Multisensory Legal "Compunications" or rather Multisensory Legal Communication

Colette R. Brunschwig

I am pleased that the Community on Multisensory Law is steadily growing. Currently, there are 47 registered members.

I am also pleased to see that my postings are clicked on quite often. 4537 clicks, for instance, for "Legal Education Films for Law Students" (see <http://community.beck.de/gruppen/forum/audio-visual-law/legal-education-films-for-law-students>). This is just amazing.

It seems that this new legal discipline is attracting the interest of a larger community. It consists of legal experts and experts in other areas (which are related in some way to multisensory law). This great interest is manifesting itself, although multisensory law is not yet established as such. Notably, this lively interest exists, notwithstanding that multisensory law is occasionally considered an "esoteric plant," or is dealt with ironically (see, for example, K. F. RÖHL, in his posting "Imago, Actio, Justitia – Bilder, Körper und Handlungen des Rechts [= Images, Bodies, and Actions of the Law]"; available online at <http://recht-anschaulich.lookingintomedia.com/?p=1560>]).

Multisensory law, however, is nothing "esoteric." On the contrary.  Perhaps it even serves its cause better that, at its present stage of development, multisensory law is written about in ironic terms.

Multisensory law explores legal and legally relevant sensory phenomena particularly created by the new media. In his book The Control Revolution (1986), JAMES R. BENIGER, professor of communication and sociology (see <http://uscnews.usc.edu/obituaries/in_memoriam_james_r_beniger_63.html>), has observed,

"[…] the progressive digitalization of mass media and telecommunications content begins to blur earlier distinctions between the communication of information and its processing (as implied by the term compunications), as well as between people and machines. Digitalization makes communication from persons to machines, between machines, and even from machines to persons as easy as it is between persons. Also blurred are the distinctions among information types: numbers, words, pictures, and sounds, and eventually tastes, odors, and possibly even sensations, all might one day be stored, processed, and communicated in the same digital form [my emphasis]" (JAMES R. BENIGER, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society, Cambridge, Mass., 1986, p. 25).

What does this quote have to do with the law? I discovered BENIGER's views while reading M. ETHAN KATSH's The Electronic Media and the Transformation of Law (New York et al. 1991, pp. 93 sq.). KATSH (see <http://www.umass.edu/sbs/faculty/profiles/katsh.htm>) refers to BENIGER's quote in order to demonstrate what impact the digitalisation of writing and print has or might have in the legal context. Hence, multisensory law is therefore not an entirely "new invention." Instead, it is deeply rooted in the growing legal and legally relevant uni- and multisensory phenomena of our digital era.

Let's "compunicate" multisensorily, or rather let us experiment with communicating multisensorily in the legal field, and listen both carefully and calmly to our sharp and astute critics.

(Please note: all websites were last accessed on November 10, 2011).

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