Discourse, technology and the body

Much of the early work on computer mediated communication focused on the potential of the medium to revolutionize the way we think about and use our bodies, with some authors predicting that computers would usher in a ‘post-human’ world in which, freed of the constraints of their physical bodies, users could to create new identities and new forms of social relationships. Twenty years later, however, people are increasingly using these technologies not to escape from their physical bodies, but rather to display them more prominently.This paper explores how new information technologies have affected the ways people use their bodies as communicative resources in social interaction, particularly in the context of recent developments in video conferencing technology and the commercial success of such websites as facebook.com. Drawing on and developing Goffman’s notions of ‘display’, and ‘the watch’, as well as other insights from microsociololgy, ethnomethodology and mediated discourse analysis, it argues that, rather than taking us away from our bodies, computer technologies in many ways help is to amplify them, providing a new range of strategies for body semiosis.The paper addresses computer mediated body semiosis as it occurs in three different domains: education, medicine and sexuality, drawing on data from studies on 1) the computer use of adolescents at home and at school, 2) the computer use of various communities of the disabled, and 3) computer mediated sexual interaction among gay men. Analysis of these technologically mediated representations of the body reveals not just the strategic ways people design displays—through pose, camera angle, lighting and the strategic mixing a various modes such as photography, graphics and text—to index different aspects of social identity, but also how these displays and the identities they index are dynamic, contingent, and negotiated in an on-going, moment by moment chain of mediated actions.