Pictorial Meaning and Mobile Communication
 
 

1. Thinking in Images
2. Convention and Resemblance
3. Knowledge and Visual Communication
4. Iconic Languages

Face-to-face communication is, generally speaking, richer in content than written text, for the latter is devoid of the dimensions of body language, facial expression, gesture, and intonation. Face-to-face communication is also richer in content than  verbal communication lacking visual support, such as a telephone conversation. The background assumption of the planned research is that computer graphics could alleviate these deficiencies. 

While the attention of mobile service providers becomes increasingly concentrated on the application of visual and sound symbols, the screen, and in particular the small screen, has been discovered as a promising domain of research by experts on visual languages. The issue, clearly, is not just one of technology. It raises the question of the verbal and/or pictorial nature of thought: if our mental mechanisms are - wholly, or in part - pictorial, perceptual, then pictures could conveniently serve as vehicles of thoughts, as instruments of communication. The issue of visual languages also raises the question of linguistic redundancy: iconic languages have to make do with a rather less complicated syntax than, say, Hungarian, German, or even English. And it raises the philosophical question of the completeness and unambiguity of pictorial meaning: in twentieth-century philosophy doubts were very much alive as to whether pictures, by themselves, are really suited to carry meanings - do they not, invariably, rely on the interpretative support of words? The planned research adopts the hypothesis that ambiguous pictures might be disambiguated by some appropriate animation; while static pictures are often in need of interpretation, the resultant dynamic pictures would be self-interpreting.
 

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