Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Breaking Dawn I and vampire haptic "collisions!"

In case you haven't seen it yet, the first few minutes of BDI have a virtual plethora of gestures ending in touch tied to stressed words in phrases or sentences. I had a hard time following the fascinating, emotionally riveting dialogue, while taking notes! (Understandably, eh!)

Following up on the comments to the previous post, those are NOT examples of what HICP refers to as "haptic anchoring" or how the term "haptic" is used in various fields today. They do involve all the essential elements (movement, stressed syllables, touch, discourse focus, etc.) except one critical, technical feature: fixed, designed points in the visual field where the haptic "collision" occurs.

In an informal sense, the haptic event does certainly help to emphasize or fix in memory the meaning of at point in the narrative, but as noted earlier, the experience is being encoded into memory with all sorts of other visual and emotional information that may or may not be helpful in trying to recall how it was pronounced later. (For an interesting, concise business-like summary of nonverbal communication/body language, see this piece by Alan Chapman.) So if you find yourself getting thoroughly carried away during BDI, it is technically not the haptic anchoring . . .

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