The New Verbum: Issues of Ethos and the World Wide Web
     by B. Keith Murphy

This work was orignally printed in:  
 Proceedings of the 67th Annual Georgia Communication Association Conference . Ed. Jodeen Ducharme and Guy Warner (1998). 13-29. 

 

In effect, the Web is a literal representation of the fact that our thoughts, values, beliefs, and actions exist in a context, in a web of culture, society, family, school, and so forth. Linking our documents to others, then, helps us demonstrate how our ideas originated, what they have in common with the ideas of others, and how they may lead to new connections.⁽¹⁾

Three years would pass and the Web lay relatively dormant until 1993 when computer science students at the University of Illinois created a program, called Mosaic, which made using the Internet at easy as pointing and clicking.⁽³⁾ Mosaic went on to become Netscape, and in less than five years, the World Wide Web stands on the verge of becoming the dominant form of media in American, and global, culture. To borrow an idea from Marshall McLuhan, the WWW is, potentially, a simultaneous happening, or the embodiment of a global village.

As of the second quarter of 1997, nearly 42 million Americans considered themselves regular users of the WWW.⁽⁴⁾ By the final quarter of 1997, that number had risen to 49 million.⁽⁵⁾ International use of the Web is growing equally as fast. For instance, Internet based commerce in the Asian Pacific (excluding Japan) is expected to rise from nearly 160 million in 1997 to over 16 Billion by 2001.⁽⁶⁾ Traffic on the net has grown so quickly that the Internet 2 project, which would create a separate net for university researchers, should see its first 25 GigaPOPS go on line before Spring of 1998.

The geometric increase in use of the WWW is astonishing. Even more astonishing is the speed with which the WWW has become an integral part of American culture. Mark Hall, a former director of Ziff-Davis' computer testing labs, recently wrote:

Each time I hear Tom Brokaw or Peter Jennings mutter URLs on the evening news I imagine that one more brick has been laid in the social foundation of the Web. Everytime I see a Web reference in the Wall Street Journal. USA today, and other mainstream media, I envision a bit more Internet mortar being spread through society.⁽⁷⁾

In the 90's, all that systematized knowledge and human technology is replicating and mutating worldwide at lightning speeds across the Internet. So it seems fair to ask: How is this intimate new communication medium shaping and changing us as human beings? What are the cumulative organic effects of extended electronic interaction?. . .

Does life online tend to make some among us, young or old, even marginally more vulnerable to suggestion or other forms of covert communication control? Does this intimate new medium, with its speeding data and bedazzling images, make us any more trusting or more receptive to rumors, unsubstantiated data, undocumented claims, sexual come-ons, or pie-in-the-sky spiritual promises?⁽⁸⁾

Every year my students arrive in class feeling more and more at home with electronic environments and are more prepared to elicit something with the tone of a human voice out of the silent circuitry of the machine. . . .

Just as the computer promises to reshape knowledge in ways that some times complement and sometimes supersede the work of the book and the lecture hall, so too does it promise to reshape the spectrum of narrative expression, not by replacing the novel or the movie, but by continuing their timeless bardic work within another framework. . . . ⁽⁹⁾

This meteoric rise in credibility is astonishing. It is also troubling:

The fact that we humans often use the credibility of a communicator to guide us in the acceptance or rejection of a message opens the door once again for mindless propaganda. . . .it is often easier to feign credibility than to actually achieve it.⁽¹⁰⁾

ETHOS

Credibility, or Ethos, is one of the oldest concepts framed through the study of rhetoric. In Antidosis (c. 354 B.C.) Isocrates held that the more one wishes to be persuasive in the eyes of one's fellow citizens the more important it is that the orator have a favorable reputation among those citizens. This concept, ethos, is, according Plato, the "character produced by habitual responses."⁽¹¹⁾ Or as Aristotle would have it, ethos are those arguments whose success depends upon the believability of the speaker.⁽¹²⁾ In Rhetoric, Aristotle argues that credibility

is wrought when the speech is so spoken as to make the speaker credible; for we trust good men more and sooner, as a rule, about everything; while, about things which we do not admit precision, but only guess work, we trust them absolutely.

