In the past ten years, with the rapid development of new visual technology, various visual communication platforms and applications have emerged in an endless stream, and generative artificial intelligence images have begun to continue to "stunningly debut". Cultural construction and social information governance have brought about extremely huge and profound impacts. In this context, the research on visual communication needs to be followed up and updated urgently. At the same time, in recent years, computer vision has continued to evolve and become an important field of artificial intelligence, focusing on computers to interpret and understand the visual world. It involves the use of algorithms, deep learning models, and other techniques to enable machines to recognize image objects and perform big data analysis, interpretation, and analysis. In view of this, computational visual communication will use computer vision technology and methods to analyze the current hot phenomena and difficult problems of visual communication at the macro, meso, and micro levels, and summarize its communication models and regular characteristics.
The new media technology, represented by visual technology, has pushed us into a new era of communication revolution, and I tend to use the concept of "computing (sexuality)" to illustrate the characteristics of this era. The original meaning of computing is just a mathematical conceptual definition, which contains the rules of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, obviously this understanding of early computing is a narrow understanding, until Turing in 1936 in his famous ** "On the Application of Computable Numbers in Judgment Problems", defined an abstract "computing machine", and used it to define "computable numbers", which really laid the scientific understanding of computing. Yang Jianlin believes that since the 30s of the 20th century, due to the great achievements made by mathematicians such as Gödel, Church, and Turing in mathematical logic, algorithm theory, automatic reasoning machines, etc., as well as the continuous expansion of research fields related to computing, "computing and algorithms have been formally proposed as a philosophical category, and computing has gradually evolved into a philosophical concept and method." Therefore, computing in the modern sense includes not only algorithm processing in the sense of Turing machine, but also the concept of computing in a broader sense, as well as its continuous penetration and reconstruction of today's scientific concepts. It is certain that profound social changes are often accompanied by fundamental innovations in scientific knowledge, just as the industrial revolution brought about industrial society, the digital revolution has brought people a digital society, which has a huge impact on people's behavior and social life, as well as the entire social structure and operating mechanism, which also indicates that the scientific paradigm will once again usher in leapfrog development. The foundation of the digital society is data and computing, and it is the continuous translation of computing and data that constitutes the cornerstone of the current digital society to maintain high-speed and stable operation. The understanding of data and computing has naturally become the fundamental criterion for understanding the development of human society, and computing has gradually moved from the marginal position of technology and tools to the center of scientific research. Computation can be used in communication research because communication itself is computable. Although the traditional empirical research (quantitative and qualitative) implies a yearning for scientific computing, the root of it lies in the computability of communication systems. On the one hand, human interaction in traditional society is limited by the limitation of geographical space (the so-called local society), and on the other hand, it is also limited by the lack of computing tools and methods to obtain (large) data, so traditional communication (social science) research can only look for small sample methods for data acquisition, and pays more attention to the changes in the content and form of the media itself, rather than emphasizing the impact of computing on communication, but this does not affect the establishment of statistical calculation logic (traditional social science) at all. The basis of human interaction and social evolution in contemporary society is the digital platform, which requires people to transform digital communication from a deeper level. As Wu Fei said, because it does not bring about a single change, but a new form of civilization - digital civilization. Casemajor further argues that for today's material turn in media studies, it is not so much due to advances in anthropology as it is to advances in computational science, and it is computers that have contributed to a renewed focus on the material aspects of computing. Japec L, Kreuter F, Berg M and others believe that the reason why people are able to approach public opinion today in an unprecedented way is not entirely because of the quantitative changes brought about by the dissemination of big data, but because of the reconstruction of the computational logic of people's understanding of society. It can be seen from this that digital communication Digital civilization has greatly changed human existence and human behavior, and is constituting a new era of computing. This change will also bring about innovation and change in communication research, and the computational logic for communication is also evolving and deepening, and communication is moving towards a new era of computing. Media Observer, Issue 1, 2024, "Presence: Computational Visual Communication".
The author is a professor and dean of the School of Communication at Shenzhen University.
Editor: Yang Qian.
Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index (CSSCI)** journal.
National News Core Journal.
The 7th Excellent Journal of East China.
Top 10 social science journals in Jiangsu Province.
The 3rd Jiangsu Provincial Press and Publication Award.