself, such as the impact of media technology on perception; it also includes the various social network systems involved in the body. Therefore, the question of whether the development of intelligent technology will replace people may be translated into what social changes have been triggered by this long-occurring and intensifying practice of human-machine integration communication.

Fourth, the most fundamental issue of communication and body research is the emergence of new types of communicators, that is, the emergence of intelligent communicators with human-machine hybrids. The great significance of the rise of this new type of communication subject has gone beyond the field of communication research, and it has brought about two important impacts: communication recreates the human subject; the media has become the constitutive element of human society. The reason why it is regarded as the most fundamental issue is not only because the subject and social elements are the fundamental aspects of human survival, but also the focus of various disciplines; but also because this fully reflects the basic role of communication and media in human society, which has long been obscured by positivist and functionalist communication tool theory. When communication gradually becomes an operational tool, the theoretical value and academic status of communication research are greatly limited.

The above preset reflection is intended to respond to the calls and advocacy of many pioneers in communication studies to establish the theory of autonomy in communication studies. More than twenty years ago, in his masterpiece "The Theory of Communication as a Field," Craig wrote, drawing on the views of many communication researchers, "From the perspective of communication, communication is not a secondary phenomenon that can be explained by previous psychological, sociological, cultural, or economic factors, but is itself a fundamental, fundamental social process that can explain all other factors." Strictly speaking, theories about communication from other disciplinary perspectives do not fall into the field of communication theory because they are not based on a communication perspective. All true communication theories recognize the importance of communication, and all recognize communication itself as a basic model of interpretation. If we agree with Craig's position, communication should be an irreplaceable and important perspective in body research. Based on this, this article asks how communication, as a theoretical perspective, can explain the meaning and value of the body in the current era of the rise of digital media. It is carried out from three aspects: First, how communication studies expel the body from its own field of study, and how to understand the significance of the current body being recalled to the field of communication research. Second, the restart of communication and physical issues, how to stimulate the vitality of communication research in both theory and practice. What new research aspects of body research from the perspective of communication opens up. Third, how to disseminate the idea of reinventing the body, how to give back to the current communication research, including the reflection of existing theories, and the disciplinary paradigm innovation that responds to the practice of digital communication in the intelligent era.

In the current examination of the relationship between communication and the body, it is crucial to establish a premise: mankind is at a hot moment of historical transformation in communication practice, the communication pattern of the whole society is undergoing great changes, and the mass media is undergoing an unprecedented transformation. The social conditions of the foundation period of mass media have quietly changed, and the communication theory that occurred in this particular period urgently needs paradigm innovation. Li Jinquan, a well-known communication scholar who won the Outstanding Academic Award of the China Journalism History Society and the Fellow of the International Communication Society in 2019, after reviewing the two classic paradigms of American media studies, pointed out that the mainstream communication science of American positivism is increasingly "internalized", narrow and deep inward, mistakenly believing that the discipline is self-sufficient and does not seek externally, so that the technology is becoming more and more sophisticated, but it lacks ideological innovation, and even gradually deviates from the main concerns of the humanities and social sciences. Based on this judgment, he called on China's communication studies to construct a "global theory" based on "local experience" in response to the current surging wave of digital media practice in China. This view has become a consensus among communication researchers. Communication studies require an open mind to dialogue with other disciplines and communication practices, which is what we are talking about communication and the body.