More recent studies of credibility have continued to focus on such concepts as "trustworthiness," "expertness," and "safety," yet most studies continue to point out that credibility exists only within the individual who receives the message. As Newhagen and Nass explain:

If credibility is defined from a receiver-oriented perspective, credibility is the degree to which an individual judges his or her perceptions to be a valid reflection of reality. Yet another dimension is added to the concept when information is mediated by machine technology -- such as a television or a printing press -- as is the case with modern mass media's reporting of the news. Mass media news credibility, then, is the perception of news messages as a plausible reflection of the events they depict.⁽¹⁴⁾

This view that credibility is a result of the audience's perception of the moral stance of the speaker is as salient today as it was in the days of Quintilian's "good man speaking well." Therefore, to be credible, a message source must appear to be acting from a set of morals, or world view, that is compatible, if not identical, to that of the audience. With a new speaker or new medium of communication, that initial decision about ethical compatability is based on perceived reputation as it is known to the audience.⁽¹⁵⁾ Yet, this perception is problematic as a focus of study simply because the audience interprets messages based on their own individual set of experiences and world views. This is magnified when studying the mass media, as Umberto Eco explains,

aberrant decoding is. . . the rule in the mass media.. . . .Codes and subcodes are applied to the message in the light of a general framework of cultural references, which constitutes the receiver's patrimony of knowledge: his ideological, ethical, religious standpoints, his psychological attitudes, his tastes, his value systems, etc..⁽¹⁶⁾

For although culture is a creation of speech, it is recreated anew by every medium of communication -- from painting to hieroglyphs to the alphabet to television. Each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought. . . . the forms of our media, including the symbols through which they permit conversation, do not make such statements. They are rather like metaphors, working by unobtrusive but powerful implication to enforce their special definitions of reality .⁽¹⁷⁾

Through this definition of reality, the medium itself becomes a barometer of credibility for the audience. To understand this shift in focus to a medium-driven ethos, one must examine how ethical claims are created through the machinations of the WWW itself..

Spinning a Credible Web

A browser's discrimination of the credibility of the World Wide Web is created in three ways: metonymically; through the obliteration of the speaker; and, by framing reality.

METONYMY

A metonym (from the Greek, meaning "name change") is a trope in which " the name of an attribute or thing is substituted for the thing itself."⁽¹⁸⁾ Common examples of this in language include using the term "research" to refer to all academic creative and scholarly endeavors. Through metonymy, the representative symbol invokes all of the attendant meaning of the omitted whole. A speaker need not remind an audience of the connotative meaning of a metonymic symbol; in fact, if a metonym must be explained to the audience, its potency as a symbol is gone. Credibility is assigned through metonymy in the same manner that connotative meaning is implied. For instance, a Priest, metonymically, not only represents the Catholic Church, but is granted the Church's ethos through the reciprocal nature of the metonym.

This works for the Web simply in that each page gains metonymic credibility from the credibility assigned to the World Wide Web as a whole. As a metonym, a single Web page represents the entirety of the Web. As a function of the same metonym, then, that individual page is granted the credibility that the reader has for the Web as a medium of communication. This is multiplied by the simple fact that the average individual has little understanding of how a Web page is created, placed, or listed by a search engine. The average Web goes "on-line" as a result of the constant reminders from the standard instruments of mass communication (Television, Newspapers, Radio, Film, and Magazines) that the individual can not only find out more about their interests on-line, they can join a community of like-minded folk "on-line," as well. This approach reinforces the user's belief that the messages their browser will encounter come from media outlets that they already view as credible. Thus, metonymically, if the pages I from Smithsonian are credible, then all WWW pages are equally credible. This simplified metonymic transfer is made possible because the speaker is not visible to the reader.

THE INVISIBLE RHETOR

The second means that the World Wide Web uses to create credibility is through the obliteration of the speaker. Simply put, the individual Web page serves to hide the creator of the message. The page stands alone from the credibility (or lack thereof) of its creator. This process is accomplished through two distinct processes: mystification and obsfucation.

Mystification, simply spoken, means that the mechanisms by which the Web work are hidden from the receiver. In most forms of human communication, both sender and receiver are aware of the means by which the communicator and the medium work together to create the message. Some individuals are seen as better than others, but all involved know how the message is created.

