Narrative as communication media involves various disciplines in cooperation, such as linguistics, cognitive science, communication studies, semiotics, psychology, cultural and media studies, and philosophy. Especially, communication between mind ...
Narrative as communication media involves various disciplines in cooperation, such as linguistics, cognitive science, communication studies, semiotics, psychology, cultural and media studies, and philosophy. Especially, communication between minds is a very complex matter in that mind is not stable and exists in the flow of time for development. Then, how can this continuous and rather unstable character of mind send and receive messages I argue that narrative is an appropriate form of communication media in that the nature of narrative is associated with the mind in terms of imagination and reasoning or inference. The mind and narrative imitate and resemble each other. Narrative cognition is quite possible in the sense that mind entails a process from sensation, emotion to cognition as demonstrating all cognitive characteristics.
To explain this point, I have examined categories of narrative: form, medium, and genre from Peirce’s semiotic perspective. His semiotic system is very complex and integrated in an inseparable way. This is a strong point in showing how narrative cognition is related to the new media text. In particular, the inseparable and commensurable relationship between forms and feelings, imagination and reason, emotion and cognition, mediated by the concept of experience, is part of a useful theory to assist new media narrative interpretation. Indeed, I believe that narrative will be used as a cognition tool for the digital age generation. The phenomenon of new media is often described as immersion and interactivity where users are actively engaging in narrative experience. However, there should be a higher function of narrative experience in order not to constrict the users to direct experience as emotional reaction, but this amounts to experience of interpretation, as Peirce rightly mentioned in connection with the particular circumstances.
The three categorical types of new media have been illustrated to show how narrative reasoning is possible by virtue of applying Peirce’s three trichotomical systems. In new media, the narrative producer and consumer will produce a creative narrative construction as communication interpretant in Peirce’s terms, in that the narrative minds that are connected through the work of semiotic mediation and modeling in narrative share and exchange ideas, employing narrative as communication media.
This new media text of narrativity for construction of a Storyworld will lead to a contribution to global communication by narrative medium and, at the same time, to transmission of information in historical terms as form of narrative. As a result, narrative as modeling system connects information with cognition, resulting in communicative act where information is transformed as a basis of narrative construction in the digital age. From this aspect, I understand that the act of transmission of information in time and the communication of information in space require the narrative media which is the semiotic mediation of mental representation, connecting cognition and communication for evolutionary semiosis.
This is the way in which I see that this conceptual work is valuable for new media narrative communication in which the interpreter constructs narrativity in his/her own way, but at the same time they function as a semiotic agent within narrative representation of a modeling system. From this aspect, for the interpreter, individual new media texts are to be conceptualized so as to see what is presented at the perceptual level and what is represented at the cognitive psychological level. Further, the interpreter needs to discern what the assertion is in the audiovisual narration, in that the assertion takes the form of information. This is my contention that narrative as a cognitive tool for communication in the digital era offers an opportunity for making information a useful resource for the evolution of anthroposemiosis.