In October, I gave way to the cyclist, and they showed me their palm as a sign of gratitude. A split second before they cycled away. I’ve heard that drivers also do that – they lift their fingers off the steering wheel to thank the driver across. Maybe they let you know there’s a police car with a speedometer nearby. You just do it, and you feel connected without speaking a single word. I thought about it a lot, for some reason – about those little ways in which we connect with people in a busy city and how sometimes no words are needed to understand each other. And then we discussed mediational means in class.

Writing this post feels very LinkedIn-coded: here’s what giving way to a cyclist taught me about b2b sales kind of premise. But for this whole semester, we’ve let media studies grow roots in our real lives, reading Ingold instead of Tolkien, watching “Library of the World” instead of “Muppet Treasure Island” and citing Plato in our comments instead of just saying “me fr fr XD”. So I hope you forgive me for bringing media studies into the act of being a human and showing a fellow human your palm before cycling away.

Gestures as everyday media

Try noting how many gestures you use throughout the day. Do you shrug when asked how you’re doing? Do you wave at your friends when you see them from afar? Do you move your hands around aggressively when describing the most annoying event of the day to your family?

Flusser attempts to define gestures and comes down to this: “a gesture is a movement of the body or of a tool connected to the body for which there is no satisfactory causal explanation.” (2) There is no “scientific” or “logical” reason to raise an index finger when somebody’s bombarding you with questions while you’re clearly on the phone. The gesture becomes the symbol, it carries and mediates meaning: silence, in this case. (Flusser, 4)

Often, we don’t even notice a slight hand movement, a head tilt, a wave of a finger. Don’t be fooled – gestures are very intentional, it’s how we think through our bodies. Ever gestured something while talking on a phone only to realise your interlocutor cannot see what you’re doing? This is because gestures help us process complex information and spatial data: gestures are not simply performative.

There’s a joke about an Italian soldier who was captured during the war and, when released by his fellow soldiers, was asked: they tortured you, did you tell them anything? To which he replied “how could I have told them anything, my hands were tied?”. While it’s a silly joke, it underlines our understanding of gestures as cultural transistors of meaning that are integrated into speech. Gestures and speech synchronize to express similar meanings, yet do so in vastly different ways (McNeil, 11).

Gestures as self-sufficient mediators

We might be inclined to see gestures as “sides” to our “main meals” that is speech. Gestures can seem decorative, adding emotions to the story rather than telling it.

This is probably as wrong as assuming a tree doesn’t make a noise simply because we aren’t there to hear it or that mommy disappeared because you can’t see her. That is to say: grow up.

David McNeil describes at length the unity between speech and gestures (23-24). They are, he argues, two sides of the same cognitive process, manifesting differently through different media: both equally valuable and significant. A conversation held with gesturing will feel different in both emotional and meaningful sense from a conversation held with no gestures. Because, ultimately, not every meaning is expressible through speech: that is why we use them, after all. Spatial and temporal thinking are often better expressed though gestures, containing meanings separate from words.

Gestures as mediational means

In his “Mediated Discourse”, Ron Scollon suggests shifting attention from language as text to language as social action. In his view, meaning is produced through actions in a given context rather than simply being embedded in words. He therefore defines mediational means as cultural tools: material objects that carry out the mediated action (4). Scollon specifies that mediational means include embodied practices, be it posture or movements.

Social action is always mediated: there can be no action without tools that shape how said action is performed. No omelette without a stove and a pan, no late night calls without phones, no ratting out your country’s military plans without free hands movement. This, again, makes bodies function as sites of mediation, allowing social actors to perform in socially recognized practices, mediating whatever is required at the moment.

Scollon goes on to describe five main characteristics of mediational means as follows (121):

Dialectical – there is a dialectic between the external aspects of the mediational means as an object in the world and the internal structures of the person using the mediational means. Some gestures can feel more or less fitting this characteristic, mainly because, in my opinion, Scollon does a poor job of explaining what he means.

Historical – in both global and local ways: there can be a global history of blowing a kiss, and your favourite memory of receiving such a kiss for the first time, for example.

Partial – mediational means never fits one action exactly, only some of their characteristics being useful at a time. By being both more and less than called upon, they transform the action being performed.

Connective – mediational means link both many purposes and many participants. Today, you show me your palm when I give you way on the road. Tomorrow, somebody else does, so you do that to another person. I’m not jealous, no. It’s the connective nature of mediational means.

Representational – mediational means are not specific and concrete objects, but representative tokens of a class of objects.

“So what?” says the media studies student

In media studies, we recognize meaning as being produced through so many more things than simple semiotic representation. Gestures produce meaning through embodied actions, and understanding it is what we get from reframing them as mediational means. They translate convoluted cognitive processes into socially understandable actions. Media analysis doesn’t need to focus solely on technologies and texts, I believe we need to also pay attention to the embodied practices: they are the basics of enacting media, they are the basic of human life and cultural interaction.

If anything, this post is a nice reminder that mediation and meaning can be happening away from award-winning films, away from scrollitelling websites and complicated research papers. Sometimes it is literally right in your hand.

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Work cited:

Mcneill, David. 1992. Hand and Mind : What Gestures Reveal about Thought. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.

Scollon, Ronald. 2009. Mediated Discourse : The Nexus of Practice. London ; New York (N.Y.): Routledge.

Vilém Flusser. 2014. Gestures. U of Minnesota Press.