This knowledge is absent for most who use the Web. The average Web user lacks clear (if any) understanding of HTML, Java, VRML, Shockwave, push, pull, ActiveX, CSS, CGI binary, and GIF 89, or any of the mechanisms that allow a particular Web page to appear (or not) on their screen. In addition, as the technology mushrooms, the learning curve gets steeper and steeper.⁽¹⁹⁾

Thus, for the average Web user, they have as much understanding of the means of creating the message as did those who visited the Oracle at Delphi.

Mystification adds a positive ethos to communing with the Web. A user is faced with an almost magical response to every search query. All one need do is know how to spell a word⁽²⁰⁾ and instantly the cumulative knowledge of thousands of years of human development is at their fingertips. When a magician pulls a similar rabbit from their "empty" hat both sender and receiver wink and nod knowingly as both are willing partners in the creation of the illusion.⁽²¹⁾ In the case of the Web, only the magician is even aware there is a trick.

On the other hand, the Web obsfucates the author, thus erasing negative credibility. In days past, your friendly neighborhood anarchist, lunatic, or troublemaker were easy to pick out. The very stereotype of the anarchist is the grubby man with the wild look in his eyes handing out pamphlets on the street corner. Today, they can hide behind the curtain, their personas obliterated by the very nature of the Web itself. Individuals and causes who had been reduced to venting their views on late night public access television have suddenly discovered that they can reach millions with a message that appears as credible as any competing world view.

The Internet represents information through symbols or icons. So does speech, writing, and printed text, but the symbols on the Net are even further removed from the events and context to which they point. The power of speech gave us the ability to lie, and then writing hid the lair from view. That's why Plato fulminated at writing -- you couldn't know what was true if you didn't have the person right here in front of you, the dialog providing a necessary check. the printing press made it worse by distancing reader and writer even more. Now we put digital images and text on the net. Pixels can be manipulated. Without correlation with other data, no digital photo or document can be taken at face value.⁽²²⁾

This mystification is multiplied through the use of hyperlinks.

Additionally, HTTP [Hypertext Transfer Protocol] allows hypertextual links to be created between files, meaning that Web authors can compose projects that weave resources and ideas into complicated "webs" of information. They can also more seamlessly incorporate multimedia elements into their Web pages.⁽²³⁾

The organization of data through hyperlinks serves to order reality in set patterns, thus constructing a world-view for the viewer. This syntagmatic construction creates meaning in the same manner that the order of words in a sentence creates the meaning of the sentence. In addition, the hyperlinks serve to frame an idea as "truth" through a series of self-references. In effect, if a viewer sees the same idea often enough, then s/he will accept it as truth. As Verbum. This syntagmatic effect is multiplied by a new phenomenon known as "web-rings" where individuals or groups with similar world views, include hyperlinks to all the other pages in the "ring." Thus creating a circular self-referential world view that, like Oroborus, is striving to swallow its own tail. This self referential function is a very powerful means of meaning construction.

In the more general sense, self-reference is involved in a description which refers to something that affects, controls or has the power to modify the form or the validity of that description. The circularity which the statement implies involves non-linguistic contexts as well. E.g., a self-fulfilling prophesy, double bind, the description of a system by an observer who is part of the system observed, the cognitive organization of biological organisms. In this general sense, self-reference establishes a circularity that may involve not only referential but also causal, interpersonal or instrumental relations and thereby constitute a unity of its own.⁽²⁴⁾

The way sites are connected on the WWW tends to obliterate our historical sense. Everything on the Web seems to be happening NOW. Without a point of reference, all information seems equal. Lining up texts side-by-side and evaluating discrepancies feels like hard work.⁽²⁵⁾

The Ring of Truth is ring of pages around the web that seek to open people's eyes to the world they are faced with instead of cowering in fear behind religious dogma and

superstition. From any page in the ring you can click on a "Next" button to go to the next site, eventually bringing you back to where you started. . . .

Truth is, of course, something that no one person can know, for only the most

arrogant of men would refuse to acknowledge that he is incapable of knowing everything

about the universe. Nor can one claim to know that something is true with absolute certainty, even on a purely physical level. The greatest minds of all kind were the first to recognize their own fallibility. It is the role humanity, then, to seek truth through observation, and to substantiate theoretical claims not with threats of eternal damnation but with logic and reason.

