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3.5 AUTHOR—MESSAGE—RECIPIENT RELATION
In our rst modeling of users and makers of documents as fundamentally the same—both repre-
senting knowledge states based on their understandings of their environments—we realized that
we were being too static. Blending our model with constructs from behaviorism, we worked out a
model that could account for dierences in time, place, and circumstances. e model could now
also account for moving about in time—being able to watch a classic lm while understanding that
production methods and standards were dierent; looking at the one existing photo of a grand-
mother at 10 years old, wishing there had been YouTube videos while knowing there just were not;
watching a favorite movie on a tablet late at night, skipping to just the parts that were especially
well crafted; examining Riefenstahl’s diving sequence to compare it with the Billy Joel “River of
Dreams” video. Eventually we removed whatever hints of linearity and parallelism of time or place.
Here we present a small case study to illustrate the author—message—recipient relationship
and how structure can foster dierent meanings.
e lm Gymnastics USA
was made in 1976 about the
selection for the U.S. Olympic
Gymnastics team. ere was
essentially no narration, largely
upbeat music of various genres
composed for the lm; the edit-
ing was “poetic,” often blending
only portions of routines into
collages of human movement
reminiscent of the Diving Se-
quence in Riefenstahl’s Olympia;
there is no indication of leaders,
losers, winners. e International Gymnast magazine hailed the lm as one of the best gymnastics
lms ever made; the judges for the American Film Festival (the premiere showcase for documentary
and educational lms at the time) did not even advance it to the nal showings because it had “no
coherence” and “was obviously made by someone with no understanding of gymnastics or sports
in general (in fact the producer was a former world champion gymnast and coach of Olympic
gymnasts; the lmmaker was a competitive fencer and long distance runner.) Looking at the qual-
ications of the two audiences with their two very dierent meanings one sees participants in the
very topic of the lm on the one hand and network production sta on the other. Neither is more
understanding or more qualied. e lm festival judges were looking at structure from a point of
Noise
Noise
Constraints
Communication
Communication
Context Web
Communication
Communication
O’Connor & Anderson May 2018
Context Web
Text
Need
Need
Need
Document
Query
Ontological
Commons
Query
Query
Author
Seeker
Seeker
Seeker
Sender
Receiver
Antecedents Behaviors Consequences
3.5 AUTHOR—MESSAGE—RECIPIENT RELATION
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