A person’s gaze can realise interpersonal meaning; it can create engagement or a lack
of engagement. Gaze, like visual communication and action, makes available the
semiotic resource ‘attitude’. The horizontal and vertical angle of a person’s gaze
encodes their position in relation to what it is they are looking at. The horizontal
angle of a gaze can indicate involvement with, or detachment from, what is being
looked at. A direct frontal gaze allows the creation of maximum involvement that can
be read as a kind of demand. The vertical angle also signifies a person’s attitude to
the events they are looking at. If the person looks down on something, she or he looks
at it from a position of symbolic power. If they look up at something, that something
has some kind of symbolic power over them. At eye-level there is a relation of
symbolic equality. The person may move to realise these different attitudes to an
object, a teacher for instance may sit or kneel to achieve eye level contact with a
student. A person can also refuse to meet the gaze of another, refuse their visual offer
of engagement.
The length of time a person holds a gaze for is another semiotic resource available to
people. To take a long look at someone or something in one context may signify
power in some contexts and intimacy in another. To take a short look at someone or
something may signify lack of power in some contacts and dismissal in another. The
stability of a person’s gaze is another semiotic resource, for example, a gaze can be
steady and certain or fluctuating and hesitant.
In this thesis, the semiotic resources of visual communication, colour, sound-effect,
speech and voice, movement and gesture, and gaze outlined above inform the
transcription and analysis of the interaction of students with one another and the
computer as well as the multimodal resources of the computer applications.
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