Those who declare that they know the truth--the only truth--and insult you with demands

of faith and sacrifice without any such substantiation are undeserving of any real respect.

Those who peddle faith by appealing to humanities near-universal fear of death--those who demand devotion to an entity whose existence is not even suggested (let alone proved) by any evidence--those who require that you give up your own convictions in preference to theirs are among the scum of the Earth and lack any true dignity.⁽²⁷⁾

FRAMING REALITY

Erving Goffman posits that it is the frame, the basic element of organization, that an individual uses to define each new situation. Frame Analysis, for Goffman, consists of discovering the means through which experience is organized for an individual. As Littlejohn explains:

What the frame (or framework) does is allow the person to identify and understand otherwise meaningless events; it gives meaning to the ongoing activities of life. A natural framework is an unguided event of nature, with which the individual must cope. A social framework, on the other hand, is seen as controllable, guided by some intelligence.⁽²⁸⁾

As a social framework, the elements that make up the page that is framed both literally and metaphorically, gain their meaning from the way they are ordered and identified in the frame. Goffman also holds that these frameworks are important for a culture:

Taken all together, the primary frameworks of a particular social group constitute a central element of its culture, especially insofar as understandings emerge concerning principal classes of schemata, the relations of these classes to one another, and the sum total of forces and agents that these interpretive designs acknowledge to be loose in the world.⁽²⁹⁾

As the Web moves closer to becoming the primary framework of our culture, the way that this particular framework frames reality will alter our notions of ethos and Verbum.

Placing the Web document in the frame of the monitor is a symbolic act. As a metaphor, the "frame" is a symbol that is laden with connotative meaning. A frame syntagmatically unites all of the symbols it contains. A parallel concept is the "frame story" of literary criticism. The frame story is a story that serves as the narrative framework for a collection of shorter stories providing the setting for the stories and explaining why they are being told.⁽³⁰⁾ The frame of the computer screen itself adds meaning and credibility to the message embodied in the Web page.

One of the ways that the frame creates meaning is through iconic meaning. The strength of an iconic sign is based on how widely the meaning is shared across the audience.⁽³¹⁾ The more people that hold the intended iconic meaning of a sign, the more persuasive that sign will be. However, if the relationship that the iconic sign was intended to create must be explained, then the effectiveness of the sign is lost, and new, non-iconic meanings are created by the explanation. Equally important, the more "natural" the iconic relationship appears, the more powerful and invasive the meaning that is created. This is especially true when ethical meanings are the intent of an iconic sign. If the receiver must be told why a speaker or medium is credible, then much of the iconic impact is lost.

In the case of the Web, iconic meaning is created through its display, the monitor, which frames the reality presented by the page. As technology is beginning to outpace our imagination, one must wonder why computers still use a display system that looks so much like it's archaic cousin, television. Even state of the art laptop and palmtop computers use television's 3/4 ratio for the shape of their monitors. Bob Bejan, executive producer of the Microsoft Network explains that these parallels are intentional:

In the great tradition of emerging mass mediums in this century, we're stealing all we can from applicable things as we continue to find our own voice.⁽³²⁾

The makers of Internet hardware have a very practical agenda in making certain that the Web iconically resemble television. One of the biggest hurdles the personal computing industry had to overcome was the fear the average public has of new technology. Throughout the development of the home computer, that iconic resemblance has been maintained and refined. From the early Radio Shack Color Computers that actually used an RF output allowing your TV to serve as a monitor, to the state-of-the-art home Web theatres, the idea is to enthrall but not frighten. While many of us are still afraid to program our VCR, we don't fear our TV. Combining TV and Web browsing metonymically, metaphorically, and actually allows both the ethos and the comfort of television to be transferred to the Web.

Hardware similarities are only the beginning. The World Wide Web is the home of "Web Shows" which use Web technology to deliver entertainment that has the narrative form of a television show. the bulk of standard Web sites are tributes to television shows. Thousands of sites are devoted to such television staples as "The X-Files" <http://www.cobaltgroup.com/~roland/x-files/>, "Space: Above and Beyond" <http://www.planetx.com/space:aab/>, and the Star Trek franchises <http://members.tripod.com/~WesButtonz/startrek.htm>.⁽³⁵⁾ Even "South Park," an animated show with only a handful of episodes, has dozens of sites devoted to analyses of Kenny's weekly demise<http://www.comedycentral.com/southpark/>.