Mass communication: overcoming the shackles of the body

In the period of institutionalization of the discipline of communication, the shadow of the "body" flashed everywhere. From this appearance, it seems that communication studies have never lacked "physical" thinking. The Chicago School, which is recognized as the source of communication ideas, such as Parker, and Lazarsfeld, Laswell, etc., as the founder of the Columbia School of Communication, often mention "organism" in their masterpieces, which can be said to be synonymous with the body to some extent. In his famous 5W pattern of propagation, Laswell wrote, "If we notice the extent to which propagation has become a feature of living things at various stages of its evolution, we can look into human society, although this may lead to erroneous analogies." A living organism, whether relatively isolated or connected to a group, has a way of receiving stimuli from its external environment. Both single-celled organisms and multi-member populations manage to maintain internal equilibrium and respond to changes in the external environment in a way that allows them to maintain this balance. This response requires a unique way of coordinating the actions of the various parts of the organism. Parker, on the other hand, sees the city as a kind of "living body." In Laswell's formulation, we can clearly see the basic idea of the classical paradigm structure of mainstream Communication Science in the United States - functionalism: society is an organism, and this interdependent integral structure is composed of the integration of social subsystems that undertake different functions. This basic point is also stated by Parker, and it is precisely from the perspective of ecology that Chicago Urban Sociology sees society (the city) as an organism. This clearly shows that both paradigms of mainstream communication in the United States involve the mechanism of the "body"—how the organism receives and processes external information to sustain its own existence and development. But this "physical" element of theirs is directed at society (the city), comparing society to organisms, and then generalizing the mechanism of operation of organisms into "social" analysis. In sharp contrast, the person involved in the transmission loses the body, the conscious subject who withdraws from the senses of the body and the figurative scene. The reason for this should be explored from the process of mass media.

The emergence of the mass media is a major event of landmark significance in the history of human communication and a great revolution in human civilization. Examining the development of the mass media throughout history, it can be seen that it is directly related to the four industrial revolutions. Newspapers were born in the first industrial revolution, the mechanical revolution, and the advent of the printing press made the printed text the first mass medium in history, and the dissemination of news was also separated as a specialized social system. Since then, the well-known second and third industrial revolutions have followed, and new media forms have emerged in the mass media. The communication revolution in the electrical age, the emergence of electronic sound and video media; the revolution of information control technology in the information age, making electronic computers a popular mass media. Current digital technologies are leading humanity into the age of intelligence. From the perspective of communication and body, this revolution may be regarded as a "fusion revolution". The so-called integration is based on the emergence of the mass media of the first industrial revolution. In short, the birth of the mass media is a separation, involving two levels of separation. The first is the separation of body organs by media technology, which is a process of continuous advancement, words separate vision from the body, mechanical reproduction exacerbates this separation, and the human civilization transmission mode dominated by oral communication is broken. Broadcasting and imaging technology is constantly cutting out auditory and visual perceptions from the body. The second is the separation of a series of social relationship networks triggered by the separation of body organ perception, the separation of news dissemination from daily life, and the gradual separation of auditory networks, visual networks, and tactile networks, all of which mean large-scale reorganization of social relations and basic changes in social structure. It is in the process of cutting the body and separating the senses in the mass media that the whole body of the senses has overflowed the horizon of communication research. Participants in the mass media become conscious rational people without bodies—nodes in the process of abstract information transmission. In the mass media system, the perception of the flesh, based on the figurative body, has no place. This tradition is so strong that it has become a basic tendency of communication studies, even the critical schools that resist mainstream communication studies, such as cultural studies, whether it is the emphasis on audience initiative or the analysis of the socio-cultural mechanism of power operation, are still more limited to the abstract information level such as "discourse", "symbols" and "social structure", and the so-called local experience mostly ignores the elements of body perception, the position of communication action, the scene and so on in the physical space. For example, in the field of communication studies, the study of the body also mostly follows the critical school of media discourse constructivism to reveal the cultural meaning and power relations contained in the body. Laswell's 5w communication model, according to the distinction of communication behavior, establishes five major plate topics of communication research, and this knowledge system is still an important criterion for current communication studies: who: control analysis; what is said: content analysis; through what channel: media analysis; to whom: audience analysis; what effect: effect analysis. These topics, complemented by quantitative research methods, form an important feature of mainstream mass communication: the main understanding of communication is the discursive behavior of abstracting from the figurative scene, concentrating on the text, and presenting itself in the form of information. The emergence of this basic framework is due to the contingency of historical development, which stems from the autonomous creation of some scholars; on the other hand, it is also due to the characteristics of the form of mass communication media. With the help of technology, the mass media symbolizes and informatizes reality, and continuously externalizes human memory to achieve long-distance transmission, transcending time and space. Therefore, overcoming the shackles of the body fixed in a specific time and space, the de-domain, is the revolutionary nature embodied in mass communication. The other side of the problem is that in this process, because of the absence of the body, the richness of communication for human society is inevitably simplified or even deleted. From this point of view, it can be said that the spread of newspapers with the help of printing presses is a matter of last resort. Mutual media technology, to achieve the realization of the disembodiment must be the rejection of the body, can only be at the expense of the integrity and richness of the body and the situation, in order to achieve the goal of conquering time and space.

