Le décalage contextuel dans les communications médiées par écran : à la croisée de la dématérialisation du contexte et de la re-textualisation des échanges

Abstract

The remote digital communication media and the communication software that have emerged over the last thirty years have led to an unprecedented development of new writings and writing technologies as well as a retextualization of the exchanges concomitant to a dematerialization of the context. However, the dematerialization of the context of these environments is exponentially complexifying its understanding, multiplying the risks of misunderstanding and misalignment. People who communicate are not physically present to each other, their meeting takes place and materializes via a text. Textuality becomes a new way of encounter, of which the text is the place. The fact that we imagine communication as being instantaneous develops a textual understanding of the message, as we read it, that is only caracteristic to the reception. All these exchanges are based on an identical weakness: they deprive the interaction of the many possibilities of regulation that the physical presence allows and from which the screens deprive us, while the communication is based on a very low percentage of verbal. I thus define the notion of « contextual gap », which insinuates itself in this lack, as being at first an enunciative shift augmented by a constant and necessary recontextualization. After explaining how it works and developps, I illustrate its manifestations through the analysis of an extract of corpus, constituted by reactions to the text the freedom to bother published in Le Monde on January the 10th, 2018.

Keywords

• enunciation – discourse analysis – screen mediated communication – texts - contexts