However, don't assume that such a push toward a melding of mediums is only one way. As media critic Nathaniel Wice explains:

...every network is trying to incorporate the Internet's edge into its programming one way or another, even to the point where Academy Awards host Billy Crystal was delivering jokes culled from the show's official Web sight (www.oscar.com). . . . MTV has pushed the envelope farthest with its split-screen "Yack Live" --since the late months of 1994, the network has experimented with adding the scrolling text of its hormonally amped America Online chat channels to the bottom of its music video broadcast.⁽³⁶⁾

Why would content providers and hardware manufacturers attempt to make their product less unique? The answer is simple. By creating and maintaining the iconic relationship between television and the WWW, the Internet gains the ethos that had been reserved for television. While the elitist may sneer at television's ethos, no other medium of communication has had such a profound impact in such a short period of time as has television.

What has made television's significance even more profound is the fact that it took very little time for it to become pervasive in the culture. Unlike many media, TV spent relatively little time in the elite culture. the rich and middle classes were not the only ones to rush to purchase television sets. Many lower-class households went into debt to own this luxury item. However, to most Americans, television was not a luxury but rather a psychological necessity; it provided comfort to a lonely mass culture whose members sought both entertainment and solitude in their homes. Sociologists have been puzzled as to how something previously nonexistent could become a psychological necessity the moment it arrived in the popular culture.⁽³⁷⁾

We know enough about language to understand that variations in the structures of languages will result in variations in what may be called "world view." How people think about time and space, and about things and processes, will be greatly influenced by the grammatical features of their language.⁽³⁸⁾ Those grammatical features are created by the medium of communication itself. In time, those features become codified for us, and invisible to us. As Postman explains:

Television has achieved the status of "meta-medium" -- an instrument that directs not only our knowledge of the world, but out knowledge of ways of knowing as well.

At the same time, television has achieved the status of "myth" as Roland Barthes uses the word. He means by myth a way of understanding the world that is not problematic, that we are not fully conscious of, that seems, in a word, natural. A myth is a way of thinking so deeply embedded in our consciousness that it is invisible. This is now the way of television. We are no longer fascinated or perplexed by its machinery. . . . We do not doubt the reality we see on television, are largely unaware of the special angle of vision it affords. Even the question of how television affects us has receded into the background. . . . television has gradually become our culture. . . . we rarely talk about television, only about what is on television.⁽³⁹⁾

A literary work, even when it appears to be new, does not present itself as something absolutely new in an informational vacuum, but predisposes its audience to a very specific kind of reception by announcements, overt and covert signals, familiar characteristics, or implicit allusions. It awakens memories of that which was already read, brings the reader to a specific emotional attitude, and with its beginning arouses expectations for the "middle and end," which can then be maintained intact or altered, reoriented, or even fulfilled according to the specific rules of the genre or the type of text. The psychic process in the reception of a text is, in the primary horizon of aesthetic experience, by no means only an arbitrary series of merely subjective impressions, but rather the carrying out of specific instructions in a process of directed perception, which can be comprehended according to its constitutive motivations and triggering signals, and which can also be described as textual linguistics.⁽⁴⁰⁾

The frame surrounding a web page borrows from a rich symbolic history. The frame has been used to set certain texts above others for as long as humans have used groups of symbols to create meaning. Cave paintings used outlines of human hands to frame symbols and place the symbols in a particular syntagmatic sequence⁽⁴¹⁾ Roman stone friezes utilized acanthus leaves as ornamental borders which frame the figures in the relief, creating the meaning of a particular panel.⁽⁴²⁾ The use of the frame in symbolic tableaux has become so common place that the meaning the frame imparts has become naturalized.

