Week 3 Meta communication, patterns and play

This week's main reading was Bateson's "A Theory of Play and Fantasy". Most of the lecture was focused on the signs of communication and patterns it creates.

Bateson states that in order to have "real" communication we need to see the pattern which is based on personal mood, posture, tone of voice, etc.  I think this image is perfectly describes the lack of redundancy and pattern . That is what happens when we talk over the text or emails, we do not put any emotions through that, because we do not get any emotions back . I guess that is the reason why now there is so many stickers and emoticons for the phones and online chatting. It gives some sort of a emotional feedback, and can shows what mood we are in. Or they could be used out of laziness that a person does not know what to say so they send you a smile face.

So, as has Bateson mentioned, real face to face communication involves redundancy, which he calls pattern. In my understanding these patterns are the emotional signs.

The signs and the redundancy are important in order to have healthy relationship and a better ecology. Bateson talks about his observation on chimps, that were playing, however, it could have easily be seemed as a fight. However, they have gave each other signs that indicated the playfulness of the action and no harm will be involved. Exactly the same is happening with people, good example could be when girls say "no" to boys but sometimes they mean "yes"... and that is just a matter of a observation and knowledge of a person ( girl in this situation) to know whether she says "no-no" or "no-but if you ask me again i will say yes-no". 

The signs are important not just in maintaining a communication between friends or family. It helps us to recognize when someone is lieing to us or pranking. One for the best examples for that would be a well known tv show "Lie to Me". Perfectly describes how the knowledge of different facial expression can reveal so much about a person. 

However, the technology that we are using right now are making it completely invisible, as we do not know what the other person really mean by saying something. However, without these technologies we wont be able to communicate in long distance with each other. Sometimes we have to sacrofise our "good" communication in order to have at least some sort of communication ( speaking of secondary communication only).