Thus, while mass media were cheered over long distances, there were also lamentations about the decline of sensory transmission in the presence of the face-to-face body. Reflections on the delocalization of mass communication did not begin in the digital age. Benjamin, known for dissecting the era of mechanical reproduction, typically of storytellers, depicts the process by which mass communication expels sensory transmission, that is, the disappearance of "experience". "It seems that something that was originally indispensable to us, all that we are most safe to have, is deprived of us: this is the ability to exchange experiences. One reason for this phenomenon is obvious: experience has depreciated. Experience seems to continue to fall, and there is no end to it. Just a glance at the newspaper shows that experience has fallen to a new low. Overnight, not only our picture of the external world, but also the spiritual world has undergone the original incredible changes. ”。 The way of storytelling shows the rich meaning of people and people, people and time, and space contained in the sensory communication of the body present, which is a precious life experience of human beings. Benjamin's social critique of the mass media is also based on this reference: "A new way of communication has emerged." No matter how far away its origins are, this form has never really influenced the form of epic poetry in the past. For now, however, it exerts that influence. As a result, it meets the storyteller as a stranger, and its power is no less than that of a novel. But it is more threatening, and even brings crisis to the novel. This new way of communicating is messaging. "But as with human society itself, the evolution of the medium does not follow a simple linear trajectory. The continuous emergence of new technologies has suddenly brought body elements back into communication, thanks to the rise of digital media in the current intelligent era of converged forms.

Digital Media: Integrating fragmented bodies

For benjamins, observers of the mechanical reproduction era, the mass media, based on the cutting and separation of human senses by technology, transformed the sensory communication that was originally present in the body into a machine-led cultural industry, thereby pulling communication out of people's daily life experience and cutting off the personal local experience and social relationship network. But the social communication model dominated by the mass media is not airtight, and some media forms can still present some of the characteristics of face-to-face sensory communication, such as Benjamin's hands-on broadcasting and McLuhan's promotion of telephone. As a representative of the media environmental school, McLuhan delicately captured the fundamental relationship between the medium and human beings, that is, acting on the human body senses. "The medium is an extension of the human body" epitomizes the originality of McLuhan's view of the medium. McLuhan examines the impact of the medium on human beings from the perspective of the senses, and compared with the mainstream mass communication science concerned with how "content" acts on human consciousness, it seems so innovative, out of place, and therefore unique, and in the era of new technologies, it is even more amazingly explanatory. McLuhan's comprehensive and thorough introduction of body elements into the study of communication, "the effect of technology does not occur at the level of opinions and ideas, but in an unswerving and irresistible change in the proportions of sensations and perception patterns in people." McLuhan revealed that the influence of communication is not limited to the role of content information carried by the media on individual consciousness, but also the deeper embodiment of the media itself acting on the human senses. McLuhan's genius also lies in the fact that he draws on Innes's historical research on communication biases to advance the relationship between media technology and the human senses into a broad social context to illustrate the macroscopic and deep social impact of the media on the reorganization of human body perception. For example, when he compares the revolutionary histories of Britain and France, quoting Tocqueville as analyzing, the publications that reached saturation in France in the 18th century enabled France to achieve national identity. The French became the same people from south to north. The principles of identity, continuity, and linearity of printing overwhelmed the complexity of feudal, oral cultures. Britain, on the other hand, rejected this principle of print culture and adhered to oral or dynamic customary legal traditions. As a result, there is a discontinuity and unpredictability of British culture.

What McLuhan failed to predict was that media technology was both cutting and integrating, creating multiple possibilities for people's senses. If the media technology characteristics of the first three industrial revolutions are biased towards cutting, the essence of media technology in today's digital age lies in integration. From the experience of daily life, we can deeply feel that from the development of newspapers to television, the variety of media products is increasing, the interface for individuals to contact the media is increasing, and the public needs to contact newspapers, radios, televisions, telephones, computers and other media. The emergence of digital mobile terminals has gradually gathered these media that connect different human senses and gathered them on such a fusion medium as mobile phones. Bodies, cut into fragments by technology, are merging together in new ways. Of course, this is not a natural body in the original sense, but an intelligent body created by new technologies.