A perfect example of this is the comic book. In the comic book, the basic unit of signification is the frame (or panel). The frame contains a group of signs that are collected together and ordered in a manner that signifies the meaning of the author. As comic book writer and artist John Byrne explains, the frame is the basic unit of the comic book grammar:

The grammar of the comic book is to say as much as you can in this picture where nobody's moving and no progression is made beyond the walls of this picture until you get to the next picture. So you have to get everything in there: you have to get motion, you have to get the sense that we're walking down this hallway toward this panel over here, without it physically appearing that we're going to walk into this panel border to get to this panel over here.⁽⁴³⁾

The frame doesn't merely frame reality; as comic critic R.C. Harvey explains, the form of the frame itself creates symbolic meaning:

Large splash panels have a climactic impact in the context of a story (as opposed to the orienting function at the beginning of a book). Narrow panels in a series may suggest the rapid passage of time; long vertical panels, height (or depth). . . .most of the story must construct a pattern with panels of nearly uniform size; the uniformity creates the time for a given story - its normal rhythm. The special effects created by an odd sized panel in this context result largely from breaking the established rhythm of a story.⁽⁴⁴⁾

Layout -- the size and relative positioning of the panels -- can also enhance a story in comics' four-color format. Fact is, the capacity to vary panel size and position gives the comic book format its most potent means of creating dramatic effects.⁽⁴⁵⁾

If I show two panels, with one fellow in one panel raising a wooden mallet, and in the next panel walking away with a man lying on the ground, that reader has to supply what happens in between. . . .[the reader] gets it from his [sic] own life experience, he knows . . . that there had to be something that went on in between. . . . So the reader is supplying something. He's also supplying sound and motion which comics do not have.⁽⁴⁶⁾

The role of the frame that surrounds each and every Web page is also a generator of meaning. Yet its role is so naturalized that its meaning is ubiquitous. The viewer reflexively knows that the contents of the frame are to be viewed in light of the medium. As such, each web page is framed, metaphorically, thus metonymically borrowing meaning from all the other bits and pieces of reality we frame.

The metaphor of the frame is particularly powerful in that we use the frame to preserve choice bits of our world view. We speak of the framers of key documents. We use the frame of the video camera to confirm our view of reality. We build frames to support and unite collections of symbols that are sacred to us. A television set or a computer monitor places a frame around their content and, just like a piece of art in a museum, the frame idenitifies the content as important and valuable. The frame identifies the content as a fixed moment of a culture, a "snapshot" important enough to preserve.

The frame also serves to further abstract the content; removing the viewer one step further from the message. The frame aids in mystification, further abstracting the viewer from any knowledge of the message's creation. Through mystification, the frame implies that its contents are Verbum.

WWW.Conclusions.com
"Resistance is futile. Prepare to be assimilated." --The Borg

As we move toward a new millennium, most of us who are educators are being asked to implement Web technology in the classroom. Quite often, the push toward the newer, sexier technology is a knee-jerk reaction to available funding. My Father still regales me with stories of the televisions that were put in his Appalachian classroom to enhance education. However, in the rush to move to the new technology, no one bothered to see if the regional Public Broadcasting Station could be received at the school. The televisions that were to revolutionize education were used once, to allow my seventh grade class to watch the 1975 National League Playoffs.

As the Web and other computer mediated technologies become a part of our world view and our body of discourse, It is important to avoid engaging in what Marshall McLuhan called "rear-view mirror" thinking. One must be aware that each new medium is more than just an extension of the past. Although we may wish to believe that The Web is just a better, faster, more user driven form of television; it is a different medium. As such, it is a mistake to ignore who the Internet and the World Wide Web redefine our public discourse. The "Gee-Whiz" aspect must be balanced with an understanding of the agenda of this new medium. This agenda can be understood only in the light of critical inquiry to the communicative functions of the medium as well as it's impact on the greater body of public discourse.

As such it is important that the medium itself be de-mystified. Noam Chomsky's warning about rushing to worship educational television is equally as valuable as a warning against rushing the World Wide Web into the classroom:

There are strong pressures to make use of new educational technology and to design curriculum and teaching methods in light of the latest scientific advances. In itself, this is not objectionable. It is important, nevertheless, to remain alert to a very real danger: that new knowledge and technique will define the nature of what is taught and how it is taught, rather than contribute to the realization of educational goals that are set on other grounds and in other terms.⁽⁴⁷⁾

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25. Thieme (1996), 36.

26. To be fair, the Ring of Truth is one of over 400 web rings. They range from standard fan pages like the "X-Files" ring (http://tempest.ucsd.edu/~jlinvill/xfiles/xring.html),