"In the age of virtual reality, people's increasingly tangible desire is to be able to come and go in and out of the world at any time, to be able to sneak into any object, to break the strong bond between the object and the identity of the individual, and to be able to leave the prison of the body at least temporarily." This passage vividly describes the new type of bodily perception shaped by digital communication. This immersive media has significant characteristics compared to the old audition technology. The medium of simulation technology such as film, although "can make an invisible camera always lead the viewer's perspective, one can only see what happens to be provided to him as a scene." The lack of a self-centered perspective is the lack of the possibility of self-composing a three-dimensional scene, which means that the camera cannot be directly coupled with the eyes, microphone and ears. "In cyberspace, what is important for virtual body sensation is not only immersive visuality, but also interaction," the interaction of the body in the virtual space, the independence of virtual actors or 'real' robots, etc., will prompt us to re-understand what human nature is and what the human body is." At present, the body is less and less understood as something material, but more and more as a fragment of the world and machines, which can be changed, can be redesigned. ”

The new type of body created by digital media communication in the intelligent era has achieved an unprecedented breakthrough. First, at the level of human senses, the senses divided by the mass media are integrated, and an intelligent body of human-machine integration is constructed. In recent years, the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology has made the communication between humans and robots a focal point. In fact, this kind of thinking should be wary of falling into the trap of dualistic opposition. Some scholars have proposed that the integration of human-machine intelligence is the development direction of artificial intelligence in the future, and the so-called artificial intelligence is the mutual embedding and role between people, machines and things, which cannot be simply understood as the replacement of people by machines and the formation of antagonisms with people. Figurative manifestation is that the human body is more and more bound by mechanical devices, and the robot is more and more imitating human signs and perception, resulting in the emergence of a new type of subject that intertwines the logic of the organism and the logic of the machine. Second, at the level of existence, the new body can travel in the composite space and multiple times, creating a state of existence that human beings have never had before. The multiplicity of the body allows people to travel between physical and virtual spaces, and with the mobile transmission supported by the position medium, the two spaces that have been isolated for a long time are intertwined. Such as "punching cards", "sharing bicycles", "live streaming with goods", "online education", etc., are all common social phenomena in the integration of virtual and real spaces in daily life today. As a result, mass communication research, which was originally focused on symbolizing the virtual world, suddenly and unconsciously opened up to a large number of physical space elements such as location, scene, place, etc., which greatly expanded the empirical field of communication research. Third, at the level of social relations, the intelligent body that integrates fragmented senses becomes a fusion medium connecting different social relationship networks, connecting multiple social networks, and implementing social and cultural reorganization. This convergence can be observed from many perspectives. For example, from the perspective of the senses, the visual, auditory, and tactile networks that are cut by different forms of mass media have the possibility of reagressing. Taking the social relationship network of human memory as an example, in the era of oral civilization, memory is a physical examination related to the body's multi-sensory network, which is also an important reason for Socrates's opposition to writing, he believes that writing externalizes memory and will greatly damage human creative ability, because "words are only silent shadows of words, unable to record their speech, breath and soul, and words will be withdrawn from the context in which they are spoken", that is, words cut off people's multisensory connection with local networks. Appealing to many sensory digital media, it returns in a new way, reconstructing the multiple relationship networks of memory.

In summary, the digital communication of the intelligent era is concentrated in the creation of a new subject and its mode of existence for the construction of the body. The characteristics of digitalization, virtuality and interactive initiative of the new media have changed the sense of time and space of human existence, and the cyberspace and multiple times continue to emerge. The interactive intervention realized by digital media causes the virtual body to show a strong ability to act in reality in multiple appearances, changes the form and practice mode of human subjects, and the research of communication studies also extends to the level of subjectivity and social foundation composition, which is a breakthrough in the research preset and is of great significance to the paradigm innovation of communication science.

epilogue

The physical reconstruction of the new type of communication in the digital age has triggered reflection and innovation in communication research at both the theoretical and practical levels. The current work may involve: on the one hand, the examination of the core theories of communication from presuppositions to viewpoints; on the other hand, in response to the current new digital communication practices, the paradigm innovation of communication research. In short, it is necessary to re-establish the relationship between communication and people in the category of intelligent body-subject.

Taking the theory of publicness as an example, Habermas's public domain theory, which is an important theoretical resource in communication studies, in Sannett's view, the basis point is the publicity of discursive rational communication, which obscures another important dimension of publicness, "visual publicness". The difference between the two is first manifested in the difference in the medium. Habermas's theory of publicness focuses on the textual discourse of the mass media, while the publicity of vision is concerned with the full-sensory encounter of the body present. The reason why Sannat proposed the visual publicity in the sceneist path is to emphasize that in contemporary metropolitan life, the interaction of strangers in urban space by chance encounters and gazes at each other has a very important public value, which highlights disordered, differentiated, and emotional elements, which is in sharp contrast with Habermas's communicative rationality. The practice of digital communication has created the possibility of the convergence of the two kinds of publicity. McQuard believes that the intelligent media in the mobile network era can be called "geographical media", which has four significant characteristics: universal connectivity, location sensitivity, real-time feedback, and media convergence. Geographical media has created the possibility of merging the long-distance discourse communication of virtual space with the interaction of physical space body presence, and the publicity of discourse and visual publicity that were previously in a separate state have emerged to blend, which this article calls "embodied publicity". The medium of publicity is the body, an intelligent body that is bound by technology, saturated with data, and connected to multiple networks of virtual and real. The publicity mediated by such an intelligent body, from a morphological point of view, integrates the discourse of the virtual space with the presence of the physical space, and the embodied practice becomes the core of the publicity. This kind of formal fusion is not only a simple superposition of two kinds of publicity, but also a new connotation given to publicness through the reorganization of time and space. The public nature of Habermas's rational speech highlights the role of discourse exchange and production of public opinion in public life - expressing public opinion, supervising power, coordinating action, etc. Rationality and orderliness are its basic values, and interest negotiation is the basic goal. Sannett's visual publicity, on the other hand, focuses on witnessing the public presence of others, meeting strangers by chance, and emotionally experiencing disorder and heterogeneity as its basic goals. McQuard argues that the publicity of Habermas's rational discourse belongs to the modern category of publicity and has important value for modern democracy; while The playful public interaction described by Sonnett involves a reflective examination and renegotiation of "rules", which is the publicness of the cultural perceptual dimension, which is also indispensable and significant to modern civilization. "Public interaction between strangers, social interaction with strangers in urban life has historically played a vital role." McQuard believes that the city square connects the large screen of the network and is a new medium with both publicity, "which has the ability of traditional broadcast media to broadcast remotely to the public, and places remote live broadcasting in the traditional public space where citizens gather." In this way, the two different ideas of public space are combined and reconstructed into different dimensions of each concept. "The embodiment of publicity refreshes the connotation of publicness, such as temporal and spatial reorganization, delocalization and embedding have become a process of simultaneity, and the empirical field of disseminating publicity has been greatly expanded; the mutual penetration of rationality and sensibility, political publicness and cultural publicness are becoming more and more inseparable in communication practice; rights and powers are becoming more and more narrative, and publicness is more and more presented in the process of communication practice." The above brief analysis of the development of public theory in the digital age aims to show how the idea of communicating and reconstructing the intelligent body can open up a new dimension for the communication research of the body perspective with a reflection on the classic topic of communication.

The current reinvention of the body by digital communication is not only a change in the news communication industry, but also heralds a major turning point in the times. Debray's media science depicts the iterative situation of the media circle, and the continuous change of the discourse circle (text), the graphic circle (printing), and the video circle (audio and video) is not only the evolution of media technology, but also the evolution process of human civilization. He believes that the subject of each media circle has a center of gravity, and the center of gravity of the main body of the video circle is the "body". The advent of the current digital circle has further intensified the physicalization of communication. From this perspective, communication and body issues are related not only to the general trend of media change, but also to the historical moment when communication intervenes in the great changes that have not occurred in human beings for thousands of years through the reconstruction of the body. This is perhaps the most significant implication of communication and body issues for the innovation of the communication research